1) With the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993 (MERA) and the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in place can local school districts implement meaningful reforms on their own?
2) Are there any school districts in Massachusetts implementing novel and innovative reforms at the local level and are they seeing any results?
3) Can those reforms be duplicated in districts statewide, in districts of similar size and affluence, or are they location specific?
4) Are there other reforms from other parts of the country or world that can be implemented in Massachusetts districts to improve the quality of education here?
I’m also looking a number of reforms already. The list is by no means exhaustive (and I’m hoping more will come out here) but it already includes extended days/ years, better pay for better performance; better pay for teaching hard to staff or important subjects; tax credits for parents or community members who volunteer in schools; reducing redundancies such as separate town/ school payroll, IT, and janitorial staffs.
I hope that this conversation can be pretty freewheeling, as most here are, but I should like to point out that my thesis is going to focus on local school districts. We may be able to do a lot of good by changing X at the state or federal levels, but its beyond the scope of my work.
So, what is your town doing that is or isn’t working? What would you like to see them do? If you were mayor for a day, what would you do to improve the schools in your district?
I can only offer my opinion based on the venting I have to listen to daily…
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1) Meaningful reform is not free. NCLB does not have enough money with it. My understanding is that MERA put the cart before the horse. Let’s test on set topics, but the educational frameworks weren’t in place for years (I’m not sure they are yet in all subjects). Teachers have been left trying to change their lessons every year to fit a changing curriculum. I constatnly hear about topics on the MCAS that the kids haven’t learned yet.
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2-4) I bet there are neat ideas being tried everywhere and have been for decades (remember New Math?).
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It’s the class size, stupid.
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Let’s get class sizes down to a manageable level and see if other reforms are even needed.
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People who think testing is the be all and end all and can tell you anything about a given teacher or school need to realize that kids aren’t widgets. There’s a new crop every year and my wife is constantly amazed at the differences from year to year.
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You can’t treat education like a business. This is not my original thought but I don’t remember where I encountered it, but ask a business man what he does if a vendor supplies an inferior product and he’ll reply, I’d send it back. Well, teachers can’t send kids back just because they aren’t up to snuff. They have to deal with every child who comes through the door. Charter schools can pick and choose and some self-selection happens just by kids’ parents being self-motivated enough to apply to a charter school. The kids whose parents don’t give a sh**, end up in the public school and it’s the parents as much as the kids that tells you how successful a child will be in school.
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Much criticism and pressure is put on teachers, but no one seems to feel the need to pressure parents to give a damn. Teachers can only do so much.
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That’s something the local community can do. Get parents to care. Make them feel that education is taken seriously and is worth the effort.
Teachers can only do so much. Parents need to play a key role.
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Tom Birmingham has made the point that it’s hard for government to influence parent behavior.
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Teachers CAN help involve parents, though. But we need to do it in a way that respects teacher time.
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In our school, teachers get freed up from a lot of weekend grading — we hire grad students and others for very short money, teachers return Monday morning to find a stack of graded quizzes and homeworks — and then spend an hour on a Sunday phoning their parents proactively.
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Parents LOVE these proactive phone calls from teachers.
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A) If a kid did well last week, the teacher praises her effort, and usually the parent (singular — we have many more zero-parent households than 2-parent households) praises the kid in turn.
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B) If a kid had a rough week, the teacher enlists support from the parent. But from the parent’s point of view, at least the “Bad” calls come in combination with the “Good” ones, which helps the parent (often who had a very negative experience herself in school) trust the teacher.
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The bottom line is that many schools could be stronger with teacher-generated parent involvement from otherwise non-involved parents.
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However, you can’t simply pile one more thing on teachers. You need to invest in freeing teachers up somehow.
As far as I can tell, Massachusetts has the best educational system in the country, probably by a wide margin:
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From my blog:
Romney And Massachusetts Teachers – Mitt Needs A Math Lesson
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We could certainly use some tweaks… and should always experiment with new techniques… but I’m not sure that a case can be made for a real “reform”. (Not like we need healthcare reform; ours costs way more and produces worse outcomes compared to the rest of the “first world”.)
….inner-city 3rd graders cannot read a very simple passage and understand it.
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i think there’s some wave-particle duality here. it’s possible for Massachusetts to outperform other states and still have two giant problems —
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a) that our inner-city kids have close to zero shot of ever earning a college degree because of incredibly low literacy
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b) that our suburban kids do well compared to kids in other countries when young (elementary school) in math and science, but then plummet in middle and high school
Goldstein, I don’t think anyone is talking about giving up on inner-city youth (and there aren’t a few suburban schools struggling with similar issues). But the nature of averages means that someone is at the bottom. If I listen to WEEI and someone says that Tom Brady isn’t a good quarterback because he threw three bad passes last week, they’d get laughed off the line.
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A sensible approach to any problem includes meaningful, relevant measurement. And meaningful, relevant measurement speaks of the success of Massachusetts schools. If you know an education system wherein disadvantaged 8-year olds don’t have difficulty, I’d love to hear about it. If we’re more emotional than intellectually honest about our successes and failures as an educational system, we open ourselves up to “reform” at the behest of people whose sole qualification is that they were a student so many decades ago.
Me! Emotional!
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That’s a first. In another thread I was “hurting children.”
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Anyway, we agree that there will always be a distribution. And therefore people at the bottom of the distribution.
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But this distribution is bimodal.
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The system largely works for middle-class kids: the combination of parenting and schooling etc = a decent life.
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The system largely fails for inner-city kids. In your comments, I think you want to show that much of the low achievement is not the “Fault” of the schools themselves.
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I agree.
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However, I believe it’s possible for schools to be a much bigger part of the “solution” — even if they don’t create the conditions which lead to the “problem.”
