Merry Learning to All, Together, Really

Day before yesterday, North Carolina's governor threw her unequivocal support behind the diversity policies in her state that have brought about improved learning for all and increases in student achievement scores:

Raleigh, N.C. — As Wake County and other school districts across North Carolina shift away from busing students to achieve socio-economic diversity, Gov. Beverly Perdue and other officials fear the districts will become racially segregated.

"It's the most troublesome thing I think that's happened," Perdue said of the push toward neighborhood schools from Goldsboro to Charlotte.

. . . .

Perdue said neighborhood schools that are almost all-black or all-white won't provide all students with a quality education, saying schools in low-income areas will be at a significant disadvantage.

"Whether it's racially done or economically done, there has to be some kind of momentum to continue to have diversity in our schools," she said. . . .

Mr. Obama's Commitment to Think Tank Propaganda

Mr. Obama has put all his audacious hope for improving education in the hands of the think tank education deformers and disruptors who believe that unswerving faith in unregulated greed, corporate welfare, and entrepreneurial manipulation will bring us a new Renaiisance in schools. Despite his promotion of science and observation in other domains, the President continues to depend upon the untried edu-propaganda paid for by Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the Walton Clan.

Try this alternate view from the op-ed page of the Boston Globe (ht to Monty Neill):

By Dennis Shirley and Andy Hargreaves | September 7, 2009
AS PRESIDENT OBAMA prepares to address the nation’s students via classroom TVs and streaming Internet tomorrow, all eyes are on America’s schools. After years of unprecedented federal involvement, educators and the public have grown weary of high-sounding reforms that never seem to achieve the desired results. But we can’t give up on our schools. As we watch students from other nations outperform the United States, it is more important than ever that the Obama administration get its education strategy right.

Charter schools, pay-for-performance for teachers, alternative routes into teaching, and closing failing schools are the policy mix the administration is pushing. Most of its education ideas differ little from those of prior administrations. The ideas aren’t new, and the evidence driving policy is just as questionable as ever.

Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan are rushing headlong down a path that in many ways replicates for schools the same market-based principles that have left our economy a shambles. We know that inventing new finance models created a hollow prosperity for a few.

Likewise, we cannot create a separate underclass of public schools that charters leave behind. Financial rewards for a few teachers won’t raise quality among all of them. And shutting failing schools, like property foreclosures, fails to address the underlying problems.

There are better ways. We have seen this firsthand in our studies of high-achieving school systems around the world.

Finland’s schools lead the world on the Program for International Student Achievement tests. When its unemployment rate hit almost 20 percent in 1992, Finland reinvented itself to become the world’s most economically competitive country. Its strategy? Education.

Unlike US policies urging us to “lower the barriers’’ to let just about anyone teach, Finland has made teaching such a prestigious occupation that only 10 percent of applicants to Finland’s teacher education programs are admitted. Their system isn’t expensive - teachers are paid at the median rate for comparable nations. But there are good working conditions in all schools and a very different social ethic: Finns support “collective responsibility,’’ not narrow “accountability,’’ for improving schools. Strong schools don’t compete against weak ones, but help them instead. The result? Finland has the world’s smallest achievement gap between students based on their social class background.

Or consider a nation with an urban mix similar to the United States. The London borough of Tower Hamlets climbed from the worst-achieving district in England to the top half in the last decade. In Tower Hamlets - where more than half of the students are immigrants - our recent study found educational leaders have built ties with local community groups, particularly imams from the mosques that serve the district’s large Bangladeshi population. They reversed high truancy rates and brought the community inside the schools to serve as classroom aides, translators, and social service providers. Schools set their own improvement targets together, rather than reacting to ones from outside; and when one school sank into failure, all the others rallied round to help.

Finally, consider the Canadian province of Alberta - the second highest performer on the PISA tests after Finland. The Alberta Initiative for School Improvement, created by the government with the teachers union, receives 2 percent of the provincial education budget and has engaged 90 percent of all schools in the province in designing their own local innovations and solutions to educational problems.

We’ve found in Finland, Tower Hamlets, and Alberta paths not taken in US education today. There is nothing in the new administration’s policies that provides incentives for strong schools to help struggling ones, least of all where charter schools are concerned. Pay-for-performance schemes offer market incentives that motivate a few teachers rather than providing the mission and conditions that energize all of them. There are proven ways to lift underperforming schools rather than simply shutting them down.

It isn’t too late for this administration to reconsider its plan. In almost all his policies, Obama has proven to be a man of the world. But in education, we seem to be re-treading outworn paths from the past. Why not choose the bolder paths not yet taken in our educational system’s much-hailed “race to the top’’ and join those schools at the top of the world already?

Dennis Shirley and Andy Hargreaves are professors in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College and authors of “The Fourth Way: The Inspiring Future for Educational Change.’’

