Week In Review (May 5-9)

Best Of The Week
RTI -- The Next "Reading First"?
Charter School Weak 2008: Still Separatist After All These Years
Frustrated By Teachers And Testing

Campaign 2008
Paige Vs. Spellings: A Different Black Man, A Different White Woman
Pandering To Voters: Gas Tax Vs. Ending NCLB

School Life
NYC Schools Ban Work-Related Blog Address
To Do Before Teaching: Announce Desire To Pose Nude

Teachers & Teaching
Middle School Students Eviscerate City Council Member Over Her Behavior
"A Complex And Peculiar Task" (Reading)

Foundation Follies
"Hurricane" Phillips Takes Gates Foundation By Storm
USC Creates Faculty Spot With Princeton Review $$

Media Watch
Another NYT Education Reporter To Leave
How Education Blogs "Outsource" Newspapers' Roles
Staff Changes At The PEN Newsblast

Best Of The Day

Charter Schools are Great -- But Not Why You Think Kevin Carey
Charter school laws opened a conduit for talent, energy, and philanthropic money directed toward public education, resources that previously had no way to break into a bureaucratized monopoly state school system. Even if that's all they did, that's way more than enough.

Great teachers on screen Joanne Jacobs
Who are the five greatest teachers in the movies? Ellen Kim makes her choices for Teacher Appreciation Week.

The New Teacher Project Ed Notes
Imagine if all ATR's were placed in jobs, jobs that would otherwise go to Teaching Fellows. Will that lead to TNTP having their own ATR's?

Chrter schools in The Economist Flypaper
Two articles about charter schools in this week’s Economist are online here (Chicago) and here (New York).

 

Staff Changes At The PEN Newsblast

Albert Lang, who has of late been putting out the PEN NewsBlast, is moving on from that post as of today.  Formerly of CommunicationWorks, where his clients included the Center on Education Policy, Lang is apparently going to the e-Luminate Group, where he's going to work on the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. Congrats, condolences to Lang and to PEN. 

One of the longest-running online education outlets, the NewsBlast has penetrated deeply into schools and classrooms.  Organizations and PR outfits fight hard to get into the Blast and are elated when they get in there.  No permanent replacement for Lang has been announced.

Here's Lang's last NewBlast, which I'm sure will soon be going for big bucks on eBay. Here's the post that announced his arrival (Lang In For Schaffer At PEN).  Here's a post from last June about the departure of Lang's predecessor (PEN NewsBlast Guru Rides Off Into The Sunset).

USC Creates Faculty Spot With Princeton Review $$

It's one thing for a big foundation or long-retired individual to endow a university chair, but it feels like another thing to have someone who's currently in the mix -- in this case Princeton review founder John Katzman -- to do the same at the USC school of education.  Or maybe this happens all the time (Gates, etc.) and I should just focus on the money and the leadership that comes with the new effort, which sounds sort of interesting if you're into that stuff.

More On Charter School Isolationism

Erin Dillon at The Quick and the Ed surprised me with her response to my screed against charter school separatists by agreeing -- in part -- with the notion that charter school folks often isolate themselves.  But it doesn't have to be that way, she says -- describing a recent conference in Chicago that  included district, charter, business, and  philanthropic stakeholders. 

That's progress, no doubt, but still doesn't include teachers or community leaders and is still  more of an outlier than a clear direction that the charter school movement is heading.

Previous Post:  Charter School Weak 2008: Still Separatist After All These Years

Frustrated By Teachers And Testing

Check out John Merrow's oped in the Wall Street Journal today (Student Tests – and Teacher Grades), in which he describes how public education exists in "an upside-down universe where student outcomes are not allowed to be connected to teaching."

He's frustrated, and so am I, though by slightly different things. To me, one of the most sharply frustrating things about teachers' resistance to being evaluated or paid at least in part based on how their students do is that teachers have no such compunctions when it comes to evaluating their own students -- and little tolerance for kids' excuses.  No time to study for the vocab quiz?  Tough luck.  Didn't remember your books over the weekend?  You'll remember next time.

Every day, every week, every month, classroom teachers give their kids quizzes and tests that form the basis of determining students' grades and in some cases even whether they will pass to the next grade level or not.  I'd be more sympathetic to teachers' concerns about performance-based pay and evaluation if teachers weren't doing just what they don't want done to them every day in millions of classrooms.

Big Stories Of The Day

Principal of School That Rhee's Children Attend Is Dismissed
Washington Post
Guzman's departure has stunned many Oyster-Adams parents who wonder why, in a city filled with under-performing public schools, Rhee would sack a principal who has presided for the past five years over one of its few success stories.

