The contract idea is ideological, not empirical. There is no evidence to suggest contracts will improve education, just a deep-seated belief that a business model is the best way to go.
What is particularly frightening is the awarding of contracts to whoever makes a successful pitch.
School committees could convert existing schools to Readiness status or develop new schools. Readiness Schools could be proposed by a team of teachers, a principal, a superintendent, unions, qualified educational management organizations, a group of parents, community-based organizations or qualified charter school operators.
Of all these potential “teams,” which are best suited toward making a pitch for a Readiness School? Unions may be permitted do it, but they are in the labor-organization business, not the school management business. “A group of teachers could, in effect, create their own ‘educational private practice,’ assuming management and operational responsibility for their own school under terms authorized by the local school committee.”
An important question is, why can’t schools, under the existing structure, have the same responsibilities and flexibilities? The Readiness Project is ready to offer increased flexibility and responsibility, but only under a charter school model. Since the inception of education reform, regular public schools, if anything, have been denied flexibility.
Teachers, principals, and superintendents are in the education business, but how difficult would it be for them to receive approval to be able to make the pitch? Only the educational management organizations and charter school operators have the infrastructure ready to go.
The potential for Readiness Schools also puts the honus on school committees to screen “offers” to takeover their schools. The role of school committees oversee educational and set policy, most lack the educational knowledge and expertise to judge such offers. Most school committees consist of 5 members. Could three school committee members (a majority vote) decide who manages their schools?
Readiness Schools could also turn out to used as a threat against teachers unions in negotiations. School committees could wave the possibility of a school takeover to gain concessions from at the bargaining table.
The project seems to allow room for “union members who bargain collectively only for wages, benefits and due process dismissal procedures.” The word that concerns me is only. What’s being left out? Could Readiness schools increase the school day by an hour without a corresponding increase in pay? How about increasing class sizes? Could the leadership teams of such schools work to drive out unions?
Readiness Schools would have increased autonomy in five areas: staffing, budget, curriculum and assessment, governance and policies, and school schedule and calendar…. The leadership of each Readiness School would establish the operating standards in each of these five areas, with significant input from faculty and staff.
The devil, as they say is in the details, and like the typical Patrick proposal, the important details are in the mail. When I think about it, the Patrick Administration is starting to remind me of Microsoft: offering programs that replace things that work with features you don’t need, all at a price you can’t afford.
Direct from the report: “The state might require the school committee to create a Readiness School by selecting a preferred provider…” In other words, the state may force a town to pay a private business to run an alternate school in their town. Mind you, with the “dramatically” increased number of regional districts, it will be easier to browbeat districts unmoored from town government.
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p>Combined with the union-busting provisions and the giveaways to private consultancy, this is a reactionary document. I hope future Acting Governor Tim Murray doesn’t put a lot of faith in it.
For what it’s worth (not much), my summative final reflection on the doc:
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p>This is first and foremost a political campaign document, not a policy document. It slanders the existing, demands the unrealizable, and promises the unattainable. Anyone can solve any problem by promising the kind of money that is outlaid in this report. For teaching colleges. For consultants. For testing companies. For schools. For teachers (maybe). For what would be a stunningly bloated and empowered public education bureaucracy in Boston. And on and on. Small wonder the final punch is Deval’s campaign slogan “Together We Can”. Expect this to be waved at the media far more than at state legislators.
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p>That said, with so many omnibus initiatives, there are some good things, some bad things, and a lot of meh. I was happy not to see an over-emphasis on science and math education in this document. People hone in on these facts like zombies, forgetting that it is in creativity that America excels. We lead the world in patents, and that is the truest source of our economic strength…new, good ideas and good ideas made better. Those are not measured in test scores, and it is by working with students in history, English Language Arts, and the fine arts that advantage is preserved. We’re killing what makes America great in our attempt to imitate what makes Japan good, and I’m glad to see that isn’t too reinforced in this document.
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p>Furthermore, there’s a good, clear understanding that education is a lifelong continuum, and our citizens are hurt by its division into exclusive fiefs. If I wanted one major push in education, it would be centered on creating a system that smoothly transitions from pre-K through college.
