This week’s news includes a shake- up in New York, state progress on graduation requirements, school level accountability and transparency, the latest on Teach for America coming to Puget Sound, and more election results. This week also saw education results champion and Harlem Children’s Zone CEO Geoffrey Canada speak in Seattle. If you weren’t one of the 1200 folks in the room at The Seattle Foundation’s Annual Meeting, you missed out on much needed nourishment. And I’m not referring to the lunch. Canada’s passion, vision and commitment were obvious, as was his persistence. His best nugget may have been the observation that we can never find the resources we need to bring effective education reform to scale but we always seem to scale up the prison system. What’s up with that…
Meanwhile, in New York, the NYC School Chancellor, Joel Klein is leaving after eight years on the job. While his announcement came as a surprise, he had been in discussion with Mayor Bloomberg for several months. Perhaps the bigger surprise is his replacement, virtual education unknown, Cathleen Black, a Hearst Corp executive with no education credentials or background. Final approval of her appointment may be an uphill battle, but she is clearly a Bloomberg ally, someone he trusts with perhaps the most difficult job in New York. Still, after calling her “Exactly the right person,” to lead NY Schools, Bloomberg probably wishes he’d done a thorough scrubbing of her official records and transcripts. This off-hand comment about selling sex tips applications won’t help her cause and it’s not like New York doesn’t love a political scandal. For his part, Klein is credited with huge progress in his eight years – including massive changes to the teacher contracts in New York. With both Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein exiting stage left, some are asking, what’s going to happen to education reform? I’d also ask, what’s going to happen to Joel Klein’s soul now that he’s going to work for Rupert Murdoch?
Closer to home, the State Board of Education voted this week to adopt higher graduation standards that prepare students for college and beyond. Current standards require only 20 credits and rank abysmally low compared to other states nationwide. Kids can graduate with high GPA’s and not have the required coursework to go to college. Aligning high school graduation with college going makes tremendous sense – especially for kids whose families don’t have a history of college and in schools where the student to counselor ratio is about one to 547. (i.e. nearly every school in Washington) This move is years in the making and is likely years from implementation. Given the $128 million price tag and the pledge from the Board to wait until funding is provided to enforce the new requirements it only takes one glimpse at the state budget to see we still have an uphill battle. Still, this is welcome and long overdue news. Congratulations to the SBE.
Seattle Public Schools made news this week when they issued district and school-level scorecards. This State of the District style reporting comes as a surprise to many who complain that the district isn’t transparent enough – be careful what you wish for. Transparency here is brave, but scary at the same time. Take a look at the map produced by the Center for Reinventing Public Schools and those little colored dots that look like so much confetti actually represent schools, which are made up of KIDS. Parents can – and SHOULD – learn more about their school’s scorecard and plans for improvement. The District has scheduled several public meetings in late November, early December. It would be great if the parents outnumbered the District staff at a public meeting for a change…. Just sayin’.
The highly effective and well respected Teach for America has come under fire here in Seattle. Despite the myriad studies that show their effectiveness and ignoring the fact that their teachers CHOOSE to work in underperforming, primarily low-income schools, some in the community are choosing the status quo over any kind of change. While I know a lot of folks support bringing TFA here – IT MAKES SENSE! – stuff like this only makes Seattle, the emerald city of innovation look plain green at the gills when it comes to real change for our kids.
Votes are still being counted nationwide, but you can get a pretty decent election wrap up – and its impact on education through Education Counsel’s analysis. Check it out.
Finally, this falls under the “that’s my kind of fundraising speech” category. Apparently a certain elder statesman of philanthropy and arguably THE community leader for education and tax fairness has had all that he can stands and he cant’s stands no more. Couldn’t have said it better myself.
To say that the choice is either Teach for America or the status quo is a false dichotomy.
As for “the myriad studies that show their effectiveness” there are many more, and more reliable studies, that show that Teach for America teachers are no better than novice teachers with traditional certification, and that novice teachers are the least effective group of teachers.
