Archive for May, 2010
Celebrating the Positive
As the week closes and we head into a long weekend, I could rehash all the bad news about our education results, the budget crisis and California politics as usual. But instead I want to take a quick look back and reflect on the positive developments in CA over the last several months that might result in our state improving the quality of our education system for the majority of our students – students in poverty and students of color.
1. The drive to change seniority-based layoff policies continues. Five months ago, no one was talking about this issue. Now everyone is. There is one bill that passed out of committee in the Senate and another that may emerge in the Assembly and the Governor has stayed committed to changing this lunacy as part of the budget process. Nearly every major paper in California has raised it as an issue and there is a real drive from some of the state’s largest school districts to change a policy they know hurts kids.
2. We decided to apply for Race to the Top. The first time, we came in 27th. This time it looks like we’ll be doing a lot better job. The reform plan contains some great ideas for change and the process of placing some of our best education minds together in a collaborative has provided a great counterpoint to the typical rehashed adult-centered ideas generated by the Education Coalition.
3. A focus on a quality education as a civil right. It’s clear from the testimony of civil rights groups in opposition to seniority-based layoffs in high need schools; the decision by the judge in Los Angeles to force LA Unified to skip over the three middle schools in the layoff process; and the new drive from Public Advocates to force the state to pay for the quality education our children need in order to achieve those high state standards, that change is coming. And it is coming from outside Sacramento from those who see a quality education as a civil right. That momentum is going to build. Those who stand in the way – the education special interests and the tax payer associations – should be very afraid.
Hope Rises from Below (not from Sacramento)
At the Education Trust-West, we’ve been tracking the state’s efforts on Race to the Top pretty closely. After we lost the first round and ended up in the lower tier of applicants, we encouraged the state to re-apply. After all, it would be hard to do much worse and given the stakes for our kids, it was worth the effort. During our initial meeting with them, our leaders seemed so depressed by their first round score that there wasn’t a whole lot of willingness to try again. But when they came to their senses, we were pleased when they chose a strategy that placed our best foot forward – leveraging the good work of a group of reform-minded school districts.
Now that we are entering the final stages of the application process, we can see, based on this MOU, that the state is not making the mistake it made in the first round – prioritizing consensus over reform. In a state as large as ours, the notion that you can achieve consensus on school reform, particularly with Sacramento interests as hidebound as CTA and ACSA standing in the way was unlikely from the beginning. But in a state as large as ours, you are also likely to have a sizable number of education reformers committed to acting on behalf of the best interests of students.
These are the folks who represent the possibilities for the future for California. And as we have watched school districts and others engage in the process of putting together a Race to the Top Application for California, it is clear that we do have leaders who are willing to embrace serious reforms and be accountable for their implementation. After spending some recent time in Sacramento, listening to lunatic arguments of the entrenched interests, watching the reform elements work together and witnessing the results of their work is really refreshing.
Losers Again.
You gotta wonder about our wonderful state. Here we are – the eighth largest economy in the world. More students that any other state. More Latino students than the total student enrollment of 48 states. More English learners than the total student enrollment of 38 states. The center of technological innovation in the country. The home of Silicon Valley. The home of nearly every major tech company in the United States.
Between the needs of our student population and the expertise of one of the state’s premier industries, how could we come out on the losing side of a multimillion dollar application to fund our state-wide data system (after coming in 27th on the first round of the Race to the Top application)?
Are we that pathetic?
Here are the winners:
“In total, $250 million was awarded this year through the SLDS grant competition. States received varying award sizes based on differing needs and requests. The full list of award winners is: Arkansas - $9.8 million; Colorado – $17.4 million; Florida – $10.0 million; Illinois – $11.9 million; Kansas – $9.1 million; Maine – $7.3 million; Massachusetts – $13.0 million; Michigan – $10.6 million; Minnesota – $12.4 million; Mississippi – $7.6 million; New York – $19.7 million; Ohio – $5.1 million; Oregon – $10.5 million; Pennsylvania – $14.3 million; South Carolina – $14.9 million; Texas – $18.2 million; Utah – $9.6 million; Virginia – $17.5 million; Washington – $17.3 million; Wisconsin – $13.8 million. All 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands applied.”
As you can see, a whole lot of money was lost. And the loss was devastating for proponents of our statewide data system. The dollars would have:
- Expanded our existing systems to include preschool students and include college and career indicators.
- Renovated the California State University (CSU) data system to link it to K-12.
- Built a high-quality P-20 Longitudinal Data Warehouse in order to link and report education data from preschool through postsecondary.
