March 2012 Archives

An extensive analysis of standardized test results across the country conducted by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that about 200 of the 14,700 districts investigated had schools where test scores were suspiciously inflated.

In an article published Sunday, the newspaper analyzed scores for 69,000 schools (a link to the methodology the newspaper used can be found here.) The reporters requested average reading and mathematics results for state exams given in grades 3 through 8 from 50 states and the District of Columbia, as well as the count of students tested for each school, grade and subject in those jurisdictions. Scores that rose or dropped more than a predicted amount were flagged as unusual.

The paper noted that the score variations do not prove cheating occurred. However, it suggested that the results merit further investigation.

The Dayton Daily News, part of the same Cox Newspapers chain that owns the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, wrote its own story in partnership with the Atlanta newspaper, using the same methodology but focusing more closely on Ohio schools.

The Journal-Constitution is no stranger to investigating test scores. Its digging into test scores in the Atlanta school system prompted a state investigation that eventually led last year to one of the largest cheating scandals in the country. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation determined that cheating on the 2009 administration of the state's Criterion-Referenced Competency Test occurred at 44 of the 56 Atlanta schools it investigated.

In the new article, the newspaper contends the school districts took an "apathetic, if not defiant" stance to the newspaper's findings. Several denied any problems; others acknowledged that the changes seemed unusual but did not blame testing improprieties.

However, days before the newspaper released its report, many organizations were ready with a response, and others have come forward since publication to say that the newspaper's methodology was flawed or that cheating will not be condoned.

The Washington-based Council of the Great City Schools, a coalition of the nation's urban school districts, said "these are serious charges that should be supported by the strongest evidence. That strong evidence has not been provided."

A statement from the National Education Association said NEA President Dennis Van Roekel "categorically denounces cheating or altering test scores. However, he said individuals accused deserve a thorough investigation, and should not be accused based solely on complicated probability formulas."

The Journal-Constitution has gathered more responses here.

Gary Miron, a professor of education at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo who reviewed the data for Ohio at the request of the Dayton Daily News, wrote in a Washington Post blog that the testing irregularities uncovered by the newspaper could be an artifact of high student mobility, not test tampering.

Miron said in an interview that he was given the Ohio data to analyze less than a week before it was published. What the newspapers did "was a reasonable first step, but you have to be cautious," he said. "You want a high level of certainty, and to not cast suspicion on a variety of school districts."

This investigation used a fairly wide net to identify schools. Test-cheating investigations typically take into account the number of wrong-to-right erasures on the tests themselves. Even though this one did not, the number of districts flagged for potential problems was small—just 1.3 percent of the total number investigated.

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More than a dozen school districts are taking part in a leadership fellowship sponsored by the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) charter network, in order to learn how the network trains its school leaders.

The KIPP Leadership Design Fellowship, which is funded through a $50 million federal Investing in Innovation grant, has also brought together representatives from charter management organizations and educator training programs.

The group will meet at least three times between now and October, and will cover areas such as leadership development, principal training and residencies, and evaluation and support of school leaders. The first meeting is taking place this week in Houston. The districts did not have to pay to partipate in the program. A full list of the participants can be found here. The districts participating include those with KIPP schools in their communities, such as New York and Denver, as well as smaller districts without KIPP schools, like West Contra Costa in California and Ascension Parish in Louisiana, about 65 miles west of New Orleans.

KIPP has trained more than 100 school founders and leaders, said Steve Mancini, the public-affairs director for KIPP, which has 109 schools in 20 states and the District of Columbia, educating 33,000 students. The organization plans to use part of its i3 grant to expand its operations to serve 55,000 students by 2015.

Mancini said that KIPP wanted to be a "convener of a conversation" about leadership training. "We do think we have a model that could be helpful to others," Mancini said.

This is not the only example of school districts attempting to learn from charter networks. The Houston district is in the middle of an experiment to turn around some of its lowest-performing schools by importing the best practices of charter schools, including KIPP, which was founded in the city. I wrote an article about that work earlier this month.

