There are some obvious lessons from Monica Ratliff's stunning and instructive defeat of Antonio Sanchez in this week's LAUSD School Board runoff for District 6.
Ratliff went from having come in ten points behind Sanchez in the primary (34-44) to beating Sanchez by four points in the runoff (52-48). The Coalition and the SEIU spent over $2 million to elect Sanchez. Ratliff, meanwhile, spent roughly $50,000 and had no special interest support.
Many of these are covered in Valerie Strauss's latest piece (The billionaires lose one), and I hope they'll be remembered the next time there's a race like this. Money and political pedigree are no guarantee of victory. Sometimes at least the underdog wins.
But there are other less obvious lessons and considerations:
Sanchez was recruited and selected by Mayor Villaraigosa in what seems like a sentimental move more than a clear-eyed decision about who would stand the best chances of winning the seat.[Rumors are that Ratliff was recruited to run by the UTLA from her spot as a House of Representatives delegate have never been confirmed.] There were other candidates that could have been chosen, none of them perfect but in hindsight Sanchez seems extremely weak.
The reform community in LA has been personality-based, an ad hoc set of individuals who come together for a brief period of time and then go back to their day jobs in between elections. There's an independent expenditure committee, the Coalition for School Reform, that appears every couple of years as a collection point for contributions, but there's no nonprofit c(3) or c(4) organization laying foundations and building relationships in between elections along the lines that UTLA and many other operations have.
Last but not least, the union's decision to endorse all the candidates from the start (rather than have to go through the process of re-endorsing candidates along the way) seemed to most of the world like a big win for Sanchez, who was also getting massive outside support from the Villaraigosa camp, but also prevented Sanchez from attacking Ratliff for her union affiliations. UTLA couldn’t spend any real money on Ratliff, but it also meant that the Coalition couldn’t attack Ratliff for being beholden to the union.
“We took away from the Coaltion the one thing they desperately needed — a negative message,” said Brent Smiley, a Ratliff supporter. “We didn’t let them hit the teachers union. They had absolutely nothing negative to say.”
Tidbits: Going negative is not a prerequisite for winning. Field work and turnout are key, as are absentee (vote by mail) ballots. Internal polling isn't reliable. (The Coalition's polling had Sanchez ahead by 20 points, leading them to pull back on spending the more than $750,000 they had in reserve.) Refrigerator magnets.
For two post-election reports on what happened, read here and here.
This year’s testing foul-ups included more mistakes by Pearson in New York City, and computer malfunctions during testing in Indiana and Oklahoma. Carrie Coppernoll’s Testing Fallout Persists, in the Daily Oklahoman, describes the political decisions that must be made after high-stakes testing was disrupted, last month, by computer crashes.
Before No Child Left Behind, Oklahoma had its share of testing fiascoes. In 1997, Harcourt Publishing sent the wrong writing exams to 8th and 11th graders. In 2001, Riverside Publishing lost its contract with the state after significant delays in providing test results.
In the last ten years, Oklahoma has used five different testing companies. Harcourt regained the contract but then it printed incorrect answers on the sample test. In 2007, Pearson was awarded the contract for end-of-instruction tests, but it made data classification errors and mishandled its portfolio assessments for profoundly disabled students. Now, Oklahoma has to decide how to deal with McGraw-Hill’s latest mess.
Economics 101 would predict that after NCLB dramatically increased the demand for standardized tests, the quality of the testing product would decline. Even with the primitive old bubble-in tests, that seems to be happening. When the far more complicated Common Core assessments are rushed into production, shouldn't we expect even more testing debacles?-JT(@drjohnthompson) Image via.
CPS approves largest school closure in Chicago's history ChicagoTribune: Months of argument and anguish over Mayor Rahm Emanuel's push for sweeping school closings came to a climax Wednesday as his hand-picked Board of Education voted to shut 49 elementary schools and transfer thousands of children to new classroom settings. Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett withdrew her recommendation to close four other schools at the last minute as it became clear some board members would fight to save them.
Charter schools in Boston score higher on key tests, but have lower graduation rates BostonGlobe: Boston charter schools outperform other public schools on three popular barometers of student achievement — the MCAS, the SAT, and the Advanced Placement exams — but tend to have lower four-year graduation rates, according to a study being released Wednesday.
