TFA: A Crime Against the Most Vulnerable Kids

Study this chart relating the correlation between teaching experience and achievement, and ask yourself: If education is the civil rights issue of this generation, which children are living in Jim Crow land?  And who is promoting it?

ETS Report: Achievement Gap Static During Last 20 Years of Test and Punish

So Obama and the Oligarchs are launched on another generation of the same edu-diversions and privatization schemes that pretend to treat the symptom, while ignoring the problem of poverty, racism, and the corrosive effects of capitalism run amok.  Will it matter that the f-ing Educational Testing Service is now waving the red flag?  What will it take? 

From the ETS Press Release today (my bolds):

After a long period of progress in narrowing the Black-White educational attainment and achievement gaps, that progress has stalled, according to a new report from Educational Testing Service titled, "The Black-White Achievement Gap: When Progress Stopped." Moreover, some research indicates that reaching equality could take 50 to 100 years if current patterns continue.

It has been 45 years since Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his landmark and controversial report on the deterioration of low-income Black families, "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," and evidence gathered over the past several decades supports the assertion that deteriorating family structure, neighborhoods, and schools threaten to undermine the development of disadvantaged children.

This report, written by Paul E. Barton and Richard J. Coley of ETS's Policy Information Center, examines the periods of progress and stagnation over the past several decades in closing the achievement gap; looking for the factors that contributed to the progress and the reasons for why it stopped.

Coley, Director of the ETS Policy Information Center explains, "National Assessment of Educational Progress data starting from the 1970s reveal a steady narrowing of the gap until the late 1980s. The last 20 years have essentially yielded a period of stability in spite of a lot of national attention to the gap, and measures taken that were expected to narrow it. We want to know, 'why?'"

The report focuses on three time periods beginning with the 1970s and 80s during which a substantial narrowing of the gap was seen in the subjects of reading and mathematics. Next, the research shows that the decades since the late 1980s have produced a sustained period of no change in the gap. Finally, the authors go back to the beginning of the 20th Century when the gap in educational attainment levels first started to narrow with progress halting, ironically, for those born in the mid-1960s when landmark legislation such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act created optimism for educational and societal equality.

Furthermore, Coley and Barton describe a number of developments that could be implicated in blocking continued progress — including sensitive ones — such as inadequate care in early childhood, the decline of communities and neighborhoods, the explosion of single-parent families, the employment plight of Black males, and stalled intergenerational mobility out of seriously disadvantaged neighborhoods. These areas are important because family, demographic and environmental factors can have a large positive or negative effect on student achievement.

The report points particularly to the lack of movement of succeeding generations out of seriously disadvantaged neighborhoods so the effect becomes cumulative as successive generations remain in these areas. "The data show that many Black people have been stuck in neighborhoods deprived of social and economic capital for several generations. Although only 5 percent of White children born between 1955 and 1970 grew up in highly-disadvantaged neighborhoods, 84 percent of Black children did so."

"Approaches to restart progress will require addressing this problem on multiple levels," Coley says. "Entire neighborhoods may have to be uplifted in terms of their economic capital, school quality, safety and health structures."

Barton, a senior associate with ETS's Policy Information Center adds, "The challenges to be faced in restarting progress in closing the gap are indeed daunting. However, the prospect of waiting 50 or 100 years — as economist Derek Neal of the University of Chicago has projected based on past trends — is simply unacceptable."

Download "The Black-White Achievement Gap: When Progress Stopped" for free at http://www.ets.org/research/perc/pic/. Purchase copies for $15 (prepaid) by writing to the Policy Information Center, ETS, MS 19-R, Rosedale Road, Princeton, NJ 08541-0001; by calling (609) 734-5949; or by sending an e-mail to pic@ets.org. . . .

LA Teacher Discovers Secret to Higher Test Scores!

Letter below to LAUSD superintendent posted at Anthony Cody's website:

Dear Dr. Cortines,

You have decided to make Fremont teachers reapply for their own jobs as part of a "reconstitution," implicitly blaming them for the shortcomings of their school. You have also opened the hiring at Fremont to other aspirants.

I am a teacher at Marshall High. I helped our Academic Decathlon team gain top scores in Art for several years, including a second place finish. Several dozen of my English students have succeeded at the challenging AP Literature test. Virtually all of my students pass the English CAHSEE, including many special education students. I have helped my school meet its AYP/API targets with some consistency.

If you are looking for teachers to spearhead success at Fremont, perhaps my record would recommend me as a promising candidate.