KIPP's signature training program is the year-long Fisher Fellowship, which operates in three phases, Mancini said; a 6-week summer institute where potential school founders learn about KIPP culture and operations; a residency where leaders spend several weeks in two or more KIPP schools shadowing the principal, and finally a school design phase, where leaders return to their communities and begin hiring teachers and recruiting students. The charter school network also has training programs for teacher leaders and future assistant principals. The participants in the fellowship will be exposed to all parts of KIPP's training programs, Mancini said.

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The requirements for the $550 million federal Race to the Top competition for school districts are still under development, but a U.S. Department of Education official offered a few clues today on how the program might look.

Speaking at a legislative and policy conference in Washington sponsored by the Council of the Great City Schools, Ann Whalen, the Education Department's director of policy and implementation, said the money will be distributed by the end of the calendar year, and that draft rules governing the competition should be out in the spring for comment. However, federal policymakers are interested in hearing from districts now, before those proposed rules come out, she said.

"We do know that we're not going to take the state criteria and do a find-and-replace, changing 'states' into 'districts,'" said Whalen. She said the criteria for the district competition would have to be different from the previous competitions because districts don't have the power to make sweeping changes such as adopting new academic standards or new assessments.

The department does not plan to abandon its focus on student achievement and closing achievement gaps, Whalen said. And it is considering allowing consortia of districts to apply for the funds—possibly even district groups that cross state lines.The four-year grants will be distributed regardless of whether the district is located in a state that did or did not win one of the previous competitions, she said.

A member of the audience asked how the department would guard against a district submitting an application that was somehow in violation of state policy. Whalen turned that question around, asking the district representative what he would like to see. After the presentation, she said the education department was "trying to figure out the right way to put those checks and balances in."

The email address for submitting comments to the department is racetothetop@ed.gov

Update: At the same meeting, Michael Yudin, the acting assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education, said that the Education Department is considering No Child Left Behind waivers for school districts, similar to the waivers that have been granted to some states. You can read more about this proposal at the Politics K-12 blog.

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When the leaders of Michigan's Education Achievement System were looking for an example of how to organize their newly-created network of low-performing schools, they took a trip down south, to New Orleans. Tennessee did the same as it planned its Achievement School District, which will eventually manage low-performing schools in Chattanooga, Memphis and Nashville. (I wrote about both districts' work in an article last December.)

And now, the nonprofit organization New Schools for New Orleans has created a guide for other policymakers who may be interested in bringing reforms similar to the New Orleans Recovery School District to their own cities. The Recovery School District (RSD) took over most of New Orleans' city schools after Hurricane Katrina and converted them to charter schools. The RSD now manages schools in the city and other parishes in the state. A link to the free guide is here; you must provide your name, organization and email address before downloading.

The guide, which was released March 1, was created as part of the organization's $28 million federal Investing in Innovation grant. New Schools for New Orleans received the five-year grant in conjunction with the Recovery School District in October 2010. The funds are intended to expand the charter model in New Orleans and other urban districts.

Neerav Kingsland, the chief strategy officer for New Schools for New Orleans, said in an interview that the guide is not intended to suggest that everything New Orleans did should be replicated wholesale. For example, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina forced a ramping-up of services that turned half of the city's schools into charters within two years. A more manageable pace of expansion, Kingsland suggested, might be converting somewhere between three to eight percent of a city's schools to charters each year.

The guide also notes that districts need to play a role in nurturing charter school management organizations. "Aggressive growth cannot be managed solely through the opening of stand-alone charter schools," the guide says. Instead, districts have to concentrate on attracting high-quality managers as well as growing their own networks. Fewer than 10 percent of the charter schools in New Orleans are run by national charter networks, the guide notes. Instead, the Recovery School District helped expand some strong schools into fledgling networks.

