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Make the most of Bus Radio’s demise

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

A few months ago, I blogged about BusRadio, the company that supplied music and advertising to school buses across the country, including those in the Denver, Douglas County and Aurora school districts. It now appears that the company has ceased operation.

According to the article in today’s Denver Post, it is unclear what will happen to the equipment buses used to broadcast a mixture of pop music and advertisements. I will repeat my suggestion: It would be nice if that equipment could be used to broadcast something with some sort of educational value.

No, I am not suggesting extending the school day by blasting recitations of times tables or state capitals. But how about classical music or other music that children are not necessarily exposed to on a daily basis? If the districts get to keep the equipment, they could choose which music to play. If another for-profit company purchases the equipment, the districts, who are in this case the client, could use their leverage to demand that whatever start-up steps in plays educational content, even if the advertising remains.

This also seems like an opportunity for an arts-related non-profit to step in an possibly purchase the equipment, which could be used to play music to which kids are not being exposed during the day as a result of cuts to programs in the arts.

The fare of the old BusRadio was the audio equivalent of Skittles. It does not have to be replaced with the educational equivalent of lima beans but how about something in between?

Popularity: 2% [?]

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

On closing schools, more information, please

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

I am glad that DPS is tracking what happened to the students in the schools closed in 2007. I am also glad that these students appear to be doing well.

But I wonder why, according to today’s article in the Denver Post, they have refused to release the data to the Post. Nor did it appear from the Post article that the district had provided much detail on the students it had tracked.

Closing “failing” schools is one of the primary means of school reform in urban districts. While this approach seems to make sense, not everything that seems commonsensical is actually workable.

Students, teachers, parents and taxpayers would be better served with more information on this approach that we have somewhat blindly adopted on an enormous scale.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Posted in Reform | 4 Comments »

Has the bad economy helped with teacher shortages?

Monday, August 31st, 2009

Now that school has started again, I find myself wondering about the metro area’s job market for teachers.

Given the poor economy, we have not, for some time, heard the traditional laments about teacher shortages. But what about the perpetual shortage areas of special education, English-as-a-second-language and secondary science and math? What about the inner-city and rural schools that have always had the most trouble attracting quality teachers?

Are they still making due with long-term subs or hiring history majors to teach math? Has the poor economy actually created a bigger and more-qualified teaching pool? If so, has bureaucratic red tape prevented schools from taking advantage of this bigger pool? What about the recent college graduate with a certification in a non-shortage area? Does he or she have a prayer of finding a job?  I’d be interested in seeing observations or, better yet, data on how the slow economy and high unemployment rates have impacted teacher supply and demand in Colorado. Anyone have any thoughts?

Popularity: 3% [?]

Posted in Teaching and learning | No Comments »

The fate of old Manual’s orphans

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

A thoughtful article in Sunday’s Denver Post describes what has happened to students who attended the old Manual High School, before it was shut down. While the study cited in this article does not address the important question of whether the closure was beneficial to future Manual students, it does pretty clearly suggest that it was detrimental in multiple ways to the kids who were attending the school back in 2006.

Research like this is all too rare in an era in which closing down and reopening schools has become the flavor of the month in educational policy circles.  It was good to see that the superintendent seemed  responsive to learning from the study, perhaps by phasing programs out rather than simply shutting them down.

This approach seems like it might be especially appropriate for longstanding high schools like Manual because they occupy a place in the community that extends well beyond test scores, making it particularly traumatic for students who get displaced by a reform.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Posted in Reform | 12 Comments »

Are suburbs really integrating?

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009

A report released yesterday by the Pew Hispanic Center provides some national context for Burt Hubbard’s excellent Sunday Post story highlighting the increasing diversity of Denver’s suburbs.

Some highlights: The percentage of non-white students in America’s suburbs increased from 28% in 1993-94 to 41% in 2006-07. The growth of the Latino population helped drive this trend. The percentage of Latino students in suburban schools increased from 11% in 93-94 to 20% in 06-07.

This trend has had the overall effect of slightly reducing ethnic and racial segregation in American public schools. However, the racial diversity of individual suburban schools has not kept pace with the overall trends toward greater overall suburban diversity.

In fact, there are some signs that Latinos in particular may be on the road to becoming more racially isolated within individual schools. Anyway, it’s worth a read, especially in light of Alan Gottlieb’s letter-from-the editor this week.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Posted in Integration | 1 Comment »

A radical thought: Make BusRadio educational

Friday, March 6th, 2009

The Denver Post ran an interesting story this week on BusRadio, a Massachusetts-based company that provides musical programming on school buses in some metro area districts. (In exchange, the districts share 5% of the revenue generated by the advertisements.)

Setting aside the whole issue of advertising in school venues, which has been debated for years, I have to wonder why schools wouldn’t insist on programming that is at least somewhat educational. Instead, the bulk of the programming consists of popular music by artists like Rihanna, Miley Cyrus and Ne-Yo.

I have nothing against popular music. But I’m sure kids are already getting plenty of exposure to it at home. Wouldn’t it be better to expose kids to classical music? Surely it would better fulfill one of the justifications for BusRadio, which is to keep kids calm.

For younger kids, how about something like SchoolHouse Rock, the words to which many adults recall long after they have forgotten almost everything they learned in school? Or even news programming or a recording of an age-appropriate book being read out loud?

