The Research and Policy Implementation to Support Detracking

As our penal pedagogy and backwards policy decisions drive teachers back to pre-Civil Rights days, it is important to pay close attention to what common sense, human decency, and research tells us about segregation by tracking. From PEN Newsblast (ht to Monty Neill):

A new policy brief from the Education and Public Interest Center offers three case studies of a school (a San Diego charter), a district (on Long Island), and a nation (Finland) that have "abolished curricular stratification and promoted outstanding student achievement." According to the brief, classrooms and schools where all students are taught a challenging common curriculum offer proof that detracking can produce increased achievement and far more equitable outcomes. While acknowledging the complexity of such a reform, the brief's strong recommendation is the elimination of curricular tracks that separate students by race, socio-economic status, or assumptions about learning potential. It proposes that states require districts to identify all curricular tracks, describe their composition by racial and socio-economic groups, and indicate student placement policies. Policymakers should communicate clearly to the public what the data demonstrate about tracking and the reasons for reform. Detracking should begin with the lowest track, and meaningful access to Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses should be available to all students throughout the reform process. The brief also advocates school, educator, and student support during the process, and presents model statutory code language that can be used by legislators seeking to implement these changes.
See the brief | Related

Beating Back the Propagandists

From EPIC:

December 23, 2009

TEMPE, Ariz. and BOULDER, Colo. (December 23, 2009) -– This past week, two new reviews of think tank reports were published online: by Teacher Magazine and by Teachers College Record. Neither of these reviews was published as part of the Think Tank Review Project, but both further the project's goal of advancing discussions by providing the public, policy makers, and the press with timely reviews of think-tank publications.

Innovation "Report Card" - On December 16^th, Teacher Magazine published a review by Alaska 2009 Teacher of the Year Bob Williams, who examined the goals and methods underlying a report that had assigned each state an "innovation" letter grade. The report, called "Leaders and Laggards," was a follow-up to a 2007 report from the same group that had been published in November by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce along with the Center for American Progress and the American Enterprise Institute's Rick Hess.

Williams focuses his review on aspects of the report concerning alternative teacher certification and teacher tenure. He notes that the report's authors begin with the premise that "improving education requires weakening teacher tenure and union influence while supporting alternative certification and national programs to place inexperienced people ... into teaching positions with minimal training." Williams explains how the report distorts the data in order to create state-by-state ratings that fit the authors' pre-determined agenda. The 'innovation' ratings are really little more than a façade for the authors' advocacy for privatization and marketization of public education.

The Williams review can be accessed through the website of Teacher Magazine, which requires (free) registration, or on the Epicpolicy.org website, where it was republished with permission of the author.

Fordham Detracking Report - On December 14^th, the journal Teachers College Record published a commentary by University of Colorado at Boulder Professor Kevin
Welner, who co-directs the Think Tank Review Project. Welner provides a brief review of a new report authored by Brookings' Dr. Tom Loveless and published by the Fordham Institute. Loveless' key conclusion is that each additional track in eighth-grade mathematics in Massachusetts is associated (in a regression model he presents) with a 3 percentage-point rise in students scoring at the advanced level on the state exam, after holding constant the school-level percentage of students receiving free- or reduced-price lunch, which he calls "socioeconomic status."

Welner's review describes how the Loveless report combines weak data with questionable analyses to manufacture an argument against detracking. For instance, even using just the limited control of free- or reduced-price lunch rates, the purported benefit to high-achieving students disappears when one compares the option of a school with two math tracks versus an untracked school. Overall, better treatment of these same data would likely show that high-achieving Massachusetts middle school students in heterogeneous, untracked schools do as well or better than those in two-tracked schools -- certainly in language arts (English) and maybe even in mathematics. Welner concludes that the report misleads in an attempt to convince policymakers to maintain tracking policies.

The Welner review is available here. It can also be accessed through the website of Teachers College Record (subscription required).

