A remarkable Op-Ed from Boston’s Superintendent of Schools:
The newspaper series “Leaving to Learn” tells a painful and accurate story about the state of our school district.
It is hard to admit, but it is abundantly clear that we will fail the vast majority of children if we try to run our schools the same old way.
It is long past time to admit this. As a district and a community, we must gather strength and have the courage to make change.
Parents and taxpayers have embraced choice not just as a means to provide better academic options for students, but also to drive innovation, competition and diversity of educational programming.
Choice has been a significant benefit for parents, but a challenge for the district. Traditional DPS schools have lost considerable enrollment, due to choice and demographic shifts. The resulting surplus of capacity in our buildings is absorbing resources that could be focused on student achievement.
There is no turning back this trend of choice. Indeed, we should welcome it.
Amazing.
Except this isn’t actually from Boston’s Superintendent. It’s from Denver’s Supe — and every single member of his school board.
Boston still hasn’t hired a Supe.
Four quick thoughts:
1. Like the Superintendents in New York City, and Chicago, and New Orleans, etc, the Denver Supe is NOT doing the usual.
*NOT arguing that inner-city parents should keep the kids in the school system no matter how bad, instead of choosing alternatives, like charter public schools or private schools or busing to suburban public schools.
*NOT blaming charter public schools, or parochial schools, or parents who move to the suburbs….who want to escape the troubles of the district-run Denver schools.
2. Alas, Mayor Menino has decreed that he only wants to hire a new Boston Supe who rejects this line of thinking. Don’t expect change until (perhaps) a new mayor. He’s pretty dug in on this.
3. Unfortunately, neither the Globe nor the Herald does the sort of in-depth, 7-part series that the Denver paper did.
4. Finally, Sabutai’s recent essay explores how teachers are held accountable for “bad parenting.”
As the Denver superintendent points out, the more you embrace school choice as a public policy, the better the platform for teacher-parent communication.
ryepower12 says
Right-wing talking point has proven so remarkably successful.
<
p>
I’m all for educational diversity and innovation, just not charter schools. Pilot schools, specialty schools (be they tech, aggie, etc.) all sound like great ideas… but not schools that rip funds away from schools that are already struggling to get by. Let’s try new things in the schools we already have – pilot schools. Let’s encourage student interest and diversity by catering to their interests. However, charter schools aren’t improving the over-all quality of education for all students in this state.
<
p>
Anyone else tired of these same-old, same-old posts?
goldsteingonewild says
<
p>
2. I love pilots. I support more. I’m on the board of one. But anyone there in 1995 will tell you — pilots would not have existed if charters hadn’t been created in 1994. If charters go away, so too will pilots.
<
p>
3. Pot Calls Kettle Black: you of all people saying “same-old, same-old”. Doesn’t that happen routinely on your blog?
<
p>
I’d think that BMG naturally has certain people write about the topics in which they’re most engaged. Laurel on marriage equality; Sabutai on teacher reality; AnnEM on health care reform.
<
p>
Isn’t that the very nature of political discussion — the same topics coming up with “new hooks” frequently?
ryepower12 says
They’re called DINOs, including Obama. So far, he’s just the least of them.
<
p>
<
p>
I’m calling that BS right there. Rotary phones started first and went away, people are still making phone calls.
<
p>
Your third point makes absolutely no sense. What the hell does marriage equality (the label you linked to on my site) have to do with charter schools? If it’s just a matter of people liking to talk about certain topics, you’ll note my blog is anything but a 1 topic blog. If you think that, you clearly don’t read it. I have as many posts on education, deval patrick, news critiques, etc as I do on marriage equality.
<
p>
I just deleted a very long paragraph from this reply because I have nothing (nice) left to say, other than the fact that if you didn’t obsess over charter schools (ra ra ra), and actually talked about other aspects of ed reform, etc., then I wouldn’t find you an extremely biased.. wait. Stopping myself again.
mcrd says
How far into the abyss must our inner city scholls fall/fail before some people get the message. What we are doing now and have been doing for the past twenty five years ain’t working. Not only is it not working it is in a death spiral. it’s a black hole. It’s sucking everything else into the abyss as well.