Where Clinton, Obama, and McCain Stand on Education
U.S. News & World Report
Clinton supports schoolwide performance-based pay. Obama supports pay based on individual teacher performance. McCain supports merit pay for individual teachers.

Teachers Found to Be of Two Minds on Reforms EdWeek
Most public school teachers are unequivocally ambivalent about unions and education reform, a recent survey says.

Mother Says 11-Year-Old Daughter Assaulted In School Stairwell WMAQ (Chicago)
School officials said Thursday there was an investigation into allegations that a sixth grade girl was sexually attacked in a South Side charter school.

The Uneven Playing Field New York Times Magazine
Everyone wants girls to have as many opportunities in sports as boys. But can we live with the greater rate of injuries they suffer?

To Do Before Teaching: Announce Desire To Pose Nude

No need to look for naked pictures of 24 year old Kathleen Ehrling, a Long Island woman who says she's switching from the entertainment industry to being a NYC public school teacher.  She declares her interest in being photographed naked and published in a New York magazine that is holding a naked picture contest (Poll  women).  Too bad she's not already in the classroom, since I'm sure her students would all vote for her.  But I'm not sure she's ever going to get hired after this.

UPDATE:  Ehrling emailed to say that she has withdrawn from the poll and had the magazine remove her picture.

Middle School Students Eviscerate City Council Member Over Her Behavior

Video from Wonkette showing middle schoolers blocking and parrying every evasion attempted by city councilwoman Conyers.: If only real journalists were so persistent and verbally agile. The council member is John Conyers' wife, who recently called the city council president "Shrek."

A "Check Plus" For These Blog Posts

Blame the Building Core Knowledge Blog
Edutopia, a George Lucas-funded education newsletter with a tendency to wander off into cloud cuckoo land, has a piece on its site about “buildings that teach” which claims the way a building is designed and used has a “profound impact” on the way students learn.

Good news for charter schools (and school reform in general) Mike Petrilli
No, I’m not referring to this survey from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, though there are some promising tidbits.

Klein Blames Idle Teachers for $4 Gas, Subprime Crisis eduwonkette
"Schools Chancellor Joel Klein said the teachers union - and policies that keep instructors from their classrooms - bear some of the blame for next school year's budget cuts."

Confusion over "universal" prekindergarten Early Stories
Ezra Klein, who blogs for the American Prospect, chides liberals for not getting behind universal prekindergarten.

Potential Growth Method Undergoes Scrutiny The Hoff
Statisticians and education researchers are starting to question the value-added model's accuracy and utility

How Education Blogs "Outsource" Newspapers' Roles

Here's a chart that the Dallas Morning News' Kent Fischer showed recently to describe how the content from a traditional newspaper article matches up to the content of a blog post and the comments from readers that accompany many posts. 

Essentially, Fischer is arguing that blogs replace news articles by "outsourcing" the anecdotes, opinions, and analysis that make up most of a newspaper story.  The result is just messier to read, unverified (to the extent that newspaper stories are verified these days), and in some cases uninformed (not that experts are always all that informed).

Fischer's blog is called the Dallas ISD Blog. 

Charter School Weak 2008: Still Separatist After All These Years

Perhaps the best news for charter school advocates this week isn't all the coverage they're getting, most of it positive, or the big conference they've been holding in DC.  It's Barack Obama's continued march towards the Democratic nomination.  He is staunchly pro-charter, despite pushback from teachers and voters who aren't so sure.

But all is not well in charter-land.  Research on charters' benefits continues to be weak or mixed (see a RAND report on Chicago charters here).  Charter advocates have been frustratingly slow to get involved in turnaround efforts, which are a big focus for district leaders and an increasingly big part of NCLB, and equally slow to focus on charter accountability (ie, closing the bad ones).  And, while complaining loudly about the need for a level financial playing field with district schools, charters in many places continue to ignore pre- and post-lottery admissions procedures that seem to give them advantages when it comes to students' academic, economic, and social backgrounds.

Most important, all but a small section of the charter community seems locked into a narrow-minded "let's open some new schools!" mentality, ignoring the larger K12 education world where the vast majority of children are -- and will be -- educated for the foreseeable future.   I'm not against charters, and districts that ignore and create hostile conditions for charters share a portion of the blaem, but it makes me sad -- and mad -- to see so much effort and money going into something that seems to remain so insular and separatist.

NYC Schools Ban Work-Related Blog Address

The NYC Department of Education has told Lisa Nielsen, the PD manager for ed tech, to stop putting her blog URL in her email address, even though her blog is about her work (Professional Blog URLs in NYC DOE Signature). As you'll see, Neilsen is pissed. It seems like every district has at least one idiotic-sounding mandate or ban, and now New York City has a new one.  (The cell phone ban is another.)