D.C. Chancellor Force Teachers in Two Schools to Reapply for Their JobsWashingtonPost: More than 100 teachers and other staff members at two D.C. schools learned this week that they must reapply for their jobs after Chancellor Kaya Henderson decided to “reconstitute” the schools in an effort to spur improvement. Cardozo High and Patterson Elementary schools have struggled for years with low test scores, and in such cases, Henderson has the power to reconstitute — remove an entire staff and then rebuild it.
Science Project Left On Bus Leads To Bomb Scare At Boulder's Fairview HighHuffPost: A science project left on a school bus this morning led Boulder police to lock down Fairview High with the school's students corralled in the gym and auditorium, shut down streets and bring in the department's bomb squad.
More Americans have degrees, but lead is slipping HechingerReport: But while more young Americans have at least bachelor’s degrees than their counterparts in other developed countries, their lead has shrunk from 12 percentage points to 4 percentage points in the last 10 years as rival nations increase their production of graduates.
Today's as good a day as any to share with you the draft report I heard about a couple of weeks back when last discussing the issue of how to assess reform advocacy efforts.
As you may recall, the question keeps coming up if and how funders are going to assess the impact of their advocacy efforts, whether they be grants to nonprofits or direct contributions to campaigns or PACs:
"Teachers unions (AFT, NEA) and nonprofits on the other side (Broader/Bolder Alliance, Shanker Institute, and the new Ravitch thing) are actively engaged in advocacy as well, and have to figure out if their spending is making a difference, too." (What About The Impact?)
As with teachers and schools, poor evaluations can lead to poor understanding, however. It's not so easy to get it right. Michigan State professor and TWIE contributor Sarah Reckhow took a stern look at several recent recommendations for advocacy evaluation (A Misleading Approach to Assessing Advocacy)
This newest report, called a Media Measurement Framework, is funded by Gates and Knight and produced by the SF-based LFA Group: Learning for Action, who tells us that the Knight Foundation is in the process of creating an online, interactive version of this framework. This static version will become a collection of online resources.
No word yet on whether the framework is any good or if any advocacy grantees are using it yet. That's where you come in.
Underdog LAUSD classroom teacher Monica Ratliff (right) has won a surprising upset victory in her school board runoff agaainst rival Antonio Sanchez (left) , according to a story posted on KPCC and tweets from LA Times and LA Daily News reporters:
“Monica Ratliff wins #LAUSD race with 52%, says final #LAelection tally posted at 3:16 am,” tweeted LA Daily News‘ Barbara Jones. “Upset for reformers and candidate Antonio Sanchez… #LAUSD tally shows 37,022 of District 6′s 250,000+ voters went to the polls. That’s 16% turnout. Ratliff ahead by 1,464 votes.”
“Monica Ratliff edges out Antonio Sanchez for the Board of Education seat,” tweets LA Times reporter Laura Nelson. According to Nelson, the vote is “Almost final, but not quite,” with all of the precincts having been counted but not all the mail-in ballots.
Ratliff only campaigned part-time (she's a 5th grade teacher) and didn't have any outside campaign contributions (compared to Sanchez, who had boatloads of money). She didn't even have the unequivocal endorsement of her union (UTLA endorsed both candidates). In the March primary, she was a whopping 10 percentage points behind Sanchez, 34 percent to 44 percent. This time around, it was 52-48 in her favor.
Public Spending Per Student Drops WSJ: U.S. public-education spending per student fell in 2011 for the first time in more than three decades, according to new U.S. Census Bureaudata issued Tuesday. Spending for elementary and high schools across the 50 states and Washington, D.C. averaged $10,560 per pupil in the fiscal year ended June 30, 2011. That was down 0.4% from 2010, the first drop since the bureau began collecting the data on an annual basis in 1977, the agency said Tuesday.
Oklahoma Tornado: Long Minutes of Desperation Inside School Razed by Storm WSJ: When the tornado-warning sirens blared, Kelly Law was already in the hallway of Plaza Towers Elementary School, huddled against the wall, shielding as many students as she could with her body. Another eight or 10 teachers did the same, she said. For the long minutes it took the tornado to pass, she shut her eyes and prayed. The roof was ripped away. "It sounded like rivets being pulled out by a monster," Ms. Law said.