<
p>
Why hasn’t it dawned on some folks that most other countries around us are walking away from us in education?
We need more classroom discipline, greater concentration on core learning skills, a return to reading, writing, mathematics, and handwriting skills (fine motor). I don’t care if Johnie doesn’t want to read now. He shall and he will. I don’t care what kids think. Until they are thirteen or fourteen yoa, they will do as they are instructed. It’s pathetic that inner city families/mpthers are finally fed up with this union/poltical football AKA inner city schools and are demanding better, while the great benevolent”white folks” who “know better” are resisting change and demanding status quo.
<
p>
Mayor Menino is a boob and a political hack that dances to the tune of the MTA. Until the voters in Boston get it through their skulls and get off their butts and vote for change (you can throw in Dianne Wilkerson and the remainder of her political/criminal crowd) then Boston will continue to wallow in ignorance and flushing hundreds of millions down the educational crapper.
nopolitician says
How about following the example of Raleigh? In short, they decided to integrate the schools by income level, not by race. And according to the article, they’re seeing great results. No school in their district has more than 40% poverty. Contrast that to the poverty in our urban schools, some approaching 90%.
<
p>
Everything in this state is geared toward segregating by income rather than integrating by it. We want to segregate more and more. Even charter schools are an attempt to segregate out the kids whose parents don’t care enough to get them into a charter school.
<
p>
Loading high amounts of poor kids into one school, or one district, has predictable results — the school or district will be bad. No one in this country has solved that problem on a large scale — sure, some small schools with absolutely exceptional teachers have been formed and have had some success, but that solution doesn’t scale because by definition half of all teachers are below average.
<
p>
I don’t advocate large-scale busing. I advocate breaking down class-based barriers between communities, largely driven by housing policy.
massparent says
did that about six years ago, I recollect.
<
p>
That effectively scrambled Cambridge’s existing internal school of choice program – a very successful program that predated charters, where parents could petition to have a school created to meet a particular demand. Those schools were very successful, both in MCAS scores and in subjective measures, but it tended to separate based on class, in particular leaving behind some neighborhood schools. A new superintendant came in with a new class integration model. I believe it led to some exodus of students to private schools, when the choice schools were scrambled, but the dust has settled now.
<
p>
It’s one of the few examples where I suspect charter schools might be a better model for the families that choose in to a charter, as compared with a public choice school. Anything under the direct control of the district can be changed any time there is a new fad or superintendent. Charters have more control over their own destiny.
<
p>
I’d be interested in hearing if anyone studied the results in Cambridge’s class-based restructuring for the aggregate impact, as well as the school by school impact. Guess I could go back and reconstruct it if I wanted to …
stomv says
in the late 90s… when this program began.
<
p>
There are a number of reasons why this works in Raleigh that probably don’t apply to Boston. Heck, it was outlined in the article:
<
p>
<
p>
That first bit is key. Cary NC is a rich suburb of Raleigh, full of lots of Northeast transplants working white collar jobs in RTP or in the university hospitals or classrooms. Neither Brookline nor Newton are even in the same county as Boston — even if there was county education. Sure, there’s some history of busing in Boston, and with mass transit you can get kids lots of places throughout Boston proper (and Brookline, some of Cambridge, etc). But, the current system doesn’t allow this income integration simply because there’s no rich sub-school system within the Boston jurisdiction.
So, while I like the idea “in general” I think it’s an awfully hard target to get to. You think Brookline’s going to open up Devotion and Lawrence to more than a small handful of kids from Allston & Brighton? Not a chance my friend.
goldsteingonewild says
If we changed the Metco funding system, I think you could grow the # of Boston kids who were educated in Brookline, Lexington, Newton, etc from 3,000 at any given time to 9,000.
<
p>
Right now, districts get just $3,000 per student per year. The state pays for that.
<
p>
What if all the public money followed the kid to whatever public school he attended? I.e., a kid who is currently in Dorchester elementary school who goes to Devotion in Brookline brings with him the whole $11,000 or so currently being spent on him?