Big Stories Of The Day

Edge Found for Chicago's Charter High Schools EdWeek
A new first-of-its-kind analysis suggests that in Chicago, at least, charter school students are more likely to graduate from high school and enroll in college than similar students in regular public high schools. PLUS:   Study: College More Likely for Charter Students New York Sun

Experts Discuss Myths about Latino Kids NPR
Pedro Noguera, professor of education at New York University; and Jeffrey Passel, from the Pew Hispanic Center, discuss the rising number of Latino children and what it means for America.

Study Reveals What Kids Are Reading for School THE Journal
The less than great news is that their volume of reading peaks in second grade, and the level and volume of books that they're reading stagnates from about sixth grade onward, even dropping off in high school.

Why Day Care Kids Dont Play Outside NYT
Day care workers keep children inside if they show up in flip-flops rather than sneakers or if they don’t have a coat on a chilly day. Sometimes, the entire class is kept indoors if one child doesn’t have appropriate clothes for outdoor play.

Back In The Heartland

Here's what's going on in Chicago school reform circles lately:

More Charters For CPS -- Why Not? (58 comments)

Perfect Attendance Creeps Me Out (13) Comments

Obama Calls Principals On Inside Phone Lines (12) Comments

Real World, CTU -- An Update(41) Comments

How Long Should "Excessed" Teachers Have?  (3) Comments

Renaissance Schools Fund Meeting (Today)

Today's Best Blog Posts

North Carolina Election Footnote EIA
Lost in the national importance of the North Carolina Democratic primaries was the defeat of North Carolina Association of Educators President Eddie Davis in his bid to win the party's nomination for state superintendent of public instruction.

How Obama can move to the center Mike Petrilli
...He could go one step further and also talk about high-performing students who are being forgotten by our current education system and the need to help them achieve their potential too. What suburban independent doesn’t think that his or her own child is gifted?

Carnival of Education Joanne Jacobs
Will it be on the test? Yes! Bellringers has organized this week’s Carnival of Education as a standardized test.

Reading First Interim Report Doesn’t Pass the “So What? Test” edbizzbuzz
I can safely say that the study provides no support for Reading First as a federal funding program, but it doesn’t tell us anything about the efficacy of any one of the privately-developed educational programs purchased by schools with Reading First funds.

Girl Suspended for Bringing Rocks to School Detention Slip
After making the decision to suspend her, the principal called in an expert team of SWAT officials and geologists to clear the area of any other rocks that may have found their way onto school grounds. They then decided to cancel all science classes from the curriculum.

"Hurricane" Phillips Takes Gates Foundation By Storm

Not many figures in the world of education have colorful nicknames, but Gates Foundation's new education guru Vicki Phillips does.  Back in her former Portland school district, they called her "Hurricane" Phillips. 

No word yet whether she likes to be addressed that way in her current post, but in a new Q and A Phillips debunks the notion that the foundation is trying to take over the world and says she thinks she might be able to take EdSec Spellings in a powerful-women-of-education showdown on "Jeopardy." 

Check it out:  Meet the Gates Foundation’s Education Honcho.

Big Stories Of The Day

Poll Finds Public Still Unclear on Nature of Charter Schools EdWeek
What’s a charter school? A majority of adults still have little or no clue, a new poll suggests.

Teachers agree: Bad teachers with tenure too tough to fire AP
Think it's hard for schools to get bad teachers out of the classroom? Turns out teachers agree.

Failings of One Brooklyn High School May Threaten a Neighbor’s Success NYT (Sam Freedman)
Two Brooklyn high schools spent the past decade careering toward opposite destinies. The question now is whether the failure of one will destroy the success of the other.

Rhee's Need to Hurry Runs Into Parents' Fear of Change Washington Post
The colored letters on the classroom bulletin board at Stevens Elementary spelled out "Welcome Chancellor Rhee." On this humid evening late last month, however, she was beginning to wear it out.

Making Teacher Hiring Less Comfortable Wash. Post (Jay Mathews)
For those who still think helping children learn is everybody's top priority in our schools, let me cite a disturbing dispute over where to send several hundred teachers at 23 D.C. schools that are about to be closed for inadequate enrollment.

Make The Tough Decisions First

"It’s a terrible mistake to try to pick off the low-hanging fruit and have some successes right away and try to boost your popularity and then three-quarters of the way through your term you find that you’ve really got to face the tough issues and make the tough decisions."

New York City Mike Bloomberg, as reported in the NYT CityRoom blog.