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p>The union-busting (in the form of statewide contract, and charter schools) is disappointing. The drive to wrest local control of schools in the form of forced charter schools, “dramatic” reduction of school districts, and an increasingly byzantine system worries me as well. Such a large bureaucracy thrives on money and power, and I don’t trust that power over education in Republican hands…or in the hands of too many Democrats.
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p>I guess that at the end of the day this feels like a missed opportunity. There are so many little things that could make schools improve soon and quickly. I was shocked to see nothing on school administration: superintendents, curriculum supervisors, and principals. There is immense turnover here, and quality personnel is rare. Schools’ ambiguous legal status in many fields is resulting in higher legal expenses, and I’m similarly disappointed that isn’t addressed either. Almost nothing on family involvement, the biggest challenge to public education today. I’m sorry, but this does feel like an outsider’s document.
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p>Deval wanted a document that dreamed big, and he got it. Affordable college, widespread adult education, second-language support…it’s all great stuff! But the price tag remains such a stumbling block. This report may end up a valued resource for future discussions on education policy in this state, but it is not, nor can I conceive it ever significantly becoming, policy. Which makes it good politics.
You state that it busts unions as if thats a fact that in of itself makes this bad policy. Could you explain why union busting of massively powerful teachers unions is a bad thing?
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p>The way I see it all my local teachers union did was protect the teachers I felt were incompetent that needed to be fired by giving these lazy bums lifetime patronage jobs in the school system and hurting the students in the process. Every single complaint that got leveled at teachers throughout my four years at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High seemed to get ignored. We even got caught pulling a Catholic Church and transferring sexually abusive teachers from one school to another. All because the administration didn’t have the power to automatically fire teachers when they were blatantly hacks or worse pursuing criminal activities. It seemed that the union in our district stood in the way of progress.
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p>But again Id like to hear your thoughts.
America has come to identify with management so much that Americans reject unions as a matter of course.
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p>Unions are a structural entity. They exist to give workers a collective voice and power against management. Not every union action will be positive for society as a whole, but management action definitely is not for everyone’s benefit.
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p>Unions result in better wages and benefits for the workers who belong to the union. They also have some positive effect on the benefits and wages of people in the same industry.
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p>Without unions, workers would have no power.
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p>You offer an anecdote about your administration doing the Cardinal Shuffle with a teacher. This has nothing to do with unions, and everything to do with administration.
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p>If I remember correctly, you are in your mid-20’s. You graduated high school, I assume, in the late 90’s or later? Mandatory reporting of child abuse has been in force for at least 20 years, which means that the administrators were required to report alleged abuse to the proper authorities.
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p>Unions protect due process of employees, not abusers. The abuser should have been immediately suspended with pay. The union would pay for a lawyer. That’s one thing union dues afford union members.
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p>Back in the mid-90’s, we had a teacher who was charged with sexual harassment. He was suspended and put through the legal wringer. Within the last 8 or 9 years, we’ve had two teachers forced to take an early retirement because of sexual harassment.
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p>The union defended these people’s rights, it didn’t support their behavior.
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p>Mark
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p>
Teacher unions bargain for smaller class sizes–that benefits students.
Teacher unions bargain for cleaner buildings–that benefits students.
Teacher unions bargain to get teachers resources like computers, like good classroom/office supplies.
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p>In general there are several benefits unionized teachers bring to a school system.
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p>And as someone who was a member of the Cambridge Teachers Association, jconway, you’re making some big assumptions about how complaints were dealt with, because you weren’t in the room when administrators made decisions about how to deal with complaints.
Hi Mark,
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p>How do you reconcile —
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p>What seems to be your dissatisfaction with the 1993 Education Reform Act, and your seeming approval of MA today as “best in the nation in achievement”?
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p>Prior to 1993, MA was not best in the nation in achievement (I assume you’re basing that on NAEP scores). I think we were about 10th or so.
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p>If you buy the MA as best-in-nation, then wouldn’t it be reasonable to buy the 1993 Ed Reform Act as what got us there?
you make a good point and with evidence. Rhetorically, at least, you got me. When I wrote what I wrote, I didn’t really think much more than the fact that Massachusetts shows up tops on achievement. I’m not going to BS you and pretend I did.
