NCTAF News Digest:

A Weekly Digest of News Articles & Reports

Thursday April 3, 2008

In this Issue:

--NCLB Watch

--Invitation to Improving the Distribution of Teachers in Low-performing High Schools Event

--Reinventing the Big Test: The Challenge of Authentic Assessment

--City Students Less Likely to Graduate Than Suburban Kids

--State Senator Blasts 'Inequitable' School Bonus Plan

--A Good Grade for Teach for America
--Commentary: Fixing Education Policy

--Working Smarter by Working Together

Greetings,

This is the NCTAF News Digest, a timely news service provided to our partner states, commissioners, and the education policy community. This Digest is for the personal educational use of the recipient. At publication time, all links were active. Some publications may require free registration. You may wish to bookmark links for future reference.

The Alliance for Excellent Education invites you to:

Improving the Distribution of Teachers in Low-Performing High Schools

Thursday, April 10,2008

8:30 a.m.--11:00 a.m.

Resources for the Future - First Floor Conference Center

1616 P Street, NW - Washington, DC

Speakers include:

Barnett Berry, Center for Teaching Quality

Tim Daly, The New Teacher Project

Barbara Jenkins, Orange County Public School District

Jane West, American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education

Wesley Williams, Ohio Department of Education

Please note that space for this event is limited; RSVPs will be accepted on a "first-come" basis. Acceptances ONLY with subject line "RSVP: April 10 Teacher Distribution Event" to all4ed@all4ed.org or contact Sofia Bahena at (202) 828-0828 by Monday, April 7, 2008

Reinventing the Big Test: The Challenge of Authentic Assessment

-Edutopia; April 2008

When I was a younger education reporter in the old mill town of Lawrence, Massachusetts, the big day came when the state released scores on its school accountability tests. The Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, better known and feared as the MCAS, fulfills the requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act through annual tests in English and math (and now additional subjects). I scrutinized pages of numbers and wrote a story on the success and failure of nearby schools. My editors played it big on the front page because they knew parents would look anxiously at their school's results and homeowners would mentally adjust their property values based on the scores. I prodded principals and superintendents to explain their schools' leaps or stumbles.And unwittingly, I played right into the dominant illusion that these bloodless test scores are the most definitive measure of a school's success -- and that they measure what's most important. Cold, hard numbers have a way of seeming authoritative, but accountability tests are not the infallible and insightful report cards we (and our state governments) imagine them to be. The educational assessment tests states use today have two fundamental flaws: They encourage the sort of mind-numbing drill-and-kill teaching educators (and students) despise, and, just as important, they don't tell us much about the quality of student learning. "We are totally for accountability, but we've got the wrong metrics," says John Bransford, a professor of education at Seattle's University of Washington who studies learning and designs assessments.

"These tests are the biggest bottleneck to education reform." Jennifer Simone, a fifth-grade teacher at Deerfield Elementary School, in Edgewood, Maryland, is acutely aware of the limitations of standardized tests. Her curriculum must emphasize subjects for which the state accountability test measures proficiency -- math, reading, and science. Social studies? Though the subject is on her master schedule, if there is a shortened school day, it gets dropped. Moreover, Simone says, the test scores don't truly reflect her students' abilities and are too vague to help her pinpoint individual needs. She longs for an assessment that relies on more than just written problems, that could capture the more diverse skills visible in her classroom and valued in the workplace, such as artistic talent, computer savvy, and the know-how to diagnose and fix problems with mechanical devices. Simone asks, "If we differentiate our instruction to meet the needs of all the learners, why aren't we differentiating the test?"he simple, but unsatisfying, answer is history and efficiency. The tests that states use to satisfy NCLB descended from a model created in the 1920s designed to divide students into ability groups for more efficient tracking. Eighty years, two world wars, and a technological revolution (or two) later, the tests remain structurally the same.

To read the full article, click here.