Another NYT Education Reporter To Leave

K12 education reporter Diana Jean Schemo says she's taking the buyout and leaving the NYT.  She says her plans are to finish a book on the U.S. Air Force Academy and work on some magazine pieces. Schemo joins recent education departures including Karen Arenson (buyout) last week.  Based in DC, Schemo has covered education for the paper since 2000.  Here is a list of Schemo's clips.

UPDATE:  Schemo covered early childhood and higher ed as well as K12, and plans to do more writing for the Times and other outlets in the future, on a freelance basis.

The New Scholastic Administrator

The latest issue of the new Scholastic Administrator is out, including some pieces that I wrote or had a hand in editing.  Here's a taste from the table of contents:

Meet the Gates Foundation’s Education Honcho
What’s Next for NCLB
Is Obama the Education Candidate?
The Top Ed Trends to Watch
Five Things You Need to Know

 The Housing Crisis Hits Schools The fall in the housing market is hurting the budgets of school districts across the country. Here’s what administrators are doing to stem the damage. 

Grading Today's Blogs

CSAP scores are flat! Burn the CSAP! Schools For Tomorrow
This week’s release of lukewarm third-grade CSAP scores comes at a bad time for those trying to save CSAP testing from an untimely death.

Interim Reading First Study D-Ed Reckoning
We're not going to see improvement until we make a concerted effort to separate the winners from the losers, scrap the losers, fund the winners, and find effective means of identifying and developing new winners.

Ed. Dept. Looks to Standardize ELL Categories The Hoff
If you thought the Bush administration was finished putting its stamp on NCLB, think again.

Charter laws 2008 Joanne Jacobs
Center for Education Reform has released its 2008 version of Charter School Laws Across the States.

Is Education Listless? ASCD Blog
The venerable Time Magazine has just published its "Time 100: The Most Influential People in the World," and we couldn't wait to dive in. But a skim through the list finds only three figures associated with education.

How much do students cheat? AJC Blog
A friend of mine has been teaching high school English in the area for about 15 years. Every year she catches more and more kids who cheat.

 Teacher Fired for Magic Tricks in Class Detention Slip
After being accused of "wizardry," the school staff could now put their finger on why so many students came to class sawed in half.

Like This Blog? Vote For It.

There's yet another "best education blog" vote going on over at EDIN08, so if you feel like seeing who's up for the big prize and then voting for me, check it out:  Summit Poll.  Or, just vote for whoever you think is good.  What if they held a vote and no one voted?  That would be sadder than anything. 

Pandering To Voters: Gas Tax Vs. Ending NCLB

Which is the bigger pander -- promising to "end" NCLB or pushing for a summer holiday from the federal gas tax?  Ending NCLB, I'd say.  They're both hugely empty promises, cynical ploys to win votes.  They're both unlikely to be done in ways that would create substantial relief for educators or motorists.  They're punch lines.  But promising to "bag" NCLB (as Bill Clinton is quoted in today's New York Times) is like calling for a complete reversal in the nation's energy policy.  The press is making a giant deal over the gas tax proposal, which is a relatively minor thing.  What about examining the realities of "ending" NCLB?  I think that it would soon be clear that there's little behind the candidates' rhetoric on this front, and no clear consensus among experts and parents that ending NCLB is the way to go. 

RTI -- The Next "Reading First"?

Is RTI ("Response To Intervention") the best thing since sliced bread, or just a new name for something old, or -- worst case scenario -- a fancy-sounding way to overburden mainstream classroom teachers and save districts some cash by delaying SPED referrals?  I don't really know. 

I just started hearing about RTI last year -- you probably heard about it much earlier.  But it had been a while since I'd heard about anything "new" and of course that made me curious.  Here's an article by the Washington Post's Michael Allison Chandler from this past winter (Waiting Too Late to Test) that raises some of these questions. 

I like the notion of putting in a systematic screening system that makes sure kids don't just fall through the cracks -- rather than relying entirely on teachers' instincts.  And I'm curious about the potential for small interventions  that might make a difference.  But I'm skeptical about teachers' willingness to do all the formative assessments and ability to make a series of subtle adjustments.  Maybe that's why it's mostly being implemented in better-off districts.

Previous Posts:  Could "Checklists" Improve Academic Outcomes?

Big Stories Of The Day

Schools Chancellor Moves to Dismiss Principals Washington Post
...however, because Rhee is required to overhaul 27 city schools that have failed to make adequate progress under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

State Applies for 'No Child' Program The Ledger
Many of the same schools that get good grades from the state fail to make adequate progress under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

State Fiscal Woes Start to Put Squeeze on K-12 Budgets EdWeek
Except for such energy-rich states as Alaska, Wyoming, and North Dakota, states across the country are confronting deteriorating budget conditions that have tied the hands of legislators and governors hoping to spare K-12 education.