The guide concludes with examples of the roles that a central office must play even within a decentralized district of autonomously-run schools. For example, some entity must be responsible for an enrollment and transportation system, and for evaluating schools and shutting down low-performing schools. Those are issues that the Recovery School District is still grappling with, Kingsland said.

However, he said the district is happy to talk both about its successes and the work that it still needs to do. "We're hoping we're that city that can help other cities," he said.

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The What Works Clearinghouse, an initiative of the federal Institute of Education Sciences, said today that a widely publicized study on Philadelphia's "Renaissance Schools" model did not meet its standards for evidence because the Renaissance schools were not measured against a set of schools with similar achievement levels.

That ranking is the lowest that the clearinghouse can give a research report; the other ratings are "meets evidence standards" or "meets evidence standards with reservations."

In response to the rating, Research for Action, the Philadelphia-based organization that authored the report , said that it is sticking by its conclusion that early results showed positive academic results among the 11 K-8 Renaissance schools. All were low-performing schools that were either turned over to charter managers or placed under direct district management. The district-run schools were called Promise Academies. The changes at the schools usually included a longer day and year and reconstitution of the school staff. The charter-run schools were allowed to operate with some autonomy from the district.

The study found that the two Renaissance high schools studied did not show discernible academic or attendance gains.

The study is "a pretty rigorous design," said Kate Shaw, the executive director of Research for Action. "What it shows is that something is happening in Philadelphia's Renaissance schools."

The clearinghouse is attempting to get out more quick reviews of studies that are in the news. In this case, the study received a great deal of attention in Philadelphia, where the cash-strapped district of 146,000 students is trying to decide how and if it can expand its reform agenda. I also wrote a blog post about the study in February.

Shaw said that the researchers with her organization could not pick a group of schools that were exactly like the Renaissance schools, because all the district's lowest-performing schools were selected for reform measures. Instead, the researchers selected a group of low-performing schools that closely matched the Renaissance schools in demographics and academic performance. The researchers analyzed data going back five years to see if the performance of the Renaissance schools and the comparison group were similar.

"These schools were all improving at the same very low rate," Shaw said. But then after the Renaissance initiative, "you saw a very distinct change in the gains" among the schools chosen for the reform measures.

Shaw noted that the What Works Clearinghouse is known for having strict standards for research, which Education Week explored in an article about the clearinghouse trying to shed its "nothing works" image. Meeting those strict standards is difficult in a school system, which is not trying to conduct research but to improve its schools, she said.

The organization is working to secure funding to continue its research, Shaw said.

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The Bentonville, Ark.-based Walton Family Foundation invested more than $159 million in initiatives that support competition in education, marking its largest single-year commitment to education initiatives.

The Walton Family Foundation distinguishes itself from other large education-minded philanthropies, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation or the Broad Foundation, by its focus on grants that encourage public and private school choice, according to Daphne Moore, a spokesman for the foundation. The organization is one of the biggest contributors to such initiatives, Moore said.

Walton Foundation money went in 2011 to organizations such as the Charter School Growth Fund, which received almost $23 million to help high-performing charter schools expand. Teach For America, which recruits college graduates to serve for two years to work as teachers in low-income communities, received about $12.5 million. The New York-based Local Initiatives Support Corporation, which, among various other projects, helps charter schools find facilities, received the third largest grant in 2011, at about $6.8 million.

One grantee, San Francisco-based GreatSchools Inc., manages a widely viewed website that provides a space for parents and students to rate their own schools. GreatSchools received about $4.8 million last year, which has allowed it to provide printed information on schools to communities such as Milwaukee, Washington, D.C., and Indianapolis, said Bill Jackson, the company's chief executive officer. "It's allowed us to improve the quality and sophistication of our ratings," he said.

A full list of the 2011 grantees can be found here. It includes Editorial Projects in Education, the publisher of Education Week, which receives funding for coverage of parent-empowerment issues.

Moore said the foundation believes that spurring competitive options for education improves all schools in a community—a philosophy that has drawn criticism in the education world. To get a sense of the full range of debate over the role of competition in education, see this seven-part Education Week commentary series that explored the future of school reforms, including market-driven changes such as those promoted by the Walton Family Foundation.