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p>But here’s what I would consider:
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p>1. Post Hoc Propter Hoc. The rise in Massachusetts NAEP scores is certainly compelling. Could those scores have resulted from Ed Reform and MCAS? Sure. Could an increasing focus on test-taking skills account for that rise in ranking? Could changes in the our state’s population or the population of other states factor in? Possibly. I’d like to see some peer-reviewed research suggesting the link.
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p>2. A statistical anomaly? James Popham
writes:
So what exactly does an increase in NAEP scores mean?
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p>
to consider.
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p>First, there’s been a lot of change in this state between 1993 and today. The economy has pretty much finished shifting since then, and those days weren’t exactly this state’s best. Since then, we’ve become among the wealthiest states. As anyone who’s looked at MCAS scores in relation to those taking the test could say, socioeconomics is probably one of the biggest predicting factors of the exam. It’s safe to say, in terms of socioeconomics, Mass is better off, even today, than the late 80s and early 90s.
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p>Second, as with anything, there’s usually some good and some bad. I don’t necessarily think you can take the entire ed reform act of 93 and suddenly say, “the MCAS has made our educational system the best in the country.”
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p>There’s a lot more that’s gone. We’ve made a lot of changes since then – adapted to new technologies, made higher demands of what we expect from teachers (tests, advanced degrees, etc.) Furthermore, even with the MCAS, it may have had an overall improvement on the educational level of students in this state, but had positive and negatives impacts on the lives of certain students. For example, maybe the push to raise standards has helped certain communities, but the communities that already had great school systems and a strong, middle to upper-middle class residents are in some ways worse off, because suddenly they too have to ‘teach to the test,’ reduce educational choice and significantly change their curriculums. That’s a strong argument I’ve heard from many others.
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p>So, there’s a lot going on here. I think it’s safe to say that the ed reform act of 93 did more good than harm, but it’s tough to put any measures to that, or to state how each slice of this state’s reforms have impacted performance, given everything else that’s gone on in this state and the fact that such things are difficult to measure.
What I find interesting is that there are certain commonalities (same lobbyists maybe?) in the rationale behind the Readiness Project and the visa boondoggle. Some of the myths exposed by Professor Wadhwa’s research (formerly of Duke, now Harvard):
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p>
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p>If the solutions are not researched completely and are based upon common false assumptions, why waste the effort? Who benefits from investments based on false premises?
We take it for granted that our country is in trouble and that education is the answer. We’re obsesses with pointing out the shortcomings of our schools and generalizing those shortcomings.
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p>Throw in the angst over America’s waning world dominance and it’s easy to project the urgency to radically change our school system.
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p>Mark
reactionary legislation based on years of MSM misreporting and perpetuation of Republican fear talking points. As I added in a subheading to my visa post: Change begins when conventional wisdom is questioned. I feel so sad that I spent so much time and effort on Deval’s campaign, only to come to the realization that he’s no different than most other politicians and doesn’t have a clue about how to effect change. It’s very easy to go along with the status quo. It’s much harder to be a leader and to challenge. Are there any real leaders out there (other than Grassley and Durbin)? If our elected officials won’t bother finding out what the real problems are by questioning and researching, we have no hope of solutions. That goes for Republicans and Democrats. What a sorry state we are in.
i just wanted to clarify:
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p>Charter school advocates — I am one, and work in a charter school — are NOT big backers of Readiness Schools. That’s not accurate.
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p>Charter advocates “lost” on our main issue.
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p>Our main issue was lifting the cap on charter schools in MA’s lowest-performing 5% of school districts. That would allow new charters to open in Lawrence, Lowell, Boston, etc where there are long waiting lists of low-income minority parents.
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p>We hoped. Obama is out there ambitiously advocating for charter schools. Democrats in NY and NJ promoting aggressive expansion of urban charters. The Gov’s personal story makes him at least sympathetic to black parents trapped in failing schools. We thought things might line up.
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p>We got a fair hearing — ie, the chance to make our case to Gov’s staff. But our side didn’t win the day.