CSAP May Be on Its Way Out District Administration
Colorado's $22 million testing program appears headed for replacement after more than a dozen years and scant evidence of improvement in recent results.

Online Education Cast as ‘Disruptive Innovation’ EdWeek
A new book predicts that the growth in computer-based delivery of education will accelerate swiftly until, by 2019, half of all high school classes will be taught over the Internet.

Fatal Accidents Erode Perk of Off-Campus Lunches NYT
A growing number of high schools have recently stopped allowing students to go out for lunch due to concerns over traffic accidents and in some cases, truancy.

"A Complex And Peculiar Task" (Reading)

"At the speed of thought, readers of English turn letters they see into sounds, sounds into words, and words into meaning. Fluency is measured in milliseconds. Spelling variations are speed bumps in the brain."

From the Wall Street Journal (Science Journal)

Paige Vs. Spellings: A Different Black Man, A Different White Woman

The most interesting part of Patrick Riccards' post on who should be the next EdSec is his description of the previous EdSec, Rod Paige.  In essence, Riccards says Paige has gotten a raw deal.  Indeed, it may be true, especially given that by many accounts Paige was operating under such close orders from the White House DPC, where then-unknown Margaret Spellings was housed.  It's something that I wrote about a while back in an NRO piece about Spellings' about-face on NCLB once she became EdSec.
Unlike with Obama-Clinton, it's Spellings who's the charismatic light-footed one, what with her waivers and pilot programs and TV appearances, while Paige comes off as the plodding, humorless careerist who was overly strict about implementing NCLB.  As with Obama-Clinton, the public narrative may be substantially different from the underlying truth.

PS -- I have never seen a picture of them together, and can't find one on Google Images. 

Best Of The Blogs

Uppity.... With Malice Toward None Ed Notes Online
I was talking to some supposedly liberal teachers not long ago and was surprised at their animosity to Obama.

Margaret Spellings takes her glasses off.
Spellings says she's not sure why so many people hate NCLB. All it requires, she says, is that schools get their students "to grade level" by 2014. That, she says, is a "modest" request. And really, how can anyone argue against that?

It's A Nation At Risk... AFT Blog
I don’t usually plug Cato but the debate between Rothstein and the others over there is one of the more useful exchanges that I’ve seen in a while.

 Kierra, Conyers and Shrek Joanne Jacobs
When eighth graders asked Detroit Councilwoman Monica Conyers if she regretted interrupting the council president and calling him “Shrek,” she responded with a petulant, “That depends.”

Zombie Prom School Of Blog
My usual Friday Night Syndrome is being too exhausted after a week of teaching to move very far from the couch. Tonight, however, I am finishing up my job as prom coordinator. A job I will NEVER DO AGAIN.

Overkill Teaching In The 408
A gaggle of girls in my various classes have decided the whole tío-sobrina shouldn’t die, and we’ve pretty much abandoned using each other’s names at this point.

No Bike For You Matt Yglesias
It seems that students at Bridgewater-Raritan High School high school in Jersey raised $2,000 to pay for a new bike rack at their school. But the school said no!

Unpopular opinion
Fair Game correspondent Matt Pack offers an unpopular opinion on home-schooling.

Science Journal Wall Street Journal
Studies of schoolchildren who read in varying alphabets and characters suggest that those who are dyslexic in one language, say Chinese or English, may not be in another, such as Italian.

Big Stories Of The Day

What Do Children Read? Hint: Harry Potter's Not No. 1 Washington Post
Children have welcomed the Harry Potter books in recent years like free ice cream in the cafeteria, but the largest survey ever of youthful reading in the United States will reveal today that none of J.K. Rowling's phenomenally popular books has been able to dislodge the works of longtime favorites...

Teacher Opposed to Standardized Tests Reconsiders NPR
Teacher Chela Delgado once hated standardized tests and didn't want to make her students take them, but then she started listening to some of the children's parents. She reveals how families in under-resourced schools are pursuing what they see as best for their kids. PLUS: Seattle Teacher Rejects State's Standardized Test

Student no-shows on rise as threats spread by text USA Today
In an age when schools are on high alert for campus shooters, school officials nationwide say they're battling a new phenomenon: threats of violence that trigger a flurry of text messaging, driving up absenteeism among frightened students.

I Know What You Did Last Math Class NYT
A profusion of online programs that can track a student’s daily progress, including class attendance, missed assignments and grades on homework, quizzes and tests, is changing the nature of communication between parents and children, families and teachers.