Chicago School Closings May Leave Some Communities Without Old Lifelines NYT: And yet, the possible move to Gregory [a better-performing school] has generated a visceral reaction from Bethune families, underscoring broader fears about school closings that officials have found difficult to ease. By uprooting elementary schools like Bethune, where around 98 percent of the students are black and from low-income homes, parents say officials are uprooting the personal and academic lifelines of Chicago’s neediest communities.
House Panel Presses Arne Duncan on Loans, Waivers, Common Core PoliticsK12: Student loans are at the top of Congress' agenda this summer—and they were the number one topic when U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan testified today before the House Education and the Workforce Committee on President Barack Obama's fiscal year 2014 budget.
D.C. Bets Big on Common Core EdWeek: The District of Columbia, where she's taught for 11 years, was quick to adopt the Common Core State Standards. But putting them into practice demands a heavy lift: With their emphasis on mastery of complex text, the standards require far stronger literacy skills than most students here—and many in the 46 states that also adopted the common core in English—currently possess.
Oklahoma Schools Lacked Consistent Tornado Shelter Rules HuffPost: The two elementary schools leveled by the deadly tornado that swept through the Oklahoma City area Monday lacked designated safe rooms designed to protect children and teachers, despite state warnings that the absence of such facilities imperils lives. At least two other schools in Moore -- the epicenter of the disaster -- did have safe rooms. So far no fatalities have been tied to those schools, whose buildings were fortified after a devastating twister hit the area in 1999.
If evaluation systems are a vessel meant to ferry teachers to better practice, then observation systems remain the lead weight tied to the back, dragging systems down with unwaveringly positive feedback that obscures true insight into teacher practice. - Mac LeBuhn in new DFER paper, The Culture of Countenance.
President John Jackson of the Schott Foundation, in his Moving from Standards to Support, explains how school “reform” went wrong and how we should change course. Nearly a generation ago, sincere non-educators, influenced by the corporate worldview, mandated standards-driven school reform driven by “outputs.” Jackson says that we must reject their failed focus on flawed metrics (outputs) and concentrate on a tough-minded system of supports (formerly known as inputs.)
Standards and standardized test-driven “reform” failed because it ignored the root cause of the achievement gap – poverty. As Jackson explains, “Standards-based reform creates an inherent system of winners and losers by raising the bar and assessing who makes the cut.” Because of its focus on tests for punishment, standards for children who are academically drowning have moved the shoreline further away in order to teach them how to swim.
It is time to hold “reformers” accountable for their educational outputs i.e. their results in terms of student performance. Under any objective reckoning, test-driven accountability backfired. It is time to invest in “supports-based reforms.” We must strategically align:
High-quality early education for all students; mandatory kindergarten with assurances that all students are achieving at grade level by 3rd grade; recruitment and retention of high-quality teachers, along with supplying the training and resources those teachers need to provide more learning time and deeper learning approaches; access to student-centered learning and personalized academic, social, and health plans to keep all students on a college path; and equitable resources and policies so that all students remain in engaging, high-quality educational settings.
Bill Gates used his most recent TED talk to make the case for putting video cameras in every classroom. Teachers, he says, don't get enough feedback about their practice and performance; recording and submitting lessons for review would have a "phenomenal" impact on teacher quality for a modest price.
To be clear, Gates badly underestimates how much feedback teachers currently receive. I've certainly never had a single evaluation in which I "just got one word of feedback", so I have no idea why he thinks "98% of teachers" get so little. New teachers in particular are often assigned dedicated coaches, and formal observation and coaching is not the only way to get feedback.
Still, it's not unreasonable to think that frequent videotaping and coaching could help teachers improve. Sarah Brown Wessling agrees, and Cassandra Tognoni is so excited by the prospect of a camera in every classroom that she thinks Gates should just put up the $5 billion required to buy them himself.
But if cameras offer so much promise for improving education, it's worth asking why they're not already more heavily used. An adequate camera can be purchased for about $100: not nothing, but not so much that an enthusiastic teacher, administrator, or coach couldn't invest in one.