- Allowed researchers to use data from this system to allow educational policymakers to make “informed” decisions about educational investments
Our existing state data system, CALPADs, has had performance issues that have made it difficult – if not impossible—for districts to submit data to the system. And its possible that the feds might have decided that it wasn’t a good idea to give us money to expand a system that isn’t currently working. If that’s the case than the folks responsible for the CALPADs debacle now have two black marks instead of one on their record and the question is whether we should be turning over this work to someone/anyone with the ability to make this critical system work. We should also be doing an in-depth investigation into how this situation got screwed up in the first place.
The Importance of Adequacy
Today, we heard about the possibility that Public Advocates will file a lawsuit on behalf of the children of California to force our state to provide them with at an adequate education. The truth is that we should be focusing on providing all children with a high quality education but we have to start somewhere. And in our state that somewhere is to realize that we do not fund our schools at the levels of other states.
This divide between our state and others struck me as a young teacher in California in the 90′s. After my experience as a teacher and paraprofessional in east coast schools, I could not believe the conditions in my largely Latino and African-American school in San Francisco. There were two measurable differences. The first was resources available to the students and the teachers. The second was the quality of instruction received by the students. No amount of money will fix the second issue. But money will resolve the first issue of resources and supports for students and teachers.
My wife and I met in San Francisco where she’d been a teacher in a neighboring elementary school for the past ten years. She had the same experience as me in reverse when she came with me back to Boston – when I went to earn my doctorate. She simply could believe the difference in supports and resources available to students and teachers in her Boston school. It was an eye-opening experience and one that every policymaker in California should be forced to go through.
As a state, we do not spend the dollars we should be spending on our schools. Part of the reason is that we take the resources we have and spend them poorly, directing them towards adult salaries and benefits instead of student supports. But on the whole, we simply do not spend as much as east coast districts and you can see the impact on our schools, in the absence of counselors, nurses, administrators, interventions, etc. The list of what students miss out on here vs. what they receive in a state like Massachusetts, Texas or New York is endless. And I wonder if some of the reason for that is the race, ethnicity and langauge spoken by the vast majority of our students?
I imagine there are few states where discussions of eliminating summer school or shortening the school year are seriously entertained, were the notion of eliminating basic support staff at the district level is constantly broached. We seem to have these conversations every year in California. And if it takes the courts to put an end to that lunatic cycle and to force our elected officials to provide our children with the quality education they deserve then we will owe a debt of gratitude to the courts.
Looking at the Data – It isn’t about Average Experience
If you’ve been following the work of the Education Trust-West, you know that too many of California’s students in poverty and students of color attend persistently underperforming schools, contributing to the achievement gaps that separate students in poverty and students of color from their peers. You’ve seen the data showing that our brown and black students do not have equitable access to highly effective teachers, which research shows is the most important in-school factor influencing student achievement.
If you look at what happened in the LA schools that were the subject of the ACLU lawsuit, it’s pretty clear “last-in, first-out” seniority-based teacher layoffs make these problems even worse. Our neediest students and school communities get the brunt of school district layoffs when they happen. Not only is this not an equitable situation, it is an unequal one – raising the issue of serious civil rights violations.
Knowing this, the next question we must answer is how do we protect our students from the disproportionate impact of teacher layoffs and create the conditions for ongoing improvement in the student performance, particularly in tough budget times. I believe that there is only one way – making sure that our highest need students are taught by the best teachers and that we protect effective teachers in times of budget crisis regardless of their seniority.
In my previous blog entry, I expressed the fervent hope that the ACLU lawsuit would lead to a system where we prioritized effective teachers, protected effective teachers and created the conditions where we distributed effective teachers on an equitable basis. At the Ed Trust-West, we have been looking at the data on teacher distribution and the research on effectiveness and two things are clear to us. The first is that problem of performance is our high need schools is not related to the average experience of their teaching staffs. On average, lower-performing schools in California do not have a dramatically less-experienced teaching staff. Even without explicit state law in place, the average years of experience of teachers in a school does not vary much between low-performing schools and higher-performing schools statewide. Indeed, even in the most struggling schools, the average years of teacher experience is over 10 years statewide. Averages hide the real stories of inequitable distribution of teachers. What the data does show is that lower-performing schools have higher proportions of new, untenured staffs than other schools. This reality is hidden when only averages are evaluated. Averages can also hide evidence of things like, for example, a bimodal distribution of teachers. In these cases, a low-performing school could have predominantly very new and very senior teachers, while still maintaining an average equivalent to the rest of the district. It is not surprising that teacher effectiveness research from other states identifies these two periods of a teacher’s career (the beginning and the end) as when teachers are the least effective at producing positive outcomes for their students.