<
p>
Wouldn’t Devotion then consider increasing its Metco (black Bostonian) enrollment from about 1 kid per classroom to maybe 3?
ryepower12 says
I’m suggesting we do the same old, same old?
<
p>
I actually support a lot of innovative changes and have talked about them with a fair amount of frequency on this blog before, as well as mine.
<
p>
I view the largest challenge facing lower-income families and minorities as a disadvantage of home: no tutors, not as many parents maknig sure their kids do homework, often more difficult family situations, etc. I think these are a lot of the root causes behind performance – and could be served if we created policies geared toward fixing those problems.
mcrd says
Fix the families. The educational issues facing these children are not poverty and their color per se. Poor kids can be educated with the assistance and caring of concerned parents. If a kid does not have discipline and direction from his parents, what chance does he/her have?
Teachers can’t do it. They have hard enough time just maintaining order. Our entire educational system would not be hurt one iota if we returned good order and discipline to the classroom. part of the success of these “alternative” schools is that they can get rid of the trouble makers. The trouble maker defaults to the “public school”.
ryepower12 says
If I really believe students are any different today than they were when I was in k-12 or in the 80s, 70s, etc. I think it’s only a percieved difference, like how every generation likes to imagine it’s taller than the last one. Um, no, they aren’t – and, no, students aren’t all that different either.
<
p>
Personally, I think strong-willed students are a good thing. If they become unruly, obviously that’s bad, but generally – imho – an unruly student is a student that has other issues going on. There’s a reason why they’re acting that way – and that’s what has to be addressed. Sending them away to get an inferior education is only going to compound the problems in the future, when they won’t have the public education net(work) to fall back on and instead have things like prison…
gary says
Kids of the 70s knew “I before E except after C or when sounded like A as in Neighbor and Weigh”.
ryepower12 says
Piss me off more than anything else. You try writing as much as I do, without access to spell checker, and see if you don’t make typos?
<
p>
Quite frankly, I just don’t care.
raj says
…grammar can be quite important. Consider the following:
<
p>
<
p>
I’ll leave it to you to find the grammatical error. BTW, “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” was the title of a very funny book about grammar.
ryepower12 says
Well, when a large, talking Panda comes walking in my dorm while I’m blogging, I’ll be sure to be careful of typos – and be equally sure to tell him he eats shoots and leaves. In the meantime, I’m not going to turn BMG replies into mini term papers with multiple editing stages. People who annoyingly point out every minor typo will be highly frowned upon and shall earn the nickname Marvolio. Most of us write here for the discourse, not to be corrected on every little typo – most of which we’d fix if we could edit comments.
jconway says
The biggest thing missing in the public vs private vs charter debate is the fact that the reason those alternatives look better on paper is because they have selective admissions. Since private schools and charter schools have selective admission students that are more academically successful already are the ones that tend to be admitted which in turn leads to a brain drain in already struggling inner city public schools since all their brighter students can get vouchers or go to charter schools starving them of their best assets and making them look worse on paper. Its all part of a plan to privatize public education, that said this is not altogether bad either since competition should force the public schools to innovate and become better.
<
p>
Unfortunately politicians and the teachers unions are unwilling to innovate, the reason private schools tend to be better is because they competitively pay young energetic teachers with BAs that don’t need MAs “in education” or millions of miles of red tape and certification procedures to become tenured. Also they lack tenure and unionized workers meaning that teachers that are incompetent can be fired plain and simple.
<
p>
As a proud recent graduate of a struggling urban high school I can say with full confidence that our youngest and brightest teachers became disillusioned real fast since these public institutions resist change and tend to retain really crappy teachers that happen to have seniority. So innovations like those of the Denver superintendent should be applauded, sadly Democratic politicians are forced to whore out to the public service unions to get elected and those unions tend to resist any form of merit based pay and promotions for teachers, also they tend to protect teachers jobs regardless of their ability.
<
p>
goldsteingonewild says
<
p>
1. I used to think that. But it turns out the private schools pay teachers LESS than public schools, whether urban or suburban.
