I have been reading Dr. Ravitch’s work for a while and want to call it to the attention of people interested in public education.  Why?

A former Bush (both) administration(s) appointee who championed No Child Left Behind and other education reform initiatives,  Dr. Ravitch has reconsidered her views on that legislation and other important public education issues.  Some popular initiatives Dr. Ravitch is now questioning:

• Charter Schools. She has concluded that they are no better than average and draining resources from the public education system.
• Standards/Accountability. She has questioned whether No Child Left Behind standards and curricula have produced lower standards so that most children only appear not to be left behind.
• 21st Century Skills. In September 2009, she gave us a history lesson on why skill-centered education, like the 21st Century Skills initiative so popular here in West Virginia right now, has never worked.

Dr. Ravitch’s September 2009 op-ed commentary in the Boston Globe is a relatively brief document rich with insights about public education:

• “For the past century, our schools of education have obsessed over critical-thinking skills, projects, cooperative learning, experiential learning, and so on.  But they have paid precious little attention to the disciplinary knowledge that young people need to make sense of the world.”
• “Thinking critically involves comparing and contrasting and sythesizing what one has learned.  And a great deal of knowledge is necessary before one can begin to reflect on its meaning and look for alternative explanations.”
• “The intelligent person, the one who truly is a practitioner of critical thinking, has the capacity to understand the lessons of history, to grasp the inner logic of science and mathematics, and to realize the meaning of philosophical debates by studying them.”

Dr. Ravitch’s views are significantly outside of the current educational mainstream, which happens to consist of a conventional wisdom shared by most Democrats and Republicans alike.  You would think that when most Democrats and Republicans agree on something, they’re probably right.  But Dr. Ravitch will make you “think” otherwise.

When I was a student in West Virginia, tracked classes were common, but that has changed over the years.  The same trend has occurred in Massachusetts.  Why?  A concern that teachers effectively use tracking to stereotype and discriminate against students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

What does the study find?  Controlling for socio-economic status, more tracked students perform at advanced and proficient levels, and more detracked students perform at failing or needs improvement levels.  Indeed the more tracks your school has, the better students are likely to perform.

What schools are least likely to track?  Urban schools serving mostly poor children.

Could our efforts to help students from disadvantaged backgrounds with detracking actually be hurting them?  That is the real question.

The single worst shoot-yourself-in-the-foot act that contributed to our loss of control of education reform happened about 20 years ago. That’s when leaders of business and industry, convinced that educators either didn’t know enough or didn’t care enough about educating the young to be trusted, hijacked our profession. And we let them.

Mr. Brady suggests that we have entrusted our educational system to people who are not professionals.  They think they know how to run a school because they know how to run a business and they attended school as student.

If you’re looking for a surgeon to remove a cancerous growth, a plumber to fix a leaky pipe, an artist to paint a portrait, a caterer to produce a wedding dinner, you don’t dictate which scalpels the surgeon picks up, which wrenches the plumber brings into the house, which brushes the painter will use, or select the caterer’s kitchen utensils.

Mr. Brady suggests that it’s fine for these non-professionals to engage in problem identification, but they should leave solution-identification and implementation to professional educators.

The new leaders were certain they knew what was wrong with America’s schools, and what had to be done to set them right: What was needed were “standards.” Clear, no-nonsense standards. Tough, demanding standards.

Mr. Brady thinks everyone is wasting a lot of time developing curriculum standards.  First, they are unnecessarily narrowing what students need to know. Second, they are encouraging memorization over the development of “an organized, self-reinforcing, dynamic body of knowledge.”  Third, they are stifling the development of new ideas by providing an official list of worthy ideas.

Two recent posts here - The Race to the Bottom and The Race to the Top? – summarize research and analysis that support Mr. Brady’s contentions.

• Charter schools.  The only quality studies showing significant positive effects are for popular, oversubscribed charter schools operating in large urban school districts (of which we have so many in West Virginia).
• Reconstituting the teacher workforce.  Studies demonstrate that teachers affect student outcomes, but how do we recruit, reward and retain the best teachers?  That’s not so easy, suggests the white paper.
• Early childhood programs.  Studies of two expensive early childhood programs implemented in the 1960s and 1970s found significant long-term effects, but later studies of other programs are less favorable.
• Content standards.  ”The lack of evidence that better content standards enhance student achievement is remarkable given the level of investment in this policy and high hopes attached to it.”  Enough said?
• Curriculum.  While recognizing the challenge of evaluating the differential impact of curricula, the white paper points out that study after study has found significant effects in a wide variety of contexts.

After reading the Race to the Top guidelines and this white paper, I am confused.  Surely we’re not preparing to spend $4 billion to promote questionable educational policies.

• The proposer much show that the innovative idea has community (e.g., parents, students, county of board of education) support.  Is any innovation zone going to succeed without such support?  No.
• The proposer must have the support of 80 percent of school employees.  Is any innovation zone going to succeed without such support?  No.
• The proposer must demonstrate “quality of innovation design.”  Is that a bad thing?  No.  Do you want your child attending a school where the innovation has not been well thought out or is inconsistent with educational best practices research?  I hope not.
• The proposer actually must undergo an interview and a school visit before we hand over the keys to our children’s futures.  A radical requirement?  I don’t think so.

Do firms that provide business start-ups with venture capital adopt the laissez faire approach advocated by the Daily Mail for schools?  Of course not.  They expect business plans that include everything from hiring plans to marketing plans to budgets.  And they don’t give away their money without someone (generally quite a few people) meeting with the applicant.  Why should our schools be any different?  If anything, the stakes are higher.

