In a Boston Globe opinion piece this past Friday, Boston School Committee member, Meg Campbell wrote, “I do raise the question of how 92 percent of our Boston Public School teachers can be rated proficient or exemplary when more than 50 percent of our schools are low performing? Shall we just blame the kids?”
Since Ms. Campbell raised the question, let me try to provide at least part of the answer. During the School Assignment Process this past year the one piece of data, that parents and I repeatedly asked the Boston Public Schools (BPS) External Advisory Committee for, and never received, was the student test data broken down by neighborhood. We asked that it be aggregated by those students currently attending traditional public schools, those attending charter schools, and METCO. We felt that school “quality” would change overnight as children were marched into different schools. The children are the data; the “quality” of the neighborhood schools they attend would be determined by where kids who scored high on MCAS were placed.
I’ve written about this before but it is worth repeating here, communities that use a Unified School System model, always seem to make AYP? Why? Have you ever heard of schools in Lexington, Wellesley or Weston not making AYP? No! There is a reason for this, and it not that kids in those communities are smarter, or that their teachers are better. In the communities making AYP, all students attend traditional “heterogeneous” schools. Their schools have programs that reflect the interest of the community and advanced students are offered Advance Placement (AP) courses, or have International Baccalaureate (IB) programs, WITHIN their regular schools. These communities don’t separate and send students to separate exam or charter schools!
Traditional public schools in Boston do not compete on a level playing field. Mayor Menino, supported by his appointed Boston School Committee, made the decision to adopt a “portfolio model” for our district, which has lead to a two-tier system in our schools. In the Boston Public Schools (BPS) “portfolio of schools” there is 128 schools. Among these, the BPS has 3 exam schools, 21 pilot, 5 Horace Mann, and 4 “innovation” schools. Then there are the 23 Commonwealth Charter Schools in Boston, and they accept Boston students, but are their own separate districts and are not accountable to the Boston Public School District but to the Department of Education (DOE). One example of a Commonwealth Charter is the Codman Academy Charter School in Dorchester, Boston School Committee member, Meg Campbell, is the founder and executive director there.
Commonwealth charter schools are not “level funded” but are “average funded” by the sending district. I wrote a detailed piece about it here on BMG titled “MADOE Commissioner Mitchell Chester…Listen Up!” To briefly sum it up, to educate a Regular Ed student in a BPS traditional school cost $11,855. However, when you add the cost of all the BPS Special Ed and Ell students, the cost “averages” out to $15,227. Charter schools are paid the “average” $15,227. even though their population of students is mostly regular ed, and in no way reflects the English Language Learner and Special Education demographic of the Boston Public Schools! This $15,227 tuition figure BPS pays, does not include the busing expense, which BPS pays for, nor does it include the “non-tuition” State, Federal, Foundation, and NMTC (New Market Tax Credit) investor revenue, which Codman Charter, and other Commonwealth charter schools, also receive.
At Codman Charter in Dorchester only 2%, (3 students) are LEP (Limited English Proficient) in a community like Boston that has a high population of new comers, only 3 LEP students! In 2011, they had .7% – that’s point seven percent! In the BPS 30.6% of its students are LEP.
In 2010, Codman Charter started out with a 9th grade cohort of 53 students. In 2011, when those students entered grade 10, an MCAS grade, 19 students vanished from Codman Charters roll! This June only 24 students from that cohort remain, they did not backfill those empty seats. There is no way to predict if all 24 of these students will graduate but historically Codman Charter has had a low graduation rate. In 2012, Codman’s four year graduation rate was 62.5%!
These Commonwealth Charter schools, like Codman Charter, take our children, try them out, and send those children that are “not the right fit” back to BPS. One way that happens is by Suspensions. At Codman Charter the Suspension Rate is 23.5%. In BPS it is only 4%. How many days can a parent take off of work to address their kids issues before they don’t have a job?
Meg Campbell is an APPOINTED member of the Boston School Committee, after reading her article I’ve come to think of her as carpetbagger. You would think that she would be relieved and proud that 92% of the teachers in the Boston Public Schools were evaluated proficient and exceeds expectations. You would think that she would be the first to step up to the plate and investigate why there were discrepancies in nationality, color and age for those teachers that did not meet the cut. You would think she would have Investigated the many educational vendors who have been allowed to saturate our schools to tell teachers “how to do it” without addressing or even acknowledging the systemic problems that a two-tiered system has created and which Ms. Campbell, in pursuit of HER dream of Expeditionary Learning for a few, has contributed negatively to the rest of Boston’s children.
