In New Orleans schools that have been taken over by the state in recent years, scores among fourth-graders on this spring’s Louisiana Educational Assessment Program test increased by 12 percentage points compared to last year. Scores for eighth-graders rose 4 percentage points.
It was a sign of long-awaited success for public education in New Orleans, and proof, said state Rep. Karen Carter Peterson, D-New Orleans, that this is not the time and New Orleans is not the place for the limited voucher program being pushed hard by Gov. Bobby Jindal’s administration.
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Still, when those scores were announced — at a New Orleans school surrounded by a tall fence and barbed wire — it was easy to see why some lawmakers are still pushing to provide some students with a state-funded escape: only 48 percent of fourth-graders and 36 percent of eighth-graders in the 59 schools passed the test
“They’re not where they need to be. And, as they’re not where they need to be, we should not leave any child behind,” said Rep. Austin Badon, a New Orleans Democrat who has split with others in his city’s delegation over the issue.
Badon is sponsoring the House version of the Jindal-backed bill; Sen. Ann Duplessis, also a New Orleans Democrat, the Senate version. Each bill has won initial committee approval, but there has been speculation that Jindal is having trouble garnering votes.
- Does getting rid of the old teachers reform a school? [As in the-Orleans-teachers-all-sucked-and-it's-their-fault belief in the local reform ethos.] Not necessarily, according to “The Benwood Plan: A Lesson in Comprehensive Teacher Reform” by Elena Silva (published April 7, 2008):
Two years later, Arizona Senator Jon Kyl cited Benwood’s “incentive package” as evidence of the wisdom of merit pay for teachers. And more recently, the Education Commission of the States and the national Working Group on Teaching Quality praised Benwood’s teacher compensation initiatives.
But the arguments that these initiatives brought a flood of new and better teachers into the schools’ classrooms have been overstated. Most of the teachers who reapplied for their jobs were hired back, and less than 20 of the 300 teachers in the Benwood schools received bonuses in the first year of the much-touted financial-incentive plan.
Benwood’s success has had at least as much to do with a second, equally important teacher-reform strategy: helping teachers improve the quality of their instruction. A new analysis of “value-added” teacher effectiveness data conducted for this report indicates that over a period of six years, existing teachers in the eight Benwood elementary schools improved steadily. Before the Benwood Initiative kicked off, they were far less effective than their peers elsewhere in the Hamilton County district. By 2006, a group of mostly the same teachers had surpassed the district average.
This improvement was by design. The Benwood Initiative was about much more than pay incentives and reconstitution; the district invested heavily in mentoring programs to train teachers, in additional staff to support curriculum and instruction, and in stronger and more collaborative leadership at the school level. At the same time, the Benwood Initiative was buoyed by better labor-management relations and a host of other reform efforts at the district level.
These findings have implications for other districts looking to turn around low-performing schools—of which there are many in the era of the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). There is no doubt that disadvantaged students are disproportionately likely in American education to be taught by less experienced, less qualified, less effective teachers. Given the strong relationship between teacher quality and student learning, this disparity is one of the reasons that schools like the pre-reform Benwood eight do so poorly. But solving that problem is not only a matter of playing the politically treacherous zero-sum game of redistributing teachers from one school to another.
The picture that emerges from the growing data set appears mixed for charter schools. While many analysts urge caution in using NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress] to judge the 4,300-school charter sector, the latest data do not bolster the early hopes of charter advocates that the sector as a whole would significantly outperform regular public schools.
The overall scores of charter students tested in 2007 in the nationally representative assessment program were lower than for students in regular public schools in 4th grade reading and mathematics, and in 8th grade math, all by statistically significant margins.
In 4th grade reading, charter students had an average score of 214, compared with 220 for regular public schools, on a 500-point scale. Looked at another way, 59 percent of charter students scored at or above the “basic” reading level on the NAEP test, compared with 66 percent in other public schools.
But in 8th grade reading, charter students appeared to essentially close a gap from 2005, with charter and regular public school students scoring about the same in 2007.
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The debate over charter schools and NAEP first came to public prominence following an August 2004 story in The New York Times. The article focused on an analysis conducted by the American Federation of Teachers,[PDF] which had called for a national moratorium on new charter schools in 2002.
The AFT study used reading and math scores in 2003, the first time charter students’ NAEP scores were reported separately. It concluded that charter students trailed those in regular public schools as a whole, and also when results were broken down by such subgroups as black students or students eligible for free or reduced-price lunches.
The report and news story spurred an outcry from charter advocates and some researchers, who suggested its methodology was flawed and the results misleading. The 2003 NAEP data were the subject of multiple re-evaluations, including a federal analysis issued in 2006 finding that scores in charter schools, taking into account a range of background characteristics of students and schools, trailed those in regular public schools that year in reading and math. (“Reanalysis of NAEP Scores Finds Charter Schools Lagging,” Aug. 30, 2006.)
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Chester E. Finn Jr., the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a Washington think tank that is the authorizer for a set of Ohio charter schools, was among the charter advocates who urged the separate reporting of results for charter students on the 2003 NAEP tests. He said he believed it would be good for charter schools and policymakers.
“I hoped they also would be good for traditional public schools, and might show them up,” he said.
Mr. Finn said he now believes the most important distinctions are between different kinds of charters, such as those that operate in networks, or from state to state where different governing laws apply.
“I’m not very interested in the average performance of charters,” he said. “The word ‘charter’ signals so little about them, and the diversity within that universe is at least as great as the diversity outside it.”
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The population that charter schools typically serve is substantially different from that served by public schools as a whole, complicating comparisons across school types. In 2007, the NAEP charter sample had more than twice as many black students on a percentage basis and far more students living in cities—groups that generally score below national averages—than did the pool of NAEP test-takers overall.