City Students Less Likely to Graduate Than Suburban Kids
-Los Angeles Times; April 2, 2008

WASHINGTON -- Students in urban public school districts are less likely to graduate from high school than those enrolled in suburban districts in the same metropolitan area, according to research presented Tuesday. The report by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center found that about 75% of the students in suburban districts received diplomas, but only 58% of students in urban districts did. In the Los Angeles metropolitan area, the gap was even wider, with 78% of students in suburban districts and 57% of those in city districts graduating. Just 45% of the students in the Los Angeles Unified School District completed all four years of high school successfully, compared with the national graduation average of 70%. The analysis of graduates in the 2003-04 school year examined U.S. Department of Education data from metropolitan areas surrounding the country's 50 most populous cities. Of the principal school districts serving those cities, LAUSD's graduation rate was the ninth-lowest, the report found. Nationally, 52% of students in the main school districts of urban areas graduated. The dropout rate of more than a million students each year "is not just a crisis; this is a catastrophe," said former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, the founding chairman of America's Promise Alliance, which presented the research. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings said the government would soon require states to use a uniform method to report graduation data, although she did not provide specifics. This would require a change in the No Child Left Behind Act, which allows states to devise their own methods of determining graduation rates and tracking improvements. "The problem is frequently masked by inconsistent and opaque data-reporting systems," Spellings said. "For example, in some districts, a school only counts a dropout if you register as a dropout. . . . In others, a dropout's promise to get a GED at an unspecified future date is good enough to merit graduate status. With these loose definitions . . . it's no wonder why this epidemic is so silent."

Officials also pointed to the need for community involvement to help urban schools with the problem. Leaders of businesses and faith-based groups were urged to make graduation a priority in discussions with children. "It is not just a problem for our schools or our teachers," Powell said. "It is a problem for all of us. All these parts have to come together, connected to a superior school system, and we can solve this problem." To accomplish that, the alliance announced plans for dropout prevention summits in every state over the next two years to bring community, school and business leaders together "to develop workable solutions and action plans for improving our nation's alarming graduation rates." For the “Cities in Crisis” report, the EPE Research Center, a nonprofit in Bethesda, Md., used a method called the cumulative promotion index to calculate graduation rates. The biggest difference between this index and previous measurements is that it looks at graduation in four steps -- three grade-to-grade promotions and receiving a diploma -- instead of as a single event. The index counts only students who receive standard high school diplomas as graduates. The promotion rates for each step of the process were multiplied by each other to form a graduation rate for the district. Reported dropout statistics were not used. Panelists said that open access to information and to problem areas was crucial in addressing the issue. "This problem is not only manageable; it's solvable in a decade or less," said Robert Balfanz, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University. "We can locate the problem. It's not every school; it's not every student." Tuesday's report said the main school districts of Detroit, Indianapolis, Cleveland and Baltimore had the lowest graduation rates in the country. All were below 40%; Detroit's was 25%.

For the full article, click here.

See the full report click here.

See related articles:

• Report: Half of Atlanta Students Don't Graduate on Time, Atlanta Journal Constitution, April 1, 2008
• U.S. Requires States to Use a Single School Dropout Formula, The New York Times, April 1, 2008

State Senator Blasts 'Inequitable' School Bonus Plan

-Houston Chronicle; April 2, 2008

AUSTIN — Forcing property-poor school districts, such as Fort Bend and Pasadena, to help finance a state bonus pay program for superior teachers "is illegal and inequitable," a state senator contends in a letter to Education Commissioner Robert Scott. Texas lawmakers created the $148 million District Awards for Teacher Excellence program last year to help schools award teachers for improving student achievement. Scott placed a 15 percent local match requirement on the awards, which start at $3,000 per teacher. The statue does not require school districts to leverage the state grants with matching money. "By requiring property poor school districts to raise a 15 percent match, you place districts such as all of the ones I represent at a significant disadvantage," Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, wrote in his letter to Scott. He noted that some property poor-schools in his district have nearly $800 less per student than property-rich schools. "All across Texas, teacher quality is the issue," Shapleigh said in an interview. "So often, low-performing schools have last choice when it comes to (hiring) teachers, so teacher pay can improve teacher quality. And property-poor school districts need a level playing field. With the 15 percent rule, they are at a disadvantage from the start."The commissioner has not yet responded to Shapleigh. Only one-third of the state's 1,039 school districts have chosen to participate, even though Scott has told school officials they could meet the match requirement with an in-kind contribution or request a waiver. None have sought such a waiver. "We're not trying to disadvantage any school," Scott said.