<
p>
<
p>
Boston Public Schools pays starting teachers with a bachelors degree $43,000. If you agree to work in a “Superintendents school” (struggling) and work 7.5 hours instead of 6.5 hours, you start at $50,000. Most private schools offer less.
<
p>
I think Sabutai’s recent post shows more of what really happens — young teachers take a pay CUT to work in private schools because of frustration in some traditional high-poverty public schools.
<
p>
2. Also, while it’s true private schools do have selective admission — some take just 10% of applicants — most which serve inner-city kids (Catholic schools)aren’t particularly selective, and take almost all comers.
<
p>
3. Charters admit kids by random lottery.
ryepower12 says
But the student body admitted tends to be different than the student body at large. A number of studies have shown that which have been linked to in these replies in any number of the other dozens and dozens of same old, same old posts you’ve published on this subject.
<
p>
/yawn.
nopolitician says
Private schools are definitely selective, both in terms of admissions and in terms of parental responsibility. If you don’t care about education, you’re not going to pay extra for it. Only the most dedicated parents will, and parental involvement translates into good students.
<
p>
Charter schools, while admitting kids by a random lottery, still have selection bias in their student body. First, you actually have to apply to a charter school. If you don’t care about your kids’ education, you’re not going to apply, period. That screens out a large group of kids.
<
p>
Second, if you move to an city with kids that are already in school, you have virtually no chance of getting into a charter school because those slots were filled at kindergarten, and any leftovers are filled from a waiting list. So that means transient parents are screened out.
<
p>
Transience seems to be a significant problem in public schools — in order to be effective, a school has to apply their methods and standards from kindergarten. I know someone who is a teacher in a public school in Springfield. When busing of students stopped, and a lot of kids got reassigned to a new school in 2nd and 3rd grade, she said that they had way more problems with those kids because they weren’t used to the tone set at her school. But when they get kindergarteners in, they have a much better chance of reaching them.
mcrd says
Gee, a light in the darkness. A recent HS grad? Such insight from a youngster. You will go far in life—-I assure you.
<
p>
Work hard and keep at it. No goal is unattainable. Every goal that you work very hard to attain is that much more of an accomplishment.
<
p>
It’s a shame that many folks here that pontificate are devoid of your wisdom and insight.
massparent says
Boston won the Broad prize this year.
<
p>
<
p>
Denver has never been nominated as a Broad Prize finalist, though it is one of the 100 eligible districts.
<
p>
Here’s the List of Jurors for the Broad Prize. Not exactly a list hand-picked by the Mass Teacher’s Association.
<
p>
Here’s the founder’s message :
<
p>
<
p>
Overall, Mass’s national test scores on the NAEP exam, are consistently above Colorado’s.
<
p>
Boston’s scores aren’t as good as Concord’s, but they’re better than most other urban school districts nationally. And while Boston is likely to be labelled as failing the adequate yearly progress standards Massachusetts has adopted for No Child Left Behind compliance within a few years, so is Concord. But that reflects more on the standards than about the school systems.
<
p>
And, by the way, my educated guess is that something like four out of five charter schools in Mass are also likely to be labelled as failing No Child Left Behind, under those same standards. And the charter schools serving the most challenged districts are the most likely to be labelled as failing.
goldsteingonewild says
<
p>
I know both guys who run the Broad Foundation, I trust their process, and their point is that among the nation’s urban districts, Boston is well run.
<
p>
On the other hand, Boston data is that about 50% of all kids drop out. And < 10% of black and Hispanic ever get college degrees. The waiting lists for every alternative to traditional BPS schools — Metco, charters, pilots, exam schools, and moving if you can afford it — is very long.
<
p>
That’s a dichotomy. is it possible to be the “best” of a group that is structurally failing? Who is the best American car maker? Does it matter if they will still go bankrupt?
<
p>
2. So there are two questions —
<
p>
a. Is there a crisis? You say no (Prize). I say yes (reality).
<
p>
b. If crisis, what is best way to change? One view is that competition slows change. Another is that competition helps drive change.
<
p>
My point is that superintendents increasingly believe the latter. The Houston supe (which won the Broad Prize, too) embraces charters.