And the charter population itself is changing, the test samples suggest. For example, 53 percent of charter students tested in 4th grade math in 2007 were eligible for free or reduced-price lunches, up from 42 percent in 2003.
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“Certainly, the raw data suggest charter students are behind,” said Sarah Theule Lubienski, an associate professor of education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, after reviewing the recent results for 4th grade students in math and reading. But she said that when controlling for race and low-income status, it appears that “neither one is ahead.”
In a press release last September, the national charter alliance highlighted the gains of 8th grade charter students in 2007, though those apparent increases were not deemed statistically significant. The average scale score rose from 255 in 2005 to 260 in 2007 in reading, and from 268 to 273 in math.
It isn’t just merit pay or bonuses – it is also working conditions that make for better and more effective teachers and instruction.
When the district can’t adequately provide enough substitutes, no teachers get lunch breaks or planning periods (as teaching is really like having two very intense jobs: running a class and planning to run a class). New teachers vs. experienced teachers is such a straw man red herring argument. When you hear news and media and politicians talking about the new vs old teacher thing, your ears are about to hear some bullshit.
In an anemic system with no way to deal with discipline, special education, extracurricular activities or below level students: it doesn’t matter if your teachers are new or have 30 years experience; are certified or haven’t even graduated from college yet. Whoever they are, if they are in such a system, they will spend 90% of their time dealing with classroom management or playing catch up because of all the non-teaching nonsense they are mandated by the state to deal with. Their instruction will be destroyed by those students who should be in different environments, if they are able to involve themselves in instruction at all (because they’ve been covering other classes and are just doing what they can to keep control).
In such cases, it also does not matter if the school is a public school or a charter, because the charter is going to have similar problems of setting up. They don’t like to expel or suspend too many kids, because it looks bad in the press (and it looks like they can’t control their students), so they deal with the same discipline issues. Charters are also usually new and money driven, so they have not hired enough staff to handle setting up all the extracurriculars that go along with a successful school. Then they tweak schedules and staff so much that no consistency can be reached.
Ditto new public schools, or reopened public schools as staff is structured and restructured. One other problem unique to New Orleans in my experience is the lack of experienced teachers at the -same school-. There is a lot of bouncing around, and there are a lot of curriculum and instructional changes that appear (from talking to experienced teachers) to come in every few years. That lack of consistency adds up to low, low scores.
Because let’s face it, that 36% of 8th graders number is just the ones who scored -basic- and above. -Basic- is not a victory lap to be taken if we are really going to use these ridiculous exams to guage progress. I’ve got incredibly smart students running around whooping it up about being “basic” when they have the capability to be scoring “mastery” and “advanced.”
As an aside, when Rising Tide III gets going, we NEED to have an Education Panel.
“As an aside, when Rising Tide III gets going, we NEED to have an Education Panel.”
I second that! Will pass that on.
For true, Cuz. And great points and all well-taken. I’m not trying to sum up the whole problem in one talking point, no matter how it looks. I know it’s multiple problems, I know it’s lack of resources and respect and too many people with no education experience making executive decisions about how to structure the day, the lesson, the teacher, the desks, the art on the walls. But blowing apart a bad system doesn’t fix it. Firing the teachers who were in the failing school doesn’t necessarily fix the problem either. The problem is people outside of the classroom bringing their pet solution to the table and ramming up the asses of teachers, parents and children. I’m tired of people fucking my child’s teachers. Period. I’m tired of people fucking teachers. Period. Too many good teachers leave. Too many good students flounder. Too many parents give up hope or get PTSD so bad they don’t know which way is left. Look around, Cuz. I have other things on schools. I’m not THAT dumb, really.
I hear that.
I don’t want it to sound like I’m being snarky or ignoring other points. But I hear about this particular point a whole lot, especially when it is used as a means to “motivate” folks who are already pulling their hair out with their general day-to-day activities, and I wanted to focus specifically on it.
Maybe it is a sore spot for me because I get to hear higher ups and other teachers in meetings (and, in turn, reading about it in media) talking about merit pay and bonuses in a room full of people who are already operating on 120%.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, bonuses are nice – but you could probably keep more effective teachers in a system if the job is more like a real profession and less like the system is doing -us- a favor by keeping us around.
And of all the teachers who will not be teaching next year – experienced, certified or otherwise – not a single one I’ve talked to is leaving because of pay or because they aren’t getting a bonus.
But, again, let me say that I didn’t want to ignore other points you have made. These days, as the school year winds down, I’m evaluating what has worked and what hasn’t. The rants just show up. I start typing and a half hour later, there they are. Please forgive me if it all comes out sounding like this.
“New teachers vs. experienced teachers is such a straw man red herring argument. When you hear news and media and politicians talking about the new vs old teacher thing, your ears are about to hear some bullshit.”
So there’s no difference between an experienced teacher and a brand-new one? Education is the only profession in which experience is considered irrelevant. And considered most irrelevant when teaching children in need. The only way there can be no difference between an experienced and brand-new teacher is if all teachers are seen as commodities, as easily-replaced cogs in a machine with no damn difference between them. Which they are not. I know because I’ve been treated as a commodity the entire time I have taught, and not just here post-Floods. Though especially here post-Floods….
Make it clear you’re not yelling at me because I fucking “support” merit pay, NCLB, privatization, and all the rest of that bullshit–because I don’t– and we’ll be fine, Cuz. Your rants are a good contribution to the discussion but don’t lump me with “indifferent parents,” “charter advocates,” or other teacher bashers. And remember your perspective isn’t the only one around here.
Yes, RT Education panel. We must, we should, we will.