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The law of averages right now says that almost no inner-city kids are going to get a 4-year college degree. Almost every potential Deval Patrick — according to the averages — is NOT going to get plucked out of the ghetto to a prep school. That same law suggests most of those kids grow up to live in poverty as adults. It doesn’t make it okay that there are perhaps 300,000 suburban kids doing reasonably well when there are 100,000 kids who are not — and who COULD do MUCH better with higher-functioning schools.
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My opinion is I can’t square that reality with the idea that we need to “tweak” as Manny suggests.
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It’s really just a matter of time ’til the general public and the politician realize that the only people who are fighting charter and private with voucher, are people with a vested interest in Public: The
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There appears to be evidence (and I’m told I’m not allowed to opine on the topic since I’m not educated as an educator) that when educator succeeds in educating those students “at the bottom of the distribution” they do so using methods that are different, and innovative and more intense than those techniques employed by the public school systems.
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I see the NYTimes recently became a Charter convert.
GGW, I guess that looking back on the history of “ed reform” I am less than confident that such a change will improve things…or will not make them worse. You point out the greatest failure of our education system. Are you so confident in the people who “manage” education that they will correct these failures while not sacrificing the success in Massachusetts.
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As always, I’d love to hear some alternatives. Thuings aren’t any better for Muslim poor in French suburbs, Japanese of Korean descent, or Turkish kids in urban Germany. What model do you envision to turn this around that is bigger than tweaking, but smaller than restarting the whole thing and hoping for the best?
Try the Friedman Foundation for advocacy of the market approach to education.
The man who actually named Irving Fisher as the greatest economist America ever produced? Fisher, if you’ve forgotten, was the Yale economist who said, days before the 1929 stock market crash, “Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” He continued to be equally anti-prescient for at least the next four years, as he kept claiming that the stock market’s bottom had been reached, but the market wouldn’t listen. (The ability for the Right to favor hypotheses over outcomes continues to amaze me.)
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If Milton’s foundation is as evidence-oriented as Milton himself, then no thank you.
It’s unclear why someone who was mistaken about the stock valuation of the stock market in the 20s couldn’t also be a great economist. Didn’t Einstein reject Quantum?
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And you claim Friedman needed an education himself. Who are you? Like they say, people love to debate Friedmen, usually when he not around.
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Then, you reject the Foundation’s writing on education merely because of the association with Milton Friedman. Reject an idea without reading it. Very progressive
He was actually one of the pioneers of quantum physics. While he readily agreed that quantum theory explains observable reality, his belief is that there is a better explanation out there, somewhere.
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He believed this because part of quantum theory relies in accepting the unknowable – that we can’t know certain things, just because we just can’t. He felt that there is a better theory out there that could explain what quantum theory says is unknowable – and that we just haven’t discovered it yet.
….wow, someone’s education worked pretty well.
Regardless if you choose not to read Friedman because of the economists he thought highly of, you might want to watch the video “free to choose”.
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Also see LA Times article on education reform
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Einstein rejected the most fundamental fact of quantum theory, and his belief in determinism was the stubbornness of his later age. Not to say he wasn’t one of the most brilliant physicists: Newton was far more brilliant and got a lot more stuff wrong; and there are plenty of aging high-energy theorists who stubbornly oppose modern theories for philosophical reasons (as opposed to scientific reasons).
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but right now, going into my electromagnetic theory exam tomorrow, i’m going to have to suppose Einstein correct and the world is not quantum, even though it makes everything confusing….
I think that we’re actually saying the same thing here… but I can’t resist my urge to play semantic police. I don’t think that Einstein would ever deny that quantum theory does not predict reality – he was a proponent of using it. My understanding is just that he felt that it was a cheap substitute for something else that would eventually be found that’s better – something deterministic rather than statistical.
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Good luck on EM… I’m pleased that I never have to do that again. And we had to do it without a computer… my lord it was awful doing matrix math by hand… (yes, and we walked barefoot in snow two miles to the exam, uphill… and we LIKED it that way…)
? Friedman Foundation
? Pioneer Institute
? Manhattan Institute
? Thomas B. Fordham Institute
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That’s not reform. That’s the incumbent Massachusetts Board of Education.
I hear a lot of talk about teacher quality, parent involvement, using data, testing, not testing and on and on. But in my experience the difference between good schools and bad schools is most often leadership. If you have an excellent instructional leader in a school your chances of success are much higher. I’ve seen this first hand at my daughter’s school in Boston.
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I’ve been involved with the school for almost four years (even though my daughter just started in 2005). When I first got to know the school I met a lot of the teachers and they seemed really talented and committed. But the school’s results (as measured by MCAS) were horrible. The principal would tell you that it was a difficult population (English language learners, low-income, single parent, etc.) and they were doing their best, but other schools in the district were succeeding with similar populations.
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A new principal started a little over a year ago and the change is dramatic. The same teachers are getting better results from the same students. There seems to be more time, money, and space. There’s not, but by re-prioritizing and being more creative she was able to hire more teachers, add a library, and free up teachers for any number of tasks that there was never time for before.
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Other successful Boston schools I’m familiar with support this idea. If there’s one thing these schools have in common it’s a strong leader. Some of them have zero parent involvement, limited facilities, very challenging student populations, etc. But they’re succeeding none the less.
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I was in a meeting with Tom Payzant last year and he said that he considered hiring principals to be his most important job. He never delegated the interviewing of finalists to a staff member, he always did them himself.
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If I were the Mayor I would send a team of educators to every struggling school in the district. If the principal needed help he or she would get it. If the principal wasn’t cut out for the job, he or she would be fired. I would make sure that hiring and developing talented principals was a high priority for the school district.