As a result, a solution to the layoff problem that prioritizes averaging years of service for schools is both unnecessary and counterproductive. Our highest need schools could continue to have their staffs decapitated of their less senior teachers without changing the average years of service. And from an instructional level, they could actually suffer. But if we could construct a system that guaranteed they could keep their best teachers, regardless of seniority; if we looked to ensure they had teachers in the districts highest band of teacher quality and could keep those teachers, regardless of budget crisis, imagine how quickly the lives of their students would change.
What Does the ACLU Teacher Layoffs Lawsuit Ruling Mean?
It’s been a few days since the ACLU lawsuit results were revealed. The ACLU filed a lawsuit based on the disproportionate impact of the teacher layoffs over the last several years on three high-need middle schools that are disproportionally Latino and African-American. Some of these schools and their students have experienced massive turnover in their staffs over the past three years. The ruling requires LAUSD to skip the three schools in implementing the layoffs.
The interesting question is how this ruling will be taken beyond the three schools. One of the possible solutions that folks are floating is requiring all schools in a district to have the same relative years of experience in their staffs. While this sounds like a wonderful idea, it assumes that what these schools need is a lot more senior teachers to balance the younger ones. In the end, what these schools need most is a lot more effective teachers regardless of their years in a system. It would be a pity if the promise of this lawsuit was turned into another misdirected legal solution. It would be wondeful if the promise of this lawsuit was fulfilled by forcing the creation of a system that would prevent great, less senior teachers from being bumped out of their schools for any reason. It would be great if this lawsuit forced California and allowed LAUSD to develop a system where layoffs were based on effectiveness not how long someone had been working in a system.
The New Race to the Top MOU
We were very pleased that California chose to participate in the next round of the Race to the Top process. Over the last week there has been a flurry of activity in putting together the memorandum of understanding that districts will have to sign to participate in the second round application. The Memorandum was released today and we are encouraged by several elements of the Great Teachers and Leaders section. We are pleased to see that student growth will be a formal aspect of a teacher’s evaluation. We think it is only rational that the tests that determine how well a student learned in a teacher’s class should be part of a teacher’s evaluation. We are also excited to see that, contrary to common practice, districts who are part of the collaborative applying for second round funding will be evaluating their teachers and leaders every year. For those of you who think this is not remarkable, go take a look at the collective bargaining agreement in a nearby district and see how often a teacher or other certificated employee gets evaluated. In San Diego, the most recent teacher’s contract requires an evaluation every five years.
At first glance, there are a number of other important advances in this MOU in comparison to the earlier MOU. I think this proves that the strategy of working with a small core group of reform-minded districts has the capacity to produce a far more reform and student-focused application than a process that aimed at garnering the broadest support (which in California also means the lowest common denominator of reform). I’ll be commenting more extensively on the MOU in coming days. The MOU is atached to the blog if you want to take a look.
Crisis in California’s Chronically Underperforming Schools Continues
(Oakland, CA) – The state released its API base rankings today and one thing is clear, California’s schools continue to demonstrate vast disparities in achievement, particularly among chronically underperforming schools serving thousands of Latinos, African-Americans, and English learners.
Across the state, the 2009 API base data from the spring 2009 statewide tests reveal a familiar picture:
- African-American and Latino students substantially trail their white and Asian peers across all grades.
- Roughly 150 points separate African-American students from their white peers (670 compared to 827, respectively).
- API scores decrease for all subgroups from elementary to middle and high school.
API scores and rankings for California’s persistently underperforming schools, which serve high concentrations of students of color and students in poverty are even more discouraging. These schools are almost exclusively Latino (75%) and African-American (14%), with 78% of students qualifying for free or reduced price lunch. After an infusion of state dollars in both good and bad economic times, these schools should have improved outcomes for our most vulnerable students.
“The API data demonstrate that schools on California’s list of 188 lowest performing schools continue to produce minimal gains despite the investment of more than $265 million in state school improvement dollars over the last six years,” stated Arun Ramanathan, executive director of The Education Trust—West.
The API data reveal that these schools have only skimmed the surface of school improvement:
- 86% (152 schools) of the state’s 177 persistently underperforming schools with rankings for 2008 and 2009 had no change in statewide rank over the last year.
- 9.5% (17 schools) of persistently underperforming schools decreased in statewide rank.
- Only 8 schools (4.5%) increased in statewide rank.
Sadly, the majority of these schools failed to improve their ranking even when compared to schools with matching student demographics. Of the 177 persistently underperforming schools with similar school rankings for 2008 and 2009:
- 76% (135 schools) either failed to improve their similar schools rank or ranked lower in 2009, with some schools dropping as much as 4 ranks.
- Only 23% (41 schools) improved in their similar schools ranking.