I don’t understand how we can go from saying that these schools need the best, most expert and experienced teachers available and need teachers who won’t leave after a year or two to saying that the right people for the job are novice teachers who are likely to leave the school (if not the profession) after two years.
“Despite the myriad studies that show their effectiveness and ignoring the fact that their teachers CHOOSE to work in underperforming, primarily low-income schools, some in the community are choosing the status quo over any kind of change. While I know a lot of folks support bringing TFA here – IT MAKES SENSE! – stuff like this only makes Seattle, the emerald city of innovation look plain green at the gills when it comes to real change for our kids.”
And on the other side, there are studies that show they aren’t effective. TFA members are like charters – a few good, a few bad and a whole lot in the middle. And TFA makes them go work in low-income schools so the choice comes when they enlist, not when they teach.
Makes sense to bring TFA in? Okay answer these questions and I’ll sign on:
- where’s the money for the entire term of the contract coming from – the $4k per teacher per year? You know, for a fact, that for the entire 3 year term of the contract, that this “mystery” donor is paying all of that? Who pays for the overhead of this program (because there’s always overhead)?
- where is the accountability for all the “student identifiable data” that TFA will have access to? Do you know, for a fact, that every single parent whose child is in a TFA classroom will be fully-informed of their right to opt their child’s information out of TFA’s hands?
- we have NO shortage of teachers in Seattle. Dr. Goodloe_Johnson acknowledged this at a public meeting. In fact, they had over 400 teachers apply for jobs in West Seattle this year. We have at least 4 teaching colleges in this state that graduate many FULLY-qualified young and energetic teachers every single year.
- our School Board and district have NO business, in a terrible economy that is not rebounding quickly, to take on a new initiative with NO revenue stream. It is wrong to do this on a wish and a prayer.
- we have a brand-new, highly touted teachers contract with built-in benefits for high-performing teachers and support for struggling teachers. Why can’t we give that at least 2 years to see teacher improvement? If it’s so great, then why the rush?
- lastly, is this effort really the top 5 things our Board and our Superintendent need to concentrate on?
By the way, it is not Teach for America that has come under fire, but the leadership of Seattle Public Schools.
Everyone I know has a lot of respect for Teach for America. They send teachers into areas where there aren’t enough teachers for the classrooms. In these areas they fill positions that would be otherwise empty, or filled with long-term substitutes, or filled with other non-certificated teachers. That’s not the case here in Seattle where there is no shortage of certificated, experienced teachers for every available teacher job.
And now the scorecards and what’s wrong with them:
The school and District scorecards don’t provide any data that was not already available. All of this information was already known and public. Putting the data out there is nothing new or even particularly beneficial.
What we need now – and what we have needed for some time – is for someone to react to the data. That still isn’t happening. Read the reports. Read what the schools and the District say they are doing to respond to the poor outcomes they report. They aren’t doing anything much, or anything real, or anything different from what they have done before.
The shame of these reports are not on page one but on page two.
The geographical distribution of the school “ratings” make it clear that the schools are being graded on who enrolls in them, not on what happens for those students after they enroll. The shame of the District is to see schools and statistics but not see students. The District sees a school full of struggling students and concludes that the school is struggling so they send support to the school and the teachers. As far as we know the teacher is doing very well. The District should be sending the support to the students.
At the last Board meeting the superintendent and the Chief Academic Officer both claimed that providing students with appropriate interventions is a core duty for the District. Then they both acknowledged that the District isn’t doing it. They are seeking outside funding for it. It’s a core duty of the District but they haven’t made it a budget priority so that it is completely unfunded?!?
The data in these scorecards is completely meaningless if it does not lead to some action. There is no decision and no action that members of the public can take in response to this data and it’s increasingly clear that the schools and the District are not making any decisions or taking any effective action in response to the data either. So what’s the point of having pretty new reports in place of the old ones that had the same information? No point.