<
p>
These supes think the BEST way to improve THEIR schools is by embracing the idea of OTHER schools that they do NOT control.
<
p>
Of course folks can disagree — but the trend among those closest to the situation is to embrace competition.
<
p>
3. You think 80% of MA charters will fail on NCLB? It’s funny how charter opponents make BOTH arguments. If charters have good scores, the claim is “they take the good kids”; if charters have bad scores, the claim is “charters suck.”
<
p>
Anyway, I’d love to make a friendly wager on your claim 🙂
<
p>
On 2006 MCAS (which is used for NCLB’s “Annual Yearly Progress”), almost all the MA charter public schools made it. You’re saying that in 2007 it will flip?
mcrd says
You hit a home run. You arew spot on. I’m puzzled why some folks are arguing with facts and figures. It’s irrefutable that the present system has failed and independent schools succeed.
<
p>
How can you argue with success?
massparent says
I didn’t present an anti-charter argument.
<
p>
The 2006 data is irrelevant, unless the schools scored over about 95 on each subgroup and tested subject area, because those are the scores that will eventually be required. Boston Latin nearly made that grade with 2004 data, as did a few individual suburban schools, but that was it across the state.
<
p>
The scores required to pass in 2006 were around 68.7 for math, and 80.5 for ELA. They will be 96+, 96+ in 2014.
<
p>
Scores have risen across the board for the past 15 years, but nowhere near enough that continuing a nation-leading rate of improvement would pass more than about 3/4ths of Mass schools as reported by Ed Moscovitch, in an econometric study; but the study noted the caveat that scores would have to continue to rise at the same pace for the next eight years to get to that high a pass rate.
<
p>
Sweden in aggregate wouldn’t come close to passing the NCLB requirement. Nor would Singapore. Both, homogenous high performing nations.
<
p>
The metric chosen simply doesn’t do a good job of comparing schools, or teachers. That should be at least as much a concern for charter schools as for traditional schools, especially charters that serve challenging communities.
<
p>
So, for examples, alphabetically:
<
p>
Abby Kelly Foster Regional Charter – 80.4 aggregate ELA, just a smidgeon below the 80.5 cutoff score for this year. Math aggregate CPI – 67.3; below the cut. On probation, still listed as “making AYP” because it’s the first failing year.
<
p>
Academy of the Pacific Rim: 89.6 ELA aggregate, 76.7 special ed . On probation for the special ed numbers now. 80.7 on the aggregate math, modestly above the state average, but unlikely to make the cut in four years.
<
p>
The Advanced Math and Science Academy Charter School, CPI of 90.9 in ELA, and 86.7 in Math – those are above state average, but unlikely to reach the the 2014 targets.
<
p>
Atlantis Charter: ELA CPI a 76.7, below the state cut for 2006. 62.0 for math, well below the state cut.
<
p>
Benjamin Banneker: Aggregate CPI 71.5 for ELA, below the cut. Math, 56.0. Hard to justify keeping this one open another year if you think Boston as a district is in a crisis.
<
p>
Benjamin Franklin Classical: 92.4 ELA, but 71.0 on the special ed. Math, 87.7 aggregate, 57.5 on special ed. They’ve got just barely enough special ed students to have to report them; if they can discourage a few from attending, they might pass AYP until around 2012, questionable from then on.
<
p>
Berkshire Arts and Technology Charter – 72.4 cpi ELA, 45.0 in math. Pittsfield is heading into 5th year sanctions and has higher scores than this charter school.
<
p>
Need I go further down the list?
goldsteingonewild says
One way to think about a school passing on NCLB is “Making AYP.” Is a school improving year over year?
<
p>
The other way, as you correctly point out, is its absolute CPI score against a standard that is supposed to converge on 100% of kids proficient by 2014. That’s the one where people throw up their hands and say “How will we get every kid there?”
<
p>
We totally agree that this is a problem. I support the MA Superintendents Association which has pushed for VALUE-ADD (measuring each students growth every year….test em Day 1 of School, last day of school, hold school accountable for the growth) method of assessment. The Gov seems interested in this, too. Alas, MA was not one of the states which applied to DOE for the waiver right to measure kids by “annual gains.”