About the Think Tank Review Project

The Think Tank Review Project (http://thinktankreview.org), a collaborative project of the University of Colorado at Boulder Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC) and the ASU Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU), provides the public, policy makers, and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected think tank publications. The project is made possible by funding from the Great Lakes Center
for Education Research and Practice.

Kevin Welner, the project co-director, explains that the project is needed because, "despite their garnering of media attention and their influence with many policy makers, reports released by private think tanks vary tremendously in their quality. Many think tank reports are little more than ideological argumentation dressed up as research. Many others include flaws that would likely have been identified and addressed through the peer review process. We believe that the media, policy makers, and the public will greatly benefit from having qualified social scientists provide reviews of these documents in a timely fashion." He adds, "we don't consider our reviews to be the final word, nor is our goal to stop think tanks' contributions to a public dialogue. That dialogue is, in fact, what we value the most. The best ideas come about through rigorous critique and debate."

CONTACT:

Kevin Welner, Professor and Director
Education and the Public Interest Center
University of Colorado at Boulder
(303) 492-8370
kevin.welner@gmail.com

New Study Documents Long Island Apartheid Schooling

A new study directed by Amy Stuart Wells of Teachers College, Columbia University, documents Long Island's segregated school systems. Below is the press release, a summary of major findings, and a list of recommendations. Absent from the recommendations, unfortunately, is any mention of national, state, and local assessment systems that sort and segregate on the basis of family income. Since minorities constitute a disproportionate percentage of the poor, as long as we depend upon standardized tests that predictably sort populations based upon family wealth and income, any efforts to integrate schools will be muted by counter-efforts to separate students with tracking based on standardized test scores.

Standardized tests are no less the driver of separation and ostracism than they were almost a hundred years ago when the first IQ tests were used during WWI to determine who would be sent to the trenches in France or to desk jobs in Washington.

Suburban System of Disparate Villages and Hamlets Impacts Students' Equal Access to High Quality Education