It’s one thing to be critical of the bureaucracy within existing school systems.  It’s another thing altogether to be critical of the “due diligence” that the State Department of Education seeks to perform to ensure that our children are entrusted to people with solid plans to educate them innovatively.

Some basic information for those of you who may not know:

• Federal No Child Left Behind legislation allowed states to establish their own student proficiency standards and measure performance against those standards, so there are as many proficiency standards as there are states.
• The NAEP is a national test given to a sample of students in each state and provides the only ready means of comparing student performance across states.

The report’s executive summary states disingenuously that the report is not intended “to imply a judgment about state standards,” but rather “to be descriptive of state-to-state variation in the location of the state standards on a common metric.”  Don’t be fooled!

What judgment does NCES want you to make?  ”States are setting the bar too low,” says U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

Interestingly,

• The report finds dramatic differences between the proficiency standards of the five highest and lowest NAEP-scale-equivalent states.
• Significant numbers of states set standards below NAEP basic performance cut points.  In fourth grade reading, for example, 31 states (including West Virginia) set proficiency standards below the basic cut point.
• The rigor of state standards has a positive correlation to NAEP proficiency at the 4th grade level, but not at the 8th grade level – which should cause someone to ask whether we spend waste too much time setting these standards if they seem to have no impact on student achievement … but it won’t, I assure you.

How did West Virginia fare among the 48 states for which data were reported for 2007?

• 43rd at Grade 4 reading and a whopping 26 points below NAEP basic and 56 points below NAEP proficient.
• 44th at Grade 8 reading and 14 points below NAEP basic and 52 points below NAEP proficient.
• 36th at Grade 4 math and 3 points above NAEP basic and 32 points below NAEP proficient.
• 41st at Grade 8 math and 9 points below NAEP basic and 46 points below NAEP proficient.

Lake Wobegon anyone?

West Virginia’s latest federal helper is Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who plans to hold certain federal funds hostage unless states rewrite their education laws in important ways.   Among other things, Secretary Duncan wants states like West Virginia to make their laws more friendly to charter schools.

Soon after beginning this blog, I wrote a post about a major national study of charter schools in 16 states that suggested that the majority of charter schools were not working well: 17 percent performed better than traditional public schools, while 37 percent performed worse.

It’s one thing to require states to implement laws that clearly represent good public policy when the political will otherwise might not be there to do so.  It’s another thing altogether to require states to implement public policy that is questionable at best.  West Virginia does not need this type of federal help.

Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as you have done it to one of the least of these, you have done it to me.

- Matthew 25:35

The state with the starkest negative change is West Virginia, which had a .3 percent decrease in students, but a 20.5 percent decrease in teachers.  How can that be?

The Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) recently shined a bright light on middle school education in a report on reading skills.  Some highlights from the report:

• While national testing has found gains in reading at the elementary level, the numbers are stagnant at the middle school level and declining at the high school level.
• Unlike speaking skills, which develop naturally, advanced reading skills do not.
• Success in reading is critical to later academic and workplace success.
• Developing students’ reading comprehension skills in all subjects should be a priority for middle schools.

First Lady Gayle Manchin was a member of the committee that issued this report.

To assist students who are falling behind in reading and math at the middle school level, the West Virginia Legislature recently passed legislation to create and fund critical skills instructional programs for eighth graders (and third graders).

Many education organizations, including Achieve, Education Trust, and Jobs for the Future, oppose this legislation.  Why?  Two reasons:  First, there is substantial education research about the benefits of a rigorous academic curriculum.  Indeed, it is one of the best predictors of later academic (and logically economic?) success.  These groups suspect the “career option” will be anything but rigorous.  Second, these groups worry that poor students will take the “career option” and find themselves unprepared for good careers down the road.

But is every student truly “traditional” college material?  What happens to that student for whom the “traditional” college track is not working?  Does he or she drop out before graduating high school?  How do you maximize that student’s future career options?

One possible answer being explored nationally is early college or middle college.  Middle college places struggling high school students on a college campus for a combined high school/college experience.  The theory is that certain struggling students can succeed if presented with a different environment and a different approach to education.

West Virginia Northern Community College is in the process of launching a middle college for West Virginia high school students.  WVNCC President Martin Olshinsky’s efforts to make middle college a reality for Northern Panhandle students should be applauded … supported financially … evaluated rigorously … and transplanted elsewhere IF the model proves successful.

Most surprising, though, is that despite identifying more than 1,000 studies of online learning, the U.S. Department of Education could not find enough quality studies to draw meaningful conclusions about online learning in the K-12 schools.  Given all the money spent on technology at the K-12 level, this is a stunning finding.  In West Virginia, the State alone will spend approximately $22.85 million for technology at the K-12 level during the next fiscal year, and this does not include additional local and federal funding.  West Virginia is not alone in spending significant amounts of money on technology and online learning.

The study does not address cost or the counter-intuitive fact that online learning often costs more than face-to-face learning.

In Iran people have taken to the streets and Twitter to fight for democratic principles.  In New York?  In West Virginia?

Is this what all the fighting’s for?  I hope not.

I hope everyone involved reads the new report from the Stanford University Center for Research on Educational Outcomes about the (in)effectiveness of charter schools.  The report, which has received a lot of attention nationally, found that 17 percent of charter schools performed significantly better than traditional public schools, 46 percent performed about the same and 37 percent performed significantly worse.  While far from dispositive, the report suggests that a lot of charter schools are not only not better, but actually worse, than traditional public schools.

Interestingly, the study was funded by charter school proponents.

22 June 2009.  For additional reading and listening:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/education/22duncan.html

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105461724&ft=1&f=1013

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105461713&ft=1&f=1013