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Eugene White, the superintendent of the 31,700-student Indianapolis school district since 2005, said that he is a candidate for superintendent in Mobile, Ala. and Greenville, S.C. From an article in the Indianapolis Star:

White said he was contacted by recruiters in both cases and agreed to allow them to put his name forward. He said he is not unhappy in his job, but instead has for some time considered seeking a job in the Southeast with an eye toward retiring in that part of the country. He is an Alabama native.

"I haven't made up my mind I want to leave IPS yet," he said, "but I am considering going back to my home area of the country."

The 63,000-student Mobile system announced on Monday its three finalists for the superintendent's position. In addition to White, the system also named A. Dale Robbins, the associate superintendent for teaching and learning for the 161,000-student Gwinnett district in Suwannee, Ga., and Peggy H. Connell, the chief academic officer for the 32,000-student Muscogee district in Columbus, Ga. The board plans to decide by March 30.

The school board of the Greenville district, a 69,800-student system and the largest in South Carolina, plans to interview candidates this week and announce its final selection March 24, an article in the Greenville News said.

A nonprofit organization in Indianapolis called The Mind Trust announced a plan for remaking Indianapolis schools that would involve placing the district in control of the city's mayor and turning the system into a network of "Opportunity Schools" that would compete for the district's students. The organization said that the changes were necessary to reverse enrollment declines and to strengthen the district's academics. Tony Bennett, the state's superintendent of public instruction, said in an recent Education Week article that he was supportive of the proposals in the plan. The state paid for most of the Mind Trust report.

However, White, the superintendent, said that the district was already demonstrating improvement and that the report was driven by politics. "They have to make us look as dysfunctional as possible," he told Education Week.

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From guest blogger Nirvi Shah:

A group of students who sued the Anoka-Hennepin School District in Minnesota in federal court said late Monday they have settled with the district, which in exchange must provide significant new protections to prevent the harassment of students who are perceived to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender.

The settlement still has to be approved by a federal judge, but if that happens, it would resolve a suit filed last summer and an investigation by the U.S. Department of Education that began in 2010, after the suicides of several students who were gay.

The Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Center for Lesbian Rights filed the suits on behalf of six former and current students who said they had been bullied at school because of their real or perceived sexual orientation.

The complaints said the six students named in the suits were regularly subjected to anti-gay slurs at school, with the epithets "dyke," "homo," and "faggot" hurled by other students. Some were told to "kill yourself" or "you're going to hell," the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported. The bullying sometimes was physical: One student was stabbed in the neck with a pencil; others were choked; some were pushed into lockers or urinated on. One student dropped out of school and others left the district, the newspaper reported. Some pondered suicide.

The groups said the settlement also resolves a related complaint filed against the district today by the federal Department of Justice.

Earlier this year, the district school board voted to end a policy in which teachers had to remain neutral if issues of sexual identity came up in class.

To resolve the suit, the students, federal government, and the district have entered into a consent decree. The agreement specifically says that teachers can affirm the dignity and self-worth of students, and any protected characteristics of students, such as being LGBT, without violating any district policy. It also provides for the six students to get a total of $270,000.

"No one should have to go through the kind of harassment that I did," one of the plaintiffs, student Dylon Frei, said in a statement. "I am happy this agreement includes real changes that will make our schools safer and more welcoming for other kids."

Among other steps under the consent decree, the district must:
• Hire the Great Lakes Equity Center, based at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis to provide a comprehensive, systemic review and recommend revisions to district policies and practices related to sex and sexual orientation-related harassment.
• Fully investigate reports of harassment; escalate remedial efforts through additional measures when students are harassed on a repeated basis; and mitigate the effects of harassment that occurs.
• Take proactive measures to address the hostile environment.
• Develop procedures for parental notification while maintaining sensitivity to a student's right of privacy relating to their real or perceived orientation or gender identity.
• Hire a district-level harassment-prevention official who will help lead the district's efforts to "eliminate and prevent future instances of harassment in its education programs and activities."
• Ensure that a counselor or other qualified mental health professional to be available during school hours for students in need.
• Strengthen its annual anti-bullying survey.
• Work with the Equity Center to identify hot spots in district schools where harassment is most problematic, including outdoor locations and on school buses, and work with the equity consultant to develop corrective actions.