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p>I’m told the unions said “We were your #1 contributor, Gov, and no f-ing way on even a few more charters” and that was that. But I have no first hand knowledge of how things played out.
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p>Honestly, nobody in the charter movement was like “Wow, Readiness Schools are GREAT, that’s a consolation prize.”
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p>Instead, it’s more measured.
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p>Many charter leaders are probably happy that district school leaders and teachers might create some more flexible, autonomous Readiness Schools. (Seems to me like Readiness Schools are a victory for the pilot school movement. Indeed, I wasn’t clear why came up with a new name, and didn’t simply say “Expand pilot schools statewide.”)
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p>But the same charter folks are frustrated that essentially 40 Readiness Schools are INSTEAD OF, not in ADDITION TO, a few more charters in high-need districts.
why not offer “failing” schools the money and opportunity to develop innovative plans on their own? Why not offer to empower the people who are already there? Don’t these schools already have leeway in reorganizing?
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p>My contention is that the underlying problem with education reform is that insists on being initiated by people that don’t know much about education and administered at the upper-levels of government. In order for ed reform to be deemed a success, it has to “prove” that the success results from a top-down model.
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p>Why can’t there be bottom-up reform with accountability?
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p>Mark
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p>
…it sounds like what you want to happen can happen and will happen.
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p>That’s what happened with the former Boston High School (failing, at risk of closure). The principal and teachers came up with a plan. They got some grants to facilitate some changes. It became Boston Community Leadership Academy (pilot school). Seems to be better.
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p>Overall, that’s where I don’t quite connect your concern about decision-makers from afar (which I share) with certain policies. Charters, pilots, readiness, whatever — all these schools place decision-making closer to the principal and teachers themselves in that individual school.
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p>In other public schools, most change/innovation needs approval by a superintendent who probably spends < 5% of his/her time in that particular school, and further constrained by school committees.
but school systems and superintendents aren’t given any encouragement to innovate. Ed Reform was all about making schools toe the MCAS line. It wasn’t about encouraging schools to change; if it was, it had the opposite effect. What does the proposal offer to people already invested in a system that works?
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p>As a progressive, I believe in starting with the people in existing communities, empowering them. This proposal is aimed at disturbing these communities of workers, children and citizens, making takeovers possible with as few as three votes on a school committee. I think it’s unfair to subject these communities to this threat.
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p>And this is what underlies the proposal, the threat of a takeover. Readiness Schools open up schools systems for (I hesitate to use the word) hostile takeovers. Workers/teachers and community members are at the mercy of, a lot cases, 3 school committee members. I’ve seen three school committee members go against the will of the people, they lost their seats after, but the damage was done.
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p>I don’t want my hometown’s school committee fielding proposals from anyone who wants to make an offer or running my kids school. I don’t want the town I work in facing threats of a take over by people who may not even live in the community.
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p>Business people think such a threat is good for business and will make public schools improve. I don’t agree.
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p>Mark
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p>
Full disclosure, I’m an elected school committee representative on one of the largest school committees in the state, chair of the education subcommittee of the full committee, and a high school teacher. I have negotiated teacher contracts from the teacher side of the table only, I have chaired NEASC subcommittees for high school accreditation, and have been up and down both sides of MCAS and the SAT. I’m also a Democratic town committee chair.
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p>Having said that, there is nothing in this proposal that I find so outrageous as to consider it a “poison pill” from the outset. We have much to learn from the essential school model. We have serious issues with 30 to 40 percent of students dropping out of four-year colleges and up to 60 percent dropping out of community colleges. We cannot remain competitive in a global marketplace if our kids do not possess the skill set, not the content knowledge, to graduate from college.
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p>We also have much to learn about pushing the labor envelope. I’m not change averse; I’m the type of person who thrives on change, embraces it, and views it as an opportunity to find new and better ways to do things. There is nothing wrong with forming new partnerships, forming hybrid environments, and fostering collaborative leadership with the community and stakeholders.