But property-poor school districts view it as a burden, and Shapleigh said he expects school districts will file a lawsuit if the problem is not resolved. "It's a major issue because it continues a trend of the way things have been done in the past," said Wayne Pierce, executive director of the Equity Center, which represents poor and mid-wealth school districts. San Antonio Independent School District officials want to reward teachers for their work, but did not apply for the bonus pay "because our district is not in a financial position to provide the 15 percent match," deputy superintendent Betty Burks said, adding that it would have cost the district well over $100,000 to get the bonus pay for the district's 3,500 teachers. San Antonio school administrators were unaware they could request a waiver or offer in-kind contributions. "We went by the first round of information and didn't pursue it after that. It's unfortunate that some districts have more information than others," Burks said. San Antonio's largest school district, Northside Independent School District, opted to participate only after learning that the Texas Education Agency would allow in-kind expenditures to count as the district's match, Northside Superintendent John Folks said. Northside will get $4.5 million for the teacher bonus pay program after making $561,636 worth of in-kind contributions. Leaders in the Pasadena school district — a property-poor district in the Houston area — said they opted into the bonus program because of the potential educational benefits. The 49,000-student district must provide a more than $338,000 match to receive its $2.7 million grant. "We wanted the incentive plan to be a solid, instructionally based plan that would truly stretch our staff beyond expectations," Superintendent Kirk Lewis said. He said the in-kind allowance made it possible. Despite the financial concerns, the school board for the Fort Bend district, one of the largest property-poor systems in the Houston area, voted this week to seek its $3.7 million grant. They plan to spend the money at 13 elementary and middle schools starting in 2008-09, officials said The Texas State Teachers Association raised the equity issue when the education agency established the local match requirement. "We think it is a major factor in why so many districts have opted out of the program," association spokesman Richard Kouri said.

For the full article, click here.

A Good Grade for Teach for America

-The Christian Science Monitor; April 4, 2008

What makes a good teacher? Experience helps. But a new study of Teach for America (TFA) – education's version of the Peace Corps – shows that their novice high school teachers bring something to the classroom that trumps traditional training and experience. The advantage of having a TFA teacher is particularly strong in math and science, the study finds. The results are eye-opening at a time when teacher quality is a front-and-center issue. Good teachers are a key to closing achievement gaps for low-income and minority students, researchers say, but there's still much to be learned about how to get people into the classrooms where they're needed – and how to ensure their effectiveness once they get there. "The fact that [this study] actually documents differences between different types of teachers is important as we consider the best ways in which to prepare teachers, the best ways to recruit them, the best ways to select them," says Heather Peske, director of teacher quality at The Education Trust, a Washington nonprofit that works to close student-achievement gaps. TFA has sent about 17,000 elite college graduates into two-year stints in the neediest urban and rural classrooms since it started in 1990. They get intense training in the summer and then on the job – a crash course compared with the years of study and practice that most aspiring teachers undergo. That's drawn criticism from some corners. But the first study to look at TFA teachers in high schools shows that their students do better on end-of-course exams than those of other teachers. TFA teachers' impact is even greater than that of teachers with three or more years of experience relative to new teachers. Selectivity of potential teachers, in fact, is a big part of the TFA brand. Recruiters look for top college students who could land higher-paying jobs (but TFA members take entry-level teacher salaries averaging about $36,000). Last year, only 21 percent of applicants made the cut. Criteria include perseverance, achievement, and respect for others, says TFA spokeswoman Amy Rabinowitz, but leadership is the most important. "What [the study's] findings suggest is that we have to think a lot more about selection," says Jane Hannaway, coauthor of the study produced by CALDER, a research center at the Urban Institute in Washington. "TFA spends a good part of its efforts ... selecting people who they expect to be particularly effective in the classroom." The analysis spanned from 2001 to 2006 in North Carolina, a state particularly advanced in gathering data that links teachers, students, and exam scores in a range of subjects. It controlled for a range of student, classroom, and school characteristics.