"This historic agreement marks a fresh start for the Anoka-Hennepin School District," said Sam Wolfe, an attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center's LGBT Project, in a statement. "Unfortunately, this district had become notorious for anti-LGBT hostility and discrimination. This consent decree sets the stage for Anoka-Hennepin to become a model for other school districts to follow in creating more respectful learning environments for all students in a thoughtful, systemic, and proactive way."

As part of the agreement, the federal government will monitor how the district adheres to the consent decree for five years.

Photo: Tears stream down Damien McGee-Backes' face after being asked about what he went through in the past few years of his life at his former school during a news conference after a settlement in the bullying lawsuit against the Anoka-Hennepin School District at the district headquarters in Coon Rapids, Minn., on March 5. (Renee Jones Schneider/The Star Tribune/AP)

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Highland Park, a 970-student district near Detroit that was taken over by a state-appointed emergency manager earlier this year, will be co-managed for the next few months by the Detroit Public Schools, which is itself under emergency management.

The agreement will last for the remainder of the school year, according to a press release from the state. Detroit schools will handle personnel matters for Highland Park, while an emergency manager will attempt to solve Highland Park's financial problems. The district is facing a deficit of $11 million, and had to get an advance from the state to make a recent payroll.

"Our goal is to ensure that students face as little disruption as possible," said Jack Martin, the Highland Park emergency financial manager, in the press release.

An article in the Detroit Free Press noted that at least one member of the Highland Park school board, Robert Davis, has a problem with this plan. "It's an absolute joke," Davis told the paper.

Earlier this year, Davis filed a suit against the state saying that Martin's appointment to oversee the district was made in violation of the state's open-meeting laws. A judge agreed, and Martin was asked to step down temporarily, but was reappointed on Friday.

In the meantime, Gov. Rick Snyder has signed legislation that will allow Highland Park students to leave the school system for neighboring districts or charter schools that have room to enroll them. Districts or charter schools that take in Highland Park students will receive a per pupil tuition of $4,000 to help defray costs. If student remain in Highland Park, Detroit schools will receive the money. The state government has compiled a list of schools with openings in a website devoted to the school district's emergency.

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No school board, no problem, says Paul G. Vallas, the former Philadelphia and New Orleans schools chief who accepted a interim appointment to run the 20,000-student Bridgeport, Conn. district. In an interview, he said reforms are continuing in the struggling school system despite a state Supreme Court ruling this week that said Connecticut's takeover of the district was invalid.

"It wasn't unexpected," Mr. Vallas said.

On Tuesday, the court overturned the state takeover, saying Connecticut failed to follow the law by not retraining the school board before seizing control of the district. The required retraining is aimed at helping school boards' improve their operations as a last step before resorting to state takeover.

The district's school board had voted 6-3 in July to turn the district over to state control. But board members on the losing end of that vote challenged the decision. The court ruling is available on the Connecticut Post website.

The ruling means that Bridgeport has to hold a special school board election, and the state-appointed board will serve until that elected board is certified. But Vallas said he has already made progress paring down the district's debt, and plans to introduce an academic reform plan by the end of this month.

"The bottom line for me is, on March 26, our balanced five-year budget plan will be done and we will be presenting to the community a reform plan we think will be strongly embraced," he said. The court ruling "is a speed bump," he added.

But he said observers should not expect the reform plan to look exactly like the Recovery School District which took over most of the schools in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and turned them into charters.

"We're going to do a combination of things to improve these schools," Vallas said, "transforming existing schools as well as reconstituting some."

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