The Obama administration has set aside $3.5 billion for states willing to identify and aggressively reform their chronically underperforming schools. The California Department of Education will soon be flooded with proposals seeking funding from the federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) program. The Education Trust—West calls on state education leaders to establish a rigorous application process for these dollars and turn down applications that recycle failed school-improvement strategies from the past.
For more details about the crisis in our persistently underperforming schools and the aggressive strategies needed to turn them around, see Keeping the Promise of Change at www.edtrustwest.org.
Keeping the Promise of Change in California’s Lowest Performing Schools
(Oakland, CA) – According to a new report by The Education Trust—West, Keeping the Promise of Change, California has thrown more than $265 million over the last six years at its bottom five percent of Title I schools in a series of unproductive “reform” initiatives. These reforms have skimmed the surface of school improvement, while producing minimal gains for the thousands of African-American and Latino students trapped in drop-out factories throughout the state. Now these schools and other low performers are eligible for tens of millions in new school improvement funding from Washington, D.C.
The California Department of Education will soon be flooded with proposals seeking funding from the federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) program. The Obama administration has set aside $3.5 billion for states willing to identify and aggressively reform their chronically underperforming schools.
“Nearly six years and a quarter of a billion dollars later, the list of California’s lowest performing schools serving mostly students of color is ridiculously familiar.” said Arun Ramanathan, executive director of The Education Trust—West. “This cycle must end. By rewarding federal funds to only those schools and districts that propose high-impact reforms such as placing the best teachers with the neediest students, we can prevent these new dollars from turning into another school reform money-pit.”
As the state releases its API rankings for schools this week, the tired excuses for why our lowest performing schools cannot improve will surface as well. Our neediest children and their communities will once again be blamed for school failure. Then, in what is sadly becoming an annual ritual, the same old set of reform strategies will follow— deferring accountability for how well our students have been previously served.
New federal funds offer California another chance to create opportunities for all students to excel in the great neighborhood schools that communities want. The Education Trust—West calls on state education leaders to establish a rigorous application process for these dollars and turn down applications that recycle failed school-improvement strategies from the past.
“The report shows how more money alone for the most underperforming schools has not sufficiently spurred the improvement in student achievement that the funds were intended to generate,” added Veronica Melvin, executive director of the Alliance for a Better Community (ABC), a coalition of leading organizations and civic leaders promoting equity for Latinos. “The study forecasts that emerging federal funding and policy ‘turnaround’ efforts will experience the same meager outcomes unless higher standards for meaningful school transformation are advanced.”
The full report is available online at: www.edtrustwest.org
Putting Teacher Effectiveness First
Just to give you a sense of where this conversation on teacher effectiveness is in California - It isn’t. The ACLU filed their lawsuit against the layoffs in LAUSD based on balancing years of service in high need, high poverty schools – not effectiveness. It looks as though our Senate leadership is going to focus on a policy fix that encourages more senior teachers, regardless of how effective they are to go into our high poverty, high need schools as a way to fix the disproportionate impact of layoffs. It is the typical backward thinking that has screwed our high need schools for years.
Let’s see? What do our high need schools have in abundance – teachers with less tenure who may be energetic and sometimes quite effective and who may be more like the communities in which they work. What else do they have - lots of older teachers who may be burned out and disconnected and who are less likely to reflect the communities in which they work. In a world where effectiveness was important we would keep the best teachers regardless of how long they had worked in a school system. In a world where effectiveness wasn’t important, we would not only get rid of great teachers through insane personnel policies, we would file lawsuits to make sure that we brought more older teachers into our schools regardless of their effectiveness and call it social justice. What a crock.
We have plenty of data on the impact of teachers on student performance. Districts around the country are using this data to identify highly effective teachers. This is standard practice in other professions. They identify their high performers and strive to keep them. In education, we do the opposite. And we do it at a point when we need our great teachers, particularly our less senior ones, more than ever, because they are our future.
Has anyone noticed that the baby boomers are going to retire soon. They’ll head off into the sunset with their job protections and their long-time pension benefits and they are going to leave our systems and our kids not only short of dollars but short of the great teachers who are needed to replace them. Why would you enter into a system or a profession where the only thing that matters is how long you have sat in a seat or stood up in front of a class? Why would we want to send our children into a system where the only thing that mattered about a teacher was how long they had collected their paycheck – not their impact on my child’s learning. And we ask ourselves why we have persistently low performing schools or why we fail to close the achievement gap.
The answer is patently obvious. We have structured an education system that functions like the economy in Greece. The focus of our policymakers and decision-makers is on the feeding the needs of the adults and not on nurturing the future of our nation. Would it be this case in our state if so many of these students were not brown, black, poor or had parents who didn’t speak English? I highly doubt it.