Personally, I feel that Ms. Campbell is intentionally trying to deflect the role that charter schools, like Codman Charter, have contributed to the underperformance of traditional public schools. If you took all the exam, pilot, Horace Mann, innovation and Commonwealth charter school students and salted them in Boston’s Traditional Schools would 50% of our schools be “low performing?” I don’t think so!
Shrewdly, Ms. Campbell slams the findings generated by the administrators in our schools, who have been professionally developed on the “evaluative instrument” ad nauseam and, not unionized, work at the “will of the superintendent!” What Ms. Campbell is unfolding is a generalized process of demonization of an entire population group, Boston Teachers and Administrators, committed people, on the frontline, who are in direct service to Boston’s children! Ms. Campbell has forgotten, or never considered, that we are part of the Boston Public School team!
It is clear that she has her own agenda, and there is, I feel, a conflict of interest. Back in February of this year, she applied to the DOE and received a wavier to increase maximum enrollment, and to change the grade span served at Codman Charter. She plans to open a k-8 charter school in Hyde Park. What better way to “make a compelling argument for the need for a K-8 school in the area it serves” than by making an unsupported allegation on the quality of the teaching force she plans on replacing! Would someone tell me, with a charter school graduation rate as dismal as Codman’s, how that school is considered “high quality” enough to expand?
I was surprised and questioned Mayor Menino’s wisdom in placing Ms. Campbell on our school committee. As the executive director of Codman Charter, Ms. Campbell represents her own school district and as she has demonstrated that is her priority. Busing students is costing BPS 79,993,027 million a year. The Boston School Committee just spent the past year trying to get kids off the bus and into a “quality” neighborhood school in an attempt to reduce this expense and reallocate this money back into the schools. Yet Meg Campbell is not only putting 200 kids back on the bus, as a charter school these students will be bussed citywide, and BPS will be required by State law to pay for it! I have no trust that Ms. Campbell can make the decisions that will unite our school system as a whole, and will be in the best interest of ALL our children moving forward. Ms. Campbell needs to resign from the Boston School Committee, and parents, of students currently enrolled in Boston’s Traditional Public Schools, need to be appointed to any openings.
in facts and logic.
Campbell writes:
First of all, the “single most important factor” canard. Ron Edmonds aside, others have argued that a rigorous curriculum is the most important factor. Other than justifying Campbell’s position, a “single most important factor” is irrelevant. What’s the single most important part of a car? The wheels? The steering wheel? The engine? The car doesn’t run without any of them. It’s stupid to talk about a “single most important factor” in a complex system like education. Even if principals were the most important factor, how much more important are they?
Evaluations are ratings. Lower ratings do not, as Campbell suggests, mean that there isn’t room for improvement or that teachers won’t continue to improve.
Moreover, a proficient rating doesn’t mean that a teacher was found proficient in every indicator. There may very well be indicators that have been identified areas for improvement.
foctor, component, variable, whatever… Why do we have to complicate things, when they are not complex? I do not think that the school is as strong as the principal/teacher. I think that the school IS the principal/teachers. And I do not think that a curriculum is one something the school has among a continuum of somethings…. No, the curriculum is what the school DOES. Principal/teachers curriculum. Noun verb classroom I don’t think, at its essence, there is much more complexity to it than that. Students come upon this system in its classroom setting (and mostly only in its classroom setting) and while they are the reason FOR the system, students are not part of the system (any more than is the eater part of the restaraunt in which they dine…) The school is the principal/teachers and the process is the curriculum; students come and go partaking of the curriculum and the school refines it’s curriculum according to response and adaptive behaviours of students; rinse lather repeat.