Garden City, NY (October 1, 2009) - A Long Island Index Special Report, "Why Boundaries Matter: A Study of Five Separate and Unequal Long Island School Districts," finds alarming disparities among Long Island's school districts. The report, based on a study conducted by Teachers College, Columbia University, aims to understand how Long Island's system of delivering educational services across 125 districts impacts students' access to a high quality education. The study's author, Amy Stuart Wells, Professor of Sociology and Education at Teachers College, explains, "Although this study is about Long Island's educational system, it is indicative of what is occurring in suburbs across our country. The segregation that occurs here and the accompanying impact on education funding and quality typifies what's happening across America and is a national concern." Dr. Wells and her colleagues studied five different Long Island school districts, each representing a specific demographic trend on the Island, and conducted interviews with more than 75 school administrators, teachers, students, parents and school board members. In order to maintain the confidentiality of the interviews, the names of the school districts have been changed to pseudonyms. "What we hear in these voices - whether they are privileged, affluent white students in a low needs district or educators struggling to provide an 'adequate' education for the poorest students of color in a high-needs district - is how the separateness defines them and their educational opportunities" said Dr. Wells. The study sheds new light on the following: How public school districts with more resources are able to generate higher levels of public funding and further supplement that funding through private resources from parents, community members and other donors who are connected to the district. How the inequities become wider in this type of system as wealthier schools have greater ability to offer students wider selections of courses, better teachers and more access to opportunities. "In poorer schools their 'ceiling' is meeting state mandates" said Dr. Wells. "For more affluent schools the academic 'floor' is even higher than the poorer schools' ceiling". How the types of support systems that students at wealthier schools typically have in place, inside and outside of school - and that students in less affluent districts often lack -- help them through the difficult times. The presence or absence of such supports weighs more heavily than the kinds of problems or challenges students face in affluent versus poor communities. How school and district reputations can become self-fulfilling prophecies, with poorer districts unable to attract more affluent residents or more prepared educators. "We found that in some wealthy districts, there were hundreds of applicants for a single teaching job, while in poorer districts just miles away, schools had difficulty attracting a single applicant for a teaching job" said Dr. Wells. As a result, these ways of "knowing" school districts through their reputations helps to legitimize the separation and inequality across districts that so many people on Long Island say is morally wrong. Nancy Rauch Douzinas, president of the Rauch Foundation and publisher of the Long Island Index, noted that, "If the Island is to rebuild its economic engine and provide the high quality jobs we were once known for, we have to address the economic and structural divide among our school districts. We cannot meet the needs of the future if we continue to allow today's disparities to continue. Building 125 walls between 125 districts has led to great social injustice, intolerable property tax costs and will ultimately lead to failure". In one of the districts studied by the Teachers College research team, the issues of diversity are front and center as the teachers and administrators grapple with whether or not to alter their existing system of separating middle school students into "Honors" and "Regular" classes. In the current system, the Honors classes tend to be disproportionately white while the regular classes are disproportionately African American and Latino. One administrator equates it to "apartheid." "The Long Island suburban school system has taken a national problem of separating children to a higher and more damaging level" noted Ann Golob, Director of the Long Island Index. "Although we have been re-segregating for the past three decades, many school districts are quietly finding alternatives that open the door to opportunities to more students. De-tracking is one option for districts that have diverse populations but segregated classrooms within the school. But for those districts where homogeneity - whether largely white and Asian or alternatively, African American and Latino - is the norm, a wider set of programs and policies need to be considered." Despite the rigidity of the existing school district structure, the authors point to several options that could be adopted by Long Islanders to incorporate greater flexibility and give all students greater exposure to an expanded array of opportunities. These include: Give BOCES (Nassau Board of Cooperative Educational Services) a greater role in helping students cross school district boundaries and gain exposure to a more diverse mix of students by creating more "magnet" schools or expanded educational programs beyond the current array of vocational, special education and arts programs. Create a series of "choice-oriented programs", similar to the ones that exist throughout the country, that allow students to transfer between districts in order to attend a wider variety of schools. Find innovative ways to make school district boundaries more porous allowing the flow of students and teachers across them for special events, classes and programs. Look to the NYS legislature to create policies and programs that support and sustain integrated educational opportunities. Resources for faculty recruitment and development to help educators address issues of tracking and re-segregation within racially and ethnically diverse schools. Amend New York State Laws to provide fewer public funds to private schools. In some districts the proportion of funds that flow out from the public schools Under the terms of the Long Island Index study, the names of the schools that were the focus of Dr. Wells' research cannot be released. However, the Long Island Index and Teachers College can provide the media access to South Side High School in Rockville Centre, on Long Island, a school where nearly 40% of the school's black and Hispanic students are candidates for the International Baccalaureate (IB) diploma, a two-year college-credit program similar to Advanced Placement. Fifteen years ago, virtually no students of color at South Side were taking IB or AP courses. Now, thanks to the school's decision to eliminate tracks (categories that separate those who are college-bound from those deemed not to be) the school averages fewer than five dropouts per year, every student takes accelerated math and nearly all take calculus. Black and Latino students in Rockville Centre also have higher rates of earning the New York State regents diploma than do white students statewide. To read more about the South Side High and issues of segregation and school quality in suburbia, visit http://www.tc.edu/news/article.htm?id=6609. "Let's hope that Long Islanders heed the call of both the Long Island Index Report 2009 and this more qualitative analysis of inequality and choose to take action to make their suburban setting a model for the future of a diverse society and not a throw back to a past of white flight, inequality and hyper-segregation created and reinforced during the 20th Century," said Dr. Wells. Download "Why Boundaries Matter: A Study of Five Separate and Unequal Long Island School Districts." Read the Long Island Index Special Analysis, "Long Island's Educational Structure: Resources, Outcomes, Options."