If so, you may be curious to learn why I am not still teaching at Fremont. You see, I taught at Fremont for five years before choosing to leave for Marshall.

I left some time after Fremont was assigned a principal unequal to the task of governing it. When we teachers requested an effective leader, our demands ignited an ugly fight that lead to many months of chaos. I wound up a victim of stress and disillusionment. I left the school over ten years ago when I became convinced that LAUSD either couldn't or wouldn't govern it effectively, and when the anxiety of the fight began to damage my home life.

My experience might be instructive for your efforts.

In the first place, it would seem to show that the shortcomings at Fremont cannot be laid at the door of its teachers. If you judge Fremont's current teachers a failure on the basis of their students' test scores, then by the same criteria I was a failing teacher when I left Fremont. Yet when I transferred to Marshall, my new students attained much better test scores. If you imagine this was due to some personal transformation of my teaching, I invite you to transfer me to a high school whose students have a higher average socio-economic status than Marshall, where I suspect yet another personal renaissance awaits me.

Secondly, my experience might lead you to wonder how Fremont loses so many excellent teachers and potentially excellent new teachers each year, and whether administrative efforts to retain these teachers might be more productive than your current attempt to drive teachers away.

If you are inclined to pursue this possibility, my experience suggests that you are uniquely placed to get results. One thing alone would have sufficed to keep me at Fremont: effective leadership. Consistently excellent leadership would retain many more fine teachers at Fremont. The high turnover of principals at Fremont over the last two decades indicates that LAUSD has failed to lead Fremont effectively in the time since I left. It is your responsibility, not that of teachers, to make sure that Fremont never again lacks for sustained excellent leadership.

Finally, if you follow through with your plan to interview current teachers for their own jobs, you might ask yourself what kind of teacher would both volunteer to teach at Fremont in the first place and also remain there for years. I am a creative, intelligent and capable teacher. I was deeply dedicated to Fremont, and especially to its students. I have deep and fond memories of these students to this day. These traits were not enough for long-term success in the environment LAUSD created at Fremont.

It humbles me to consider what personal qualities I would have needed to have remained. I hope you can summon that same sense of humility as you interview veteran Fremont teachers. Perhaps some of these teachers just feel stuck at Fremont. But you need to know that many more of these veteran teachers have special qualities that keep them at Fremont, and that most new teachers will inevitably turn out to lack such qualities. I wonder if you truly have any idea of what a Fremont teacher needs to succeed in the long term.

I understand that over half of the Fremont teachers have decided to leave rather than interview for their jobs. They are clearly upset at being blamed. If you do not reverse course and regain the trust of these teachers, you will do grievous harm to the institution you are trying to help.

You need the best teachers at Fremont. Who else has demonstrated that they can do the job they do?

Best regards,
Scott Banks

Training A Future Workforce that Never Stops to Eat

Perfect.

BRIARCLIFF MANOR, N.Y. — High school students in this well-to-do Westchester suburb pile on four, five, even six Advanced Placement classes to keep up with their friends. They track their grade-point averages to multiple decimal places and have longer résumés than their parents.

But nearly half the students at Briarcliff High School have packed their schedules so full that they do not stop for lunch, prompting administrators to rearrange the schedule next fall to require everyone to take a 20-minute midday break. They will extend each school day and cut the number of minutes each class meets over the year. Briarcliff currently does not require students to have a lunch period.

In a school where SAT scores are the talk in the hallways and more than half the seniors are accepted to their first-choice college, Briarcliff’s principal, Jim Kaishian, said mandatory lunch is intended to reduce stress on teenagers so caught up in the achievement frenzy they barely have time to eat or sleep.

This year, 12 percent of Briarcliff’s 665 students have no free periods, while an additional 30 percent have classes the entire time the cafeteria is open.

“We see kids rushing to eat; we hear about stress levels going up,” Mr. Kaishian said. “We’ve watched as some kids implode and bend under the weight of having to go period after period without a break.”

Briarcliff is one of several high-performing campuses that is confronting the lunchless, alongside other stress-reduction measures like starting school later or limiting the number of A.P. courses each student can take.

At Horace Mann, a prestigious private school in Riverdale, the Governing Council passed a resolution in March saying: “All students, regardless of whether they want a lunch period, should have time to eat lunch outside of class.” In Chappaqua, Horace Greeley High is rolling out a new schedule this fall that lengthens classes, with a 30-minute free block in the middle of the day so that “students will have more time to eat in a less stressful way,” according to the superintendent, David Fleishman. . . . .