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p>I have as much invested in this as anybody, but I’m not jumping off the cliff yet. I’m willing to listen and participate. As I said here, here, and here, the patient is showing signs of incipient cardiac failure. Something must be done and done now, and conscientious professional educators must be willing to both lead and break the mold. Our faculty finally read the writing on the wall this year. It was painful, it was hideous, and it was embarrassing. The old instructional model is dead. There are best practice models out there that we need to pay attention to that are providing high school students with the skills they need to be successful in college as well as in the workplace. Invoking the bogeymen of the past isn’t going to get us there.
I accept your diagnosis or prognosis. The “crisis” in education has been in manufacture for 60 years. The same things you and our governor mention, international competition, “21st century skills” (whatver that means) were being said by Arthur Bestor and Hyman Rickover in the 1950’s. Although they were wrong then, it doesn’t mean you are now, but it gives me pause.
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p>There’s a great book on this topic by Bruce Biddle and David Berliner called The Manufactured Crisis. The authors persuasively (and with evidence) argue that much of the current educational crisis, which began with the Reagan Administration, was unintentionally and sometimes intentionally manufactured by misuse of research and statistics.
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p>Here’s an economic hypothesis: our competitiveness has little to do with how many people we graduate from college. The most educated country doesn’t necessarily win. China’s middle class nearly equals our entire population. If a high-skilled job is cheaper to do overseas, it will be done there.
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p>As an educator, I believe in improving everyone’s education because it makes them better people, helps them fulfill their individual potential. It isn’t necessarily going to affect our international comptetitiveness.
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p>As an educator, I believe we should be always be working to improve. We should provides communities and schools with the opportunity to do so. We haven’t done that. MCAS was all about whipping schools into shape. It was about forcing them to improve test scores, not innovate or improve education. I think we should start there.
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p>Mark
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p>
I’m going to create 40 or 50 new userid’s so that I can give you that many 6’s! Is that allowed under the rules of the road?
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p>Of course, you know, that any good researcher is going to test the hypothesis. Same with business analysts. Same with engineers. Same with statisticians. Not the same with politicians!
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p>To further your hypothesis, Dr. Wadwha’s study determined that there is actually no labor crisis or shortage. The comparisons commonly accepted by the MSM, politicians and the general public of graduation rates in China and India vs. the US are bogus because they were (ahem) sponsored by tech industry studies that compared apples to oranges. NFAP is a primary source for disinformation. If you really want to become informed about where this data has been coming from and how the media has been saturated with false statistics, check out the biographies of those on the board. Many past affiliations with Cheney, Brownback, Abraham, Cato Institute, WTO. Did you listen to this video:
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p>
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p>All the kneejerk, reactionary legislative studies in the world that are based on false data will NEVER address what problems may exist! Stop the insanity!!!
You’re conflating the chicken-little scenarios from the past with current instructional issues, imho. They are not the same thing at all. The fact that you don’t even know what “21st century skills” is tells me that you and I are not talking the same language at all. If you teach in a high school and don’t know what I’m talking about re Breaking Ranks II, Partnership for 21st Century Skills, or Brown University’s Alliance, then I have to urge you to start reading the literature. I’m talking about school-based instructional methodology, curriculum design, school governance, and collaborative leadership. I’m not sure what you’re talking about candidly because MCAS really doesn’t matter in my world. We’re not worried about our MCAS; we’re worried that what we are doing in our high school is not preparing students for college because they are dropping out in record numbers.
What happens to those programs that you are working on (which sound wonderful by the way) if these changes are implemented and you are in competition with regional administrations that doesn’t get the value? Are you somehow insulated so that you can continue?
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p>I’m also curious about whether any of those students who are dropping out in record numbers have ever been asked why. Is there any data on why that happens with students from their perspective?
from the regional district. Wachusett is high achieving; Auburn is not.
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p>We requested and received a special report from Northeastern University (which has access to the student ID that follows students everywhere these days). Auburn’s college drop-out rate for the class of 2003 is appalling. Based on the indicators in the report, the summary indicated–and we concurred based on our experience–that our students are insufficiently prepared in virtually all aspects. They leave our high school thinking they’re Einstein only to find out they’re, well, not.
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p>We are worried about professional development funding, which has never been good in Auburn. The school committee seemed to finally get we have big problems to solve, so we’ll see what the future holds.