The fallacy Meg Campbell flogs, and it’s a whopper, is that a rating of 92 percent of teachers as either proficient or exemplary must translate to a school rating of equal stature: if 92 percent of the teachers are proficient or better, she asks, why are 40% of schools performing poorly? Rather than posit, as I have, the difference between the school, the curriculum and the student, she goes for the jugular calling this a form of ‘grade inflation’: clearly implying that a large portion of the 92 percent of teachers rated proficient or exemplary do not deserve the label. She would shoot the rider who, after having led the horse to water, could not get him to drink…
The student passes through the system and, one hopes, picking up skills along the way. But the student is not the outcome. A better, continually improving curriculum is the outcome. What we are dealing with is the best principals and the best teachers forging the best curriculum hidden behind pain, apathy and/or distraction. That’s one way in which a 92 percent teachers proficiency can exist in a system where 40 percent of schools are performing poorly and in which both are true statistics. A hungry student, no matter how willing to learn cannot learn as well as the well-fed. The anxious student, whether it’s anxiety over hunger or a morning commute through gang-infested streets, cannot learn as well as the calm student. There are few variables to a good school and we know what they are but each student brings a hundredweight of other variables and, often, puts those variables between them and the school. And we are bass ackwards if we think that the students experience can tell us anything comprehensive about the teachers.
One of the other things Meg Campbell gets wrong, I think, is the notion that she can hold up superintendents/principals as so important while relying on external evaluations as, well, somehow evaluative. Either you trust the principals and throw out the external evaluations, or you trust the external evaluations and throw out the principals.
full of it down the line. The best management focuses on continual improvement of the organization; it doesn’t obsess over those who are below average. It identifies and remediates those teachers, but helps others to improve.
The letter Cannoneo posts is right on. I know who the great teachers (are or were). Most teachers know who their good and great colleagues are. The great teachers are invariably those who dedicate their lives to teaching, often to the point of neglecting their families. Many other great teachers are either unmarried or don’t have children. My school has a lot of good teachers, but I wouldn’t say there are more than 2 or 3 who might qualify as great. In my 20 year career, I’ve known fewer than 10 teachers who I would consider great.
I want to share this letter to the editor that appeared in today’s Globe, from a former English teacher of mine. It’s not adversarial. Based on long years of experience, it simply calls attention to the realities that most “teacher performance” talk suppresses in the goal of creating and exploiting a crisis.
Campbell’s school, Codman Academy, loses an average of 30% of its teachers every year. Her school isn’t unique – in fact that number is actually low when compared to the likes of Roxbury Prep which lost 50% of its teachers at the end of last year or Edward Brooks which lost 49%. I’d love to know whether Campbell sees such high turnover as a problem–or if that’s actually our goal.
…for someone who runs a charter school to be on the school committee, unless the point is for the school committee to include representatives of stakeholders in which case I hope there is at least one member of the Boston Teachers Union on the committee as well.
Ha ha ha, that’s funny…good point
is of no concern to the charters. It is actually part of their operating plan, and they count on fresh newbies to fill their ranks. This keeps costs down, which means more money for the directors and companies “managing” them.
I know one year Weston did not make it because one “subgroup” — not students as a whole but the 50 or so minority students in the system — did not make AYP.
Outsiders to the debate should understand that is the endgame. Sure, most money is to be had in privatizing the big school systems, but in due time it will be “proven” that pretty much all other schools are failing as well.
As soon as I read your post, it started to come back to me, kind of like a surreal Stephen King movie. I’m not sure if it was Weston, but the community had a town hall debate and people tried to “un-invite” METCO. They argued that real-estate values would go down because the town didn’t make AYP.
The town ended up creating a kindergarten for METCO students. It was financed in part by consolidating the METCO busses with other communities. So kids as young as 4 were traveling additional hours a day riding through and stopping in different communities until they reached their METCO destination. What a way to spend your childhood.
our mayoral candidates respond to this…
I’d also be curious to see how our mayoral candidates respond to the “management fee’s” paid to EMO’s (educational management organizations) to take over and operate Boston public schools. For example, “Unlocking Potential” EMO for UP Academy Dorchester “service fee” will be 14% percent of the average number of students enrolled during that school year, multiplied by the Approved per Pupil Allocation set by BPS. Unlocking Potential’s management fee is projected to be $552,722 in FY14, $557,548 in FY15, and $626,377 in FY16. This is above the operating budget! $552,722 to Unlocking Potential to “manage” 546 students that 1st year at UP Dorchester increasingly more every year after as they increase students? We pay Superintendent Johnson $323,722.49 and she manages 57,100 students!