Alaska, Hawaii, West Virginia Win NCLB Waivers PoliticsK12: U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has now awarded No Child Left Behind Act waivers to 37 states plus the District of Columbia. Alaska, Hawaii, and West Virginia are the latest additions to the list, the Education Department announced today. This means that the vast majority of the country is now operating under their own federally approved but state-crafted accountability plans as Congress continues to refrain from rewriting the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, of which NCLB is the latest version.
Source: Fewer than 5 Chicago schools to be spared ChicagoTribune: One source said the six-member school board is likely to vote for saving fewer than five of the schools on the closings list. "It's a few," said Henry Bienen, president emeritus of Northwestern University, a board member who was willing to go on the record. "I don't think it's a large number of schools."
20 children among 51 victims in Okla. Tornado; toll could hit 90 USAToday: Firefighter Russ Locke was among those who helped search through the crushed remains of Plaza Towers Elementary School, where about 75 students and staff had huddled when the tornado hit. At least seven children were killed there; others were pulled alive from the wreckage.
Windows XP Deadline Puts Pressure on Schools EdWeek: Microsoft's plans to end support for Windows XP, believed to be the dominant computer operating system in K-12 education, could pose big technological and financial challenges for districts nationwide— issues that many school systems have yet to confront.
Aspiring teachers learn from their avatars HechingerReport: Started ten years ago, the so-called TeachLivE lab was developed by faculty in the education school at UCF, and at least 22 other universities across the country have opened their own labs using TeachLivE technology. Much like a flight simulator trains pilots, faculty use the virtual classroom to train teachers-to-be by helping them isolate and master strategies like higher-level questioning or behavior management.
A small, preliminary study, a talkative researcher, media hype, plus underlying cultural stereotypes and fears. Sound familiar? Retro Report via Kottke.
So far, Florida’s new state superintendent of education, Tony Bennett, is having what seems like an awfully good time. He’s head of one of the most pro-reform school systems in the nation. He’s got the support of both the governor, Rick Scott, who tapped him for the job, and a powerful business and reform community headed by former governor Jeb Bush.
A member of the reform-leaning state superintendents’ group Chiefs for Change, Bennett speaks with the rapid confidence of someone who has been a building and district administrator, a state education leader, and a classroom teacher.
But Bennett hasn’t been in his current position long. Just this past November, he was ousted from his spot as the head of public schools in Indiana—the position is an elected one and his policies had become controversial. Some of the same challenges will undoubtedly emerge in the Sunshine State, where administrators are pursuing an aggressive timeline for implementing the Common Core, and state lawmakers are considering a “parent trigger” that would allow parents to convert failing district schools into charters.
Click here to read the interview, which appears in the Summer 2013 edition of Scholastic Administrator, which sponsors this blog. Image via Scholastic.
Florida Plans Increased Scrutiny For Education Schools StateImpact: Nationally, education schools have been criticized for being far too easy and, as a result, pumping ill-equipped teachers into the system and harming student achievement. Schools across the country are trying to mitigate the criticism by changing curriculum or increasing the amount of field experience teachers receive.
Chicago Teachers Union re-elects Karen Lewis Tribune: Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis, an often controversial figure who took on Mayor Rahm Emanuel by leading a seven-day strike last fall, was easily re-elected to a second three-year term Friday, according to unofficial results released by the district.
Obama Urges Morehouse Graduates to ‘Keep Setting an Example’ NYT: President Obama came to Morehouse College, the alma mater of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., on Sunday to tell graduates, 50 years after Dr. King’s landmark “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, that “laws and hearts and minds have been changed to the point where someone who looks just like you can somehow come to serve as president of these United States.”
Schools Add to Test Load, Just to Assess the Questions NYT: As school districts across the country rush to draw up tests and lesson plans that conform to more rigorous standards, they are flocking to field tests — exams that exist solely to help testing companies fine-tune future questions.
There are numerous worthwhile speakers in this segment, but at rroughly the 22 minute mark, AEI's Rick Hess shows up onstage in his trademark cargo shorts and flipflops, and delivers a rushed, somewhat impassioned speech that hits a lot of critical points about the narrow reform agenda, the inadequate response to setbacks, the chronic refusal to converse with much less learn from critics.