Traditional teacher-education programs at colleges and universities should see what lessons they can draw from TFA, says Ms. Peske. Most of those programs have not subjected themselves to analysis of their graduates' effectiveness, she says, so she credits TFA for wanting to know the impact it's having on learning. Previous studies of TFA by various researchers looked at Grades 1 through 8 and yielded mixed results. Two found a TFA advantage in math but not in reading. Another found that TFA teachers in English classes did somewhat worse than teachers certified through university programs. One challenge with a model like TFA is that it's hard to replicate, says Douglas Harris, an educational policy professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The study suggests more broadly, he says, that people should be open-minded about "all sorts of possible alternative routes to [teacher] certification." Cognitive ability is an important predictor of worker effectiveness in complex occupations like teaching, Mr. Harris's research has found. So alternative programs could be useful, for instance, if they draw in candidates who "learn faster and learn better," he says. In many urban and rural areas, students who have the most catching up to do are in the schools with the least experienced teachers (including TFA teachers). This is despite the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which attempts to push districts to ensure equitable distribution of high-quality teachers.

For the full article, click here.

Commentary: Fixing Education Policy

-Slate; April 1, 2008

Identifying what needs to be fixed in the field of education is easy: the No Child Left Behind Act, currently up for reauthorization but stalled in Congress pending the next election. The elaborate law requires schools to test the bejeezus out of elementary- and middle-school students in reading and math, to test them again in high school, and to sprinkle in a few science tests along the way. Schools posting consistently poor test scores are supposed to be punished so that they'll clean up their acts and allow NCLB's ultimate goal to be achieved in 2014. The act imagines that essentially all students across the country will be "proficient" in that year, meaning that they'll all pass the battery of standardized tests required by the NCLB. Hence the act's catchy title. NCLB was enacted in 2001 with huge bipartisan support, though many Democrats in Congress have since disclaimed if not denounced it, presumably having had some time to read it. The act is at once the Bush administration's signature piece of education legislation, its most significant domestic policy initiative, and the most intrusive federal education law in our nation's history. The federal government provides less than 10 percent of all education funding, yet NCLB drives education policy in every school district in the country. In short, it's a big deal. It's also in need of repair. No one—conservative or liberal, Democrat or Republican—doubts that. That's the easy part. The hard part is how to fix it. Let's start with what not to do.

• Don't scrap it. Some reformers advocate scrapping the whole thing and starting anew. Well-known education author/activist Jonathan Kozol recently went so far as to stage what he termed a "partial" hunger strike (others mercilessly called it a "diet") to protest the act. Efforts like Kozol's, designed to torpedo the act, are rash. NCLB has big problems, but its core ideas—creating high goals for all schools, ensuring accountability for meeting them, and focusing attention on disadvantaged and minority students who are too often ignored—are worth retaining. That's why both the New York Times and writers for the National Review have praised the basic idea of NCLB.

• Don't stop all testing; stop stupid testing. Most of the problems caused by the act stem from its ridiculous test-and-punish regime. Specifically, the act promotes the heavy use and misuse not just of tests, but of stupid tests. This isn't a reason to abandon all testing; it is a reason, however, to come up with better tests and better ways to use those tests to judge schools. There are three problems, in particular, that need addressing.

• We don't know enough about school quality. Current test results don't tell us all we need to know about schools. Far from it. Students are tested in reading and math and a little in science. Reading, math, and science are important, but so are social studies, history, literature, geography, art, and music. Instead of telling us how schools are doing in these other subjects, NCLB is turning them into endangered species by pushing schools—especially those that are struggling—to downplay if not ignore subjects not tested. Many tests that are given further narrow the focus of education by relying on multiple-choice questions that reward memorization and regurgitation rather than analytical and creative thinking.

• What we think we know may be wrong. The second problem is that looking at just a sheet of test scores is a lousy way to judge school quality. Standardized test results tend to track socioeconomic status. As a teacher once remarked, the most accurate prediction you can make based on a student's test score is her parents' income. Teachers and schools with middle-class kids will invariably look better than those with poor kids if the only measure is how many students in a particular year pass a test. What we can't tell from scores alone, because they don't tell us where students started or how much they progressed over the year, is the value that a particular teacher or school has added to a student's education. Basing teacher and school evaluations on a snapshot of a year's test scores makes about as much sense as judging investment advisers based on how much money they are managing instead of the gains they earn for their clients.