<
p>
I think most people (including education policy analysts) focus more on the AYP in evaluating schools. Most charters make AYP.
<
p>
Meanwhile, when NCLB is reauthorized, I think it’s likely that they will change the latter standard, the “all kids to proficiency.” George Miller and Ted Kennedy have hinted at such.
massparent says
But currently “Adequate Yearly Progress”, or AYP, doesn’t measure progress, except at schools that started with very low scores.
<
p>
Schools that started at or below the state baseline must make extraordinary progress every year to stay ahead of the reaper – progress that exceeds any historical precedents for continuous improvement. But the baseline started low, meaning that typical schools have essentially been off the accountability hook up until last year. Four years from now, every school across the state will be mandated to match the scores posted by the top 10% of school districts as of 2004 to be declared as making “adequate progress”. Eight years from now, they’ll have to exceed the best districts in the state to avoid state intervention.
<
p>
Growth models can shift around the winners and losers, but as with the current scoring system, the devil is in the details.
<
p>
I think a properly calibrated growth measurement can be a reasonable diagnostic tool to give local administrators feedback and teachers feedback. In fact, schools are given “disaggregated” testing data now, which can be processed to give a growth measurement that tracks both individual students and individual teachers, and I suspect this provides about 80% of the useful information that could be gleaned from a new formal growth test at about 10% of the cost and with no additional testing.
<
p>
I’m skeptical that creating a new layer of testing for a formal growth test would result in a better black box to guide state level management of schools. It could be used as a segue from the current unachievable mandates, but I suspect that in practice it would lead to more central micro-management of teachers and curriculum plus an escallation of centralized testing. Where I’d rather see a transition away from a central command and control testing system to putting more useful information interactively into the hands of of local administrators, teachers, parents, and students. Sort of like the shift away from mainframe computers to personal computers.
mcrd says
from having to reach UP to touch bottom to being bottom. That’s encouraging. No wonder we won.
<
p>
Go out and ask any public education keid about Neils Bohr, Max Plank, How many atoms in the outer ring of a carbon atom, where is Bangladesh, what eevent precipitated WWI. Are you kidding me?
<
p>
Unions, politics, and muddled feel goodism, united to destroy our educational system.
<
p>
My wife taught school for about ten years. After her third year, listening to the stories, and having to reach into my nearly empty pocket for $$$$ for colored paper, poster board, paint, colored pencils for her students, I vowed that I would work myself to death to avoid sending my kids to public school. My kids went K-12 to private school and it shows in their advance degrees. My wife and I were more than willing to put our time, energy, and all of our finacial resources into our childrens education. We took and active interest and role. School teachers per se are not miracle workers. If parents don’t give a crap re their childrens education it is very unlikely that the kid will benefit from any educational program that you give them.
Again, families have abdicated just about every responsibility for children. Day care, pre-school, kindergarten, primary and secondary school, teachers, psychologists, cops. It’s every one elses responsibility to raise children.
<
p>
Wonder why we are in deep kimshi?
raj says
…Go out and ask any public education keid about Neils Bohr, Max Plank, How many atoms in the outer ring of a carbon atom, where is Bangladesh, what eevent precipitated WWI.
<
p>
I know who Neils Bohr and Max Planck were, and I know that BanglaDesh is the former East Pakistan. But “how many atoms” in the outer ring of a carbon atom? You really have to be kidding. Electrons, maybe. Not atoms. (There will be 12 electrons in a carbon atom, regardless of the isotope. I don’t recall their configuration, and I’m not going to look it up.)
goldsteingonewild says
Ted sez:
<
p>
<
p>
P.S. For those seeking bipartisanship, he co-wrote it with Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. Worth a look.
stomv says
<
p>
Only if they were American.
<
p>
There are dozens of public health initiatives that would save millions of foreign kids, and we do very little. I’m talking about everything from bed nets to condoms to eradicating polio. I’m not saying that tUSA doesn’t do anything, or even arguing that we do or don’t do enough. But, this blanket claim by Ted is hogwash.