GAO Study Shows ED Lax in Monitoring and Assisting School Improvement

Today's Baltimore Sun carries a story on ED's Raymond Simon's visit to take questions from concerned school administrators, who see their schools, teachers, and students being run into the ground by NCLB. Pretending that he will have his job more than a few more months, and that the Administration's school privatization testing policy will continue unabated, he had this:

Anne Arundel's Superintendent Dr. Kevin Maxwell asked if there would be any flexibility in requiring all students to reach the target goals of No Child Left Behind in 2014.

Simon stressed that there was no flexibility on this issue.

"The 2014 is nonnegotiable to us," Simon said.

However you read this stubborn departure from reality and this pretense that the public does not recognize NCLB as the bare-knuckled failure expansion plan that it is, the dogged monitoring and draconian testing by all children, regardless of whether or not they can read the test, will remain the memorable aspect of this utterly calamitous and immoral education policy. Not so memorable will be ED's strategy to improve those thousands of schools that end up on the failed AYP lists. That is because there is none to speak of.

A new GAO study shows, in fact, ED asleep at the wheel once more when it comes to monitoring the school improvement funding to schools not making AYP or in providing guidance or other assistance to schools. For instance, the What Works Clearinghouse that ED set up as a shell for federal assistance to failing schools is regarded by 19 states as "moderately to very helpful," while 22 states find it "some to no help."

Here is a summary of the GAO finding from Senator Harkin's office:

The report, titled “Education Actions Could Improve the Targeting of School Improvement Funds to Schools Most in Need of Assistance,” is available at this link or at http://www.gao.gov . . .

Among other things, the GAO made the following findings:

• Some states have not allocated or tracked their school improvement funds as required by the NCLBA, and the Department of Education has failed to monitor the lapses. For example, all states are required to keep a complete list of the schools that receive improvement funds; three states (Arkansas, Florida and North Carolina) could not provide any school-level data to the GAO, and California could provide only a partial list. The GAO also found that in a few cases, “non-Title I schools had inappropriately received Title I school improvement funds.” Though the Education Department is responsible for monitoring the allocation of improvement funds, it did not uncover those issues.

• All states are also required to take certain factors into account when allocating school improvement funds, such as focusing on the lowest-achieving schools. However, three states (Delaware, New Hampshire and Virginia) and the District of Columbia reported that they required districts to provide each school an equal amount of funding, and thus, the GAO states, may not have prioritized the allocation of funds as required under NCLBA. Again, the Education Department failed to identify those issues during its State monitoring efforts.

• The GAO also found that many states have not been able to set aside the full 4 percent of Title I funds for school improvement, as intended under NCLBA. Twenty-two states were unable to set aside the full 4 percent for at least one year, and six of these – Florida, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, and Michigan – were unable to do so for three or more years. These states were limited by a hold-harmless provision that prevents a state from reducing the Title I funding for any school district from the previous year.

And here are some quotes from the GAO Report, itself, that show in spades the lax attitudes by ED toward improvement, as opposed to their rigid and hyper-vigilant oversight of testing requirements and failure production. While states are required to set aside 4 percent of Title I money for school improvement, the growing list of failing schools makes this impossible if other Title I schools that are not failing are to to continue to receive their funds that are guaranteed by a "hold-harmless" provision (to make sure these funds aren't siphoned off for other purposes).

Sometimes, after taking into consideration the hold-harmless provision, there are not enough funds available from those districts with increasing Title I allocations to cover the full 4 percent set-aside. Specifically, 22 states have been unable to set aside the full portion of Title I funds for school improvement for 1 or more years since NCLBA was enacted because they did not have enough left over after satisfying the hold-harmless provision.

While most states monitor funds, 4 states were unable to make publicly available the complete list of schools receiving improvement funds, as required under NCLBA, because these states do not collect information on each school receiving improvement funds, and Education has not provided guidance on this requirement.30 Almost all states were able to provide a list of schools receiving funds to us, but 3 states—Arkansas, Florida, and North Carolina—provided information on districts that received funds, but could not provide information on which schools received funds, and California provided a partial list of schools that received funds. In a few cases, we found that non-Title I schools had inappropriately received Title I school improvement funds. State officials said that they would take steps to address this issue, and we referred this matter to Education, which is following up on it. Though Education monitors the allocation of school improvement funds through its 3-year Title I monitoring cycle, Education officials told us they had not uncovered these issues. In addition, Education does not regularly check when and whether states have made the lists of schools receiving improvement funds publicly available, as required, and has not provided guidance on how states make lists of schools receiving improvement funds publicly available.

So far ED's solution to this 4 percent funding problem is to do away with the "hold-harmless" provision, which would, in effect, allow states to take money from Title I schools that have miraculously managed to make AYP to pay the 4 percent to those that have not made AYP. It's the classic rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul solution.