• NCLB creates perverse incentives. The third and most fundamental problem has to do with perverse incentives. Schools must show annual improvements on test scores or face increasingly severe sanctions and the stigma of being labeled as failing. NCLB couples this punitive scheme with utter laxity regarding the standards and tests themselves. States get to develop their own standards, create their own tests, and set their own passing rates. Imagine if the EPA told the auto industry it would be fined heavily for polluting too much but let automakers decide for themselves what counts as "too much" pollution. That's basically how NCLB works.

It didn't take states very long to figure out how to play this weird little game: Avoid failure by lowering the bar! And that's exactly what some did, either by making the tests easier or simply lowering the score needed to be considered "proficient." As a result of shenanigans like these, most state tests are not very hard to pass. That many schools still post poor scores is a sign of how far we still need to travel, but it's important to recognize that, at a very basic level, this whole thing is a sham. NCLB, despite lofty rhetoric to the contrary, is not about equalizing opportunities in poor and rich, city and suburban schools; it's about making sure kids can learn some of the basics. No less, for sure, but also no more.

For the full article click here.

Working Smarter By Working Together

-Education Week; April 1, 2008

Teacher collaboration is hailed as one of the most effective ways to improve student learning, and one high school in Illinois is often credited with perfecting the concept. Adlai E. Stevenson High School was one of the first in the nation to embrace what are known as professional learning communities. The school’s focus on teacher teamwork has catapulted it from an ordinary good school to an extraordinary one, advocates say: Among its many accolades, it has been a U.S. Department of Education Blue Ribbon school for four years—one of only three nationwide to achieve that honor. Moreover, as many as 96 percent of Stevenson’s students go on to college. So well known are the learning communities here that each year, 3,000 people visit the school’s sprawling campus 30 miles northwest of Chicago to experience firsthand how its teacher-collaboration model works. Eric Twadell, the superintendent of Stevenson High, a one-school district, describes the professional learning community, or PLC, as “teachers working smarter by working together.” From the beginning, he said, the idea was not to create something new or different, but simply to foster an atmosphere in which teachers could learn from one another and share their colleagues’ expertise so that, in the end, students would benefit. In a professional learning community, each teacher has access to the ideas, materials, strategies, and talents of the entire team. At Stevenson, teachers meet in course-specific, and sometimes interdisciplinary, teams each week to discuss strategies for improvement; craft common assessments, the results of which are analyzed to improve instruction; and brainstorm lesson plans. Instead of the isolation of their classrooms, they spend their time between classes and before and after school in open office areas where their desks abut those of their course peers. The arrangement ensures that the give-and-take between teacher teams is almost constant. “Many of the best things we do don’t happen in team meetings,” said social studies teacher Brian Rusin. “The real collaboration happens outside.”

Even professional development at the school is targeted at the teams, and the hiring process for new teachers takes the teams into consideration. Candidates meet the teachers who constitute the teams they’ll be in if hired, in addition to administrators and department heads. The term "professional learning community" emerged among researchers as early as the 1960s, when they offered the concept as an alternative to the isolation in which most teachers worked. Over the years, more and more schools have adopted PLCs, and the concept has gained wider acceptance in education circles. A broad range of stakeholders, from state education departments to teachers’ unions, sing the idea’s praises. Several states, including California, Missouri, and New Jersey, incorporate learning communities or collaborative teaching in their professional-development standards.While it is not clear how many schools actually practice collaborative teaching or have established PLCs, Stephanie Hirsh, the executive director of the Oxford, Ohio-based National Staff Development Council, points out that versions of it can be found at many successful schools. “You find any high-performing high-poverty school, and you will find elements of PLCs,” Ms. Hirsh said. “You will find schoolwide goals, teachers working together on lesson plans, … all those critical elements that make up a PLC.” But implementing professional learning communities is challenging. For starters, they require a deep cultural change within the school. Education consultant and author Richard DuFour offers the example of movies about great teaching that usually feature a single teacher making a difference in the lives of his or her students.

For the full article, click here