Channel One, the TV network that airs commercially sponsored news in thousands of American schools, has been around now for two decades. I’m not saying that I support Channel One but at least schools are getting something educational out of that deal.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Posted in Teaching and learning | 5 Comments »

Economic integration is not utopian fantasy

Monday, March 2nd, 2009

Economic integration has once again reared its ugly head in the threads of this blog. Here are some of my thoughts:

I suppose I’m a little puzzled that it is always “utopian” to support integrated schools yet “pragmatic” and “laudable” to support a policy of racially and economically segregated schools that has repeatedly failed over many, many decades. Is it not equally utopian to think that merely tinkering around with separate but equal schools is suddenly going to work for all students?

That is not to say it is not working for some students right now. By all means, let the KIPPs and West Denver Preps of this world continue and expand to the point they can expand and maintain quality. But why does the choice have to be West Denver Prep..or a failing, segregated school? Why is it that we can’t have a few more diverse options..like the Denver School of Science and Technology, or Odyssey Charter School or Carson Elementary or Park Hill K-8 School or East High School?

When economic integration comes up on this blog, people often ask..How does it work? Here’s a NY Times article that provides an overview of economic integration in Wake County and also mentions several other districts that use this method of integration. A knee-jerk and pretty consistent reaction to any type of school reform, whether it be choice or charters or..economic integration is..well, those guys did it over there but no, it can’t work here because we are waaaay different.

Yes, Denver has more poverty than Wake County. So, naturally,  a similar policy in Denver would look a lot different than it looks there. It would almost certainly have to start out on a much smaller scale, possibly as a demonstration project, perhaps in one area of the city. (That would be ideal, after all, because it could be studied and scrapped if it did, indeed, not work here.)It would almost certainly need to include attracting people from surrounding suburbs.  One thing Colorado already has going for it is that we already allow families to cross district boundaries to enroll their kids in schools.

For more information, especially on the legal intricacies and history of desegregation: Here is a manual produced by the NAACP and Civil Rights Project. Yes, economic integration and even certain types of racial integration are still legal, even after the 2007 Seattle/Louisville Supreme Court ruling. And yes, a disclaimer, both the Civil Rights Project and the NAACP support integration but I think this manual is a pretty fair look at this issue.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Posted in Integration | 7 Comments »

Don’t hang all your hopes on KIPP

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009

A recent report raises interesting questions about the Knowledge is Power Program. In it, Columbia University Professor Jeffrey R. Henig takes stock of the research on schools that embrace this intensive approach to boosting the achievement levels of low-income and minority kids. [The report has been covered by Education Week and described favorably in Jay Mathews's column in the Washington Post. ]

Although KIPP critics have accused the schools of succeeding by “creaming” the best students from surrounding schools, Henig finds that this is not the case. Kids who choose KIPP really do seem to be outperforming similar kids in more traditional schools.

However, a second more troubling trend does emerge from Henig’s analysis, which includes all the KIPP-related studies he could find. (There were, unfortunately, only seven). That trend: Attrition at KIPP appears to be not only big but selective, meaning that KIPP schools are not only leaking students, they are losing the least successful students at the highest rate.

That’s not all that shocking to me. Not everyone is willing to make the intensive commitment KIPP requires. And the worse you’re already doing in school, the more resistant you probably are to spending even more time in school. Losing your least successful students, of course, means that your test results look better than they might have if everyone had remained. But that’s not so important to me. What’s impressive about KIPP is that it helps the kids it helps.

What does concern me is that when reformers single-mindedly focus on KIPP and KIPP-like schools as solutions for the woes that befall inner city schools, they fail to take into account that not everyone fits the mold. And Henig, who is generally viewed as being pretty fair and balanced on the often-contentious issue of school choice, finds that a pretty high percentage of kids do not.

That means that efforts to reform inner-city schools need to consider options other than KIPP and KIPP-like schools. Even if KIPP completely reaches capacity (and I think there’s still a lot of room for growth), it probably won’t ever be the right approach for a large body of kids. That brings me back to Alan’s post on the desirability of considering bigger picture, alternative solutions like economic integration.

Let’s continue to support KIPP and KIPP-like options. But let’s not give up on the kids who need something else to succeed. Few of us would presume to say that every middle class would kid needs the same exact educational approach to succeed. Why would low-income and minority kids be any less diverse?

Popularity: 2% [?]

Posted in Reform, School choice | 2 Comments »

Education policy’s own “Onion?”

Tuesday, December 9th, 2008

Some of you may be offended. Others may experience a (much-needed) chuckle in these dark times.

http://edtweak.weebly.com/index.html

Popularity: 1% [?]

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Some actual data on K-8s vs middle schools

Monday, November 24th, 2008

Given DPS’s emphasis in recent years on K-8 schools, I thought some people might be interested in a piece of research that I learned about when it was presented in the same session as mine at the American Evaluation Conference in this month in Denver. The research team, led by Missouri State Education School Dean David Hough, compared 501 K-8 “elemiddle” schools with 534 (6-8) middle schools. The schools, all public, were located in 49 different districts in 26 states. The K-8 schools in the study were more likely to be located in the inner-city. They enrolled higher percentages of minority and low-income students.

Yet compared to 6-8 schools, K-8 schools:

o       Had slightly higher attendance rates (94% v 92%)

o       Had lower expulsion rates (.2% v. 4.1%)

o       Suspended fewer students (an average of 77 v 139)

o       Were more likely to make Adequate Yearly Progress under No Child Left Behind (56% v 43%)

That data comes from the 2005-06 school year. The research is ongoing with more analyses planned for 2009. Not much rigorous research exists on this topic so I found this study to be both interesting and important, especially since the number of K-8 schools has increased steeply since the passage of No Child Left Behind. The authors of this study project that, by 2010, K-8 schools will actually outnumber 6-8 schools.  For more information on the study, contact David Hough.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Posted in middle grades | 2 Comments »

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