"A young Houston couple is planning to give away $4 billion—but only to projects that prove they are worth it. Can they redefine the world of philanthropy?" The New Science Behind Philanthropy (WSJ via @mikepetrilli)
The Columbus Dispatch editorial, Another Blow to City Schools complains that the city's schools “scrubbed” 2.8 million attendance records since 2006. They allegedly marked some students with low scores as withdrawn so they wouldn’t be counted against the district.
Columbus schools are also facing criminal investigations for grade changing. Obviously, I have no idea whether Columbus schools are guilty and, if they are, whether they did something qualitatively different than accumulating millions of speeding tickets.
Statistical gamesmanship predated data-driven "reform," and those policies are not an excuse for cheating. They just create a "perfect storm" where the damage done by education's longstanding "culture of compliance," is combined with inherently destructive and punitive accountability schemes, and where all are made worse by the resulting malfeasance. I also know that I must be particularly careful with my words when addressing this tragedy.
"Juking the stats" is not limited to schools. It has long been said that the prime qualification for a policeman, for instance, is a course in creative writing. As it was cryptically explained in The Wire, our legal system could not function without the ability to "turn felonies into misdemeanors."
I suspect that the cumulative damage of manipulating the nation's withdrawals and grades, as well as other tricks for jacking up attendance rates, will dwarf the consequences of outright cheating scandals. But, the Ohio case prompts die-hard supporters of test-driven accountability, such as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Andrew Rotherham, to grasp at more straws. They seem to claim that because test-driven accountability has opened multiple doors to a wide variety of scandals that, somehow, their favored policies aren't to blame.
Read between the lines and there are lots of interesting tidbits in June Kronholz's Education Next piece (Still
Teaching for America) for both TFA fans and skeptics.
The piece takes a look at the much-discussed school reform organization as it goes through a key transition of leadership and size.
Two new co-CEOs have taken over from founder Wendy Kopp, and the annual budget that in 2012 was $320 million is expected to go up to half a billion dollars within the next three years.
Kronholz boils the organization's successful growth (if not large-scale impact on educational outcomes) on things like regional innovations (Houston's content coaches, Jacksonville's localized summer institute, South Dakota's rural principal leadership incubator), and its willingness to create and scrap ideas that don't pan out.
As has become increasingly common in recent years, TFA's new leaders are focusing as much on what alumni do as what they accomplish in the classroom:
"Kramer also paints
a vision of TFA as an instigator of change, producing alumni that TFA
expects—just expects—will become the sort of shake-up-the-beast leaders who will “do
something radically different” for the schools."
However, TFA won't share its specific leadership goals. And the organization is hampered by the need for more local and regional EDs, says Kronholz. Four of the regions were empty earlier this year, and plans to expand to two new (unnamed) cities) were scrapped for lack of management talent. How interesting that an organization with such a surplus of applications for initial teaching spots is having trouble finding enough qualified candidates to staff its own expansion.
Steve Jobs’s Widow Sets Philanthropy Goals NYT: Laurene Powell Jobs has tiptoed into the public sphere, pushing her agenda in education as well as global conservation, nutrition and immigration policy.
Money contines to pours, unevenly, into LA Unified school board race KPCC: As election day looms for this year's remaining undecided seat for the L.A. Unified's board, outside groups continue to pour money into the race -- all of it for her opponent, political newcomer Antonio Sanchez.
Would Arne Duncan Consider Calling for Pause in Common Core Stakes?Education Week: So I asked Education Department press secretary Daren Briscoe about whether Arne Duncan would echo these calls for pausing stakes tied to common core, and take relevant action at the federal level.
Tennessee to Offer Teacher-Transfer BonusesTeacher Beat: Using its share of federal School Improvement Grant funds, the state will give $7,000 signing bonuses to teachers from nonpriority schools who transfer, and agree to stay for two years, in the priority schools. It will also give $5,000 retention bonuses to high-performing teachers already working in such schools.
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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in This Week In Education are strictly those of the author and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Scholastic, Inc.
