"It's not fair to put complaints about the non-school-related elements of NYC’s multi-pronged anti-poverty program, OpportunityNYC, on Roland Fryer. The New York Mag story you link to is mostly about parts of the plan Roland has zero to do with. He is connected only with cash incentives around tests.Also, for the record, the ban on cell phones in NYC dates to 1988 (focused on pagers then)."
Neither of these reward-based ideas is necessarily bad, in my view at least, but someone get this guy a (better) handler and a brush-up on selection bias. When you're at the center of the storm, you just can't mess up like this. Or maybe there's more behind this that I don't know.
Meanwhile, the controversy of the city's effort to discredit Diane Ravitch continues with her response (here).
Sick of being told that scores are going up when you think they're really not? Well the cat is soon out of the bag, for 11 big urban districts at least (Atlanta; Austin, Texas; Boston; Charlotte, N.C.; Chicago; Cleveland; Houston; Los Angeles; New York; San Diego; and Washington, D.C.). A couple weeks from now the latest reading and math scores are coming out for some of the country's biggest districts. Called the urban NAEP, or TUDA, the new data will include trend lines going back to 2003, linked to NAEP. Based on NAEP data, not all of the nation's biggest cities are doing as well as their superintendents and mayors claim.
Chicago has a newish "grow your own" teachers initiative, as well as the nation's largest set of military-themed schools:
Grow Your Own Teachers US News & World Report
Tired of seeing first-year teachers flee to suburban schools, Illinois is spending $7.5 million to help people become teachers in underperforming schools in neighborhoods like their own.
Reading, writing, recruiting? Tribune
Chicago Public Schools, which already has the largest junior military reserve program in the nation, on Monday will commission the country's first public high school run by the U.S. Marines, much to the chagrin of activists who have fought to keep the armed services out of city
schools.
There's a big article in this week's EdWeek about universities' increasing efforts at school reform, focusing on the University of Chicago which currently runs several charter schools on Chicago's South Side. I know, I know. They're evil academic geniuses out to ruin a shining example of urban education and gut teacher job protections. I get it. Still, there are some tidbits you might want to check out. In addition to Chicago, Stanford University, the
University of California, San Diego, and the University of New Orleans are also running schools. And many other universities in other places are authorizing but not running charters. Hands-On Learning.
I didn't want to like the HBO documentary on the Little Rock Nine that's been playing over and over, and had been avoiding it (and most of the rest of the 50th anniversary coverage) thinking that I'd seen the footage before, knew that things hadn't changed that much, etc.
But the documentary (see segment above) spends most of its time following current students, and there's power in seeing the nearly complete (though not particularly hostile) segregation and disparate academic experiences that are still there. Here's a NYT review of the show. Check it out.
My favorite part of this PBS NewsHour segment on DC schools superintendent Michelle Rhee is where she talks about how seeing all the unused books and supplies in the central warehouse made her want to throw up.
Thanks to Whitney Tilson for uploading this. See part 2 here.
Erik Robelen's piece in EdWeek on small schools research recaps and deepens what most of us realized a few years ago: converting big high schools into small ones without making them truly autonomous doesn't necessarily get you very much, and there are tremendous pressures against autonomy in that kind of setting. That's what the Gates folks learned the hard way. Etc. None of it worth noting except then it occurred to me that the highly-anticipated (though not quite done) breakup of Locke HS in LA into Green Dot schools is in many ways just the same thing, except that the small schools are going to be charters. Is that enough of a difference? The researcher I talked to yesterday said probably not. Have other places experimented with charter conversions? Not that I know of.
Following up on Amy Waldman's excellent look at New Orleans schools (School Reform Hurricane), here are two contrasting views of how things are shaping up this fall:
History and Ideology Gang Up in New Orleans Dissent
New Orleans now has three “systems”: NOPS, with a handful of previously pretty good schools still functioning reasonably well; RSD, with approximately twenty schools, mostly in distress, educating about a third of the city’s public school students (and planning to open another six to ten campuses next year using modular buildings supplied by the private sector); and thirty-one charter schools.
New Orleans Activists Seek Educational Growth NPR
Some
A Successful Plan for Racial Balance Now Finds Its Future Uncertain
A Supreme Court decision from June could impact a racially balanced schools plan that has been maintained for 18 years by
Seeking Solutions for the Nation's Broken Schools NPR
Our public schools are in serious trouble, says Rudy Crew, superintendent of one of the largest school districts in the country.
Continue reading "The War Within The Charter Movement: Quality Vs. Choice" »
According to this article at EdWeek ( New Orleans Charters Fare Well in Testing), the first wave of tests results look good for some schools. Charter school students did relatively better than students in the state-run Recovery School District that Paul Vallas recently took over. In response, Vallas says he's implementing longer class days and better PD for teachers. There could be as many as 40 charters in New Orleans within the very near future, according to the article.
The main observation missing from today's NY Sun article on mayoral control (By 2009, Mayor's Control Of Schools Could End) is that going back is so tremendously difficult and unlikely. Mayors and their rivals are unlikely to support it, legislators who voted for mayoral control are unlikely to want to reverse themselves. Take Chicago, where not everything has gone well in the last 12 years but no serious effort to reverse the law has been mounted.
UPDATE FROM NYC DOE: "Our communications office has a staff of 14 (soon to be 13), which includes two secretaries. Not 29...I gave Sol the correct number during his research for the piece, but he choose to use the larger and incorrect figure. I don’t believe our communications staff is disproportionately large for an organization with 140,000 employees. You may feel differently, but Sol’s count is wrong in any case."
*Free Daily E-Mail Updates Now Available -- See The Yellow Box To The Right.*
Following up on the Boston Globe's story that Boston's famed pilot schools were screening students rather than taking all comers like everyone else (is supposed to). former Boston superintendent Tom Payzant (under whose leadership the pilots were started) said that he didn't know about the practice, either.
Writes Payzant: "Frankly, I was surprised that schools other than Quincy Upper and the Arts Academy had special requirements. Sometimes the Supt. is the last to know." Payzant said he'd tell the schools to cut it out, though perhaps allowing schools to require a parent visit upon acceptance so that they know what they're getting into. Payzant also says that he's criticized charters for not taking enough SPED and ELL, and that the pilots have done better with ELLs and were being "pushed" on SPED kids for several years. "I pushed them to address the special ed issue 4-5 years ago and insisted that they welcome students with disabilities. There has been a lot of progress on that front."
Adds current interim superintendent Mike Contompasis: "I do not believe that the pilots with the exception of Fenway continue to screen prior to the lottery process. I am informing the pilots again that these practices will cease effective in the coming year."
Dallas Morning News education columnist Josh Benton isn't the first to raise questions about Newsweek's High School Challenge Index (aka "Uncle Jay's List'), but the fact that two local Dallas high schools -- both in the same building -- got ranked #1 and #2 this year does give him an interesting perspective. In his column (here), Benton points out that at least some of the Dallas success is due to a local incentive program that pays kids and teachers for AP participation. In fact, Texas was the home of these AP incentive programs, which spread nationally and are now funded federally thanks in large part to my old boss, Jeff Bingaman, and Kay Bailey Hutchison.
Though I usually find articles in The Nation tiresome and predictable even when I agree with them, I knew I was going to like LynNell Hancock's recent article on school reform in New York City when she started out making fun of the word "granular," which is currently being over-used in certain circles when it comes to describing detailed data.
But it's not just that...
Continue reading "Capturing The Current School Reform Moment ... Down To The Granular Level" »