8 or 10 articles in the last few days, but right now it’s on research methodology, I’m afraid. Aside from Educational Leadership and District Administrator (which I’m not), I mostly read un-policy-related research.
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p>While it’s possible that I’m just ignorant of those programs, I come in contact with a lot of people from a lot of school systems, and I’ve never heard of any of those programs. I wonder how many other people aren’t speaking that language.
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p>Any other Western Mass people heard of these things?
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p>I’ll definitely look into them.
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p>On a side note, shouldn’t they have identified 21st Century skills in the Readiness Project?
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p>Mark
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p>is directly from the Partnership For 21st Century Skills.
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p>I had a chance to read the entire document today while my son was at karate, and the thing is derived entirely, lock, stock and barrel, from Breaking Ranks II and Partnership. If you want to know where they are going with Readiness here, then read the publications from Partnership and BRII (for high schools) and you’ll have an idea.
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p>To give you an idea where my school is headed, here’s our blog that eventually lead to a wiki page that eventually lead to a six-person presentation to our school committee explaining how we plan to bomb the high school and rebuild it over the next five years. The bible for all of this is Breaking Ranks II: Strategies for Leading High School Reform–this link is just the exec summary. Indeed, the new NEASC standards going into place in 2010 are based on Partnership and BRII principles, so we have to conform anyway since we just got on the follow-up schedule this fall.
programs you’ve mentioned. Much of what is mentioned is stuff we do, programmatically speaking. Reaching out to kids, for example. Our school has only 900 kids or so, and as a faculty, we work hard to develop relationships and create a positive climate. We don’t follow a particular program, but we do a yearly survey about “school climate” that includes questions like “Is there at least one adult in the building you feel you can go to?” and stuff about bullying.
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p>In curricular terms, our school could do better. Our biggest constraints, however, are money and time.
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p>This is my first year as department head of English, and I’ve tried to make department meetings focus on content and pedagogy as much as possible, but less than an hour a month isn’t much time and it’s hard to build coherence every 30 days.
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p>East Longmeadow is comfortable, and MCAS isn’t much of a problem for us (though NCLB is). The last time we did an overhaul of our school organization was in 1997 when we moved to block scheduling.
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p>Can you tell me how your school system approaches things?
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p>Mark
in your school, you really should buy a copy of Breaking Ranks II and read it. Extremely challenging but eye opening. We are following Breaking Ranks and 21st Century Skills with First Amendment Schools thrown in for governance.
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p>Our principal is only 31 years old and very progressive. He is way out there on the vanguard with high school reform, so he has been vocal in expressing his concerns about our performance–and he got the faculty’s attention. We assembled fully half the faculty and a school committee member and met on Tuesdays every week after school for three hours for three months–voluntarily–figuring out what we needed to do to do a better job for our kids. This fall we are starting a PLC model in which each faculty member is assigned to a professional learning community which is tasked with exploring a variety of issues. Our goal is to roll out a new (probably trimester) schedule in 09-10 that supports interdisciplinary teaching, student mentoring, and a move towards collaborative student governance in the Hudson High First Amendment model.
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p>We have a lot going on. It’s very exciting, I have to say, and sobering.
The Commonwealth Charter schools are poison to local school districts, as they are funded from local funds (deduction from local aid allocation) but are approved and accountable to the state board of education.
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p>Commonwealth charters appoint their own board of directors, and when there is a vacancy the board makes an appointment to fill the vacancy.
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p>The charter school acts as its own school district, with its own leadership structure. When you are talking about consolidating small school districts, here’s an interesting starting point.
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p>Governance has been a problem for several Commonwealth Charters, including the Marblehead Community Charter School and the Roxbury Charter High School.
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p>Can we eliminate the governance issues, and provide central office support, without killing what makes the good charter schools a success. I think it’s possible, and they have a chance to be better than most traditional and charter schools.
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p>The devil is in the details, but this could be a very good thing for public education.
in the “credits” of the RP, no? Good for you! đŸ™‚
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p>The only person I know in that list is Bob Knittle, who was in your group, I believe.
I will tell you, that my subcommittee, was very well run. There was a great cross-section of people in the group, and the recommendations reflected quite a bit of thought and consensus-building.
Your original comment with response.