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Archive for the ‘Accountability’ Category

The disease of direct placement

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

Tomorrow, the Denver Board of Education will hear public comment on and discuss Superintendent Boasberg’s proposal to limit forced direct placement for Title I schools.  While I continue to believe this policy — which turns a free-form dance into musical chairs — is a good first step, it does little to address the root cause.

Data on DPS direct placements is fascinating: the disparity for Title I schools — which house a higher proportion of students in poverty — is well documented.  Less well known is how specific grades are affected: if you looks over the past three years, each DPS traditional middle school averages 6 direct placement teachers, compared to high schools (4), K-8 (3) and elementary programs (2).  That seems a tough burden to continue to sap DPS’s struggling middle-school sector. Also little known is who does not take DP teachers: both Charter and Innovation Schools.  That the proponents of education reform both outside and within the DPS establishment both believe it is a bad idea is as clear a signal as I can imagine.

Aside from the specific DPS proposal — which does not even forbid DP’s at Title I schools, it just tries to limit it — is the greater context of forced direct placement.  For this practice is a disease, and while Denver is not as sick as other cities, it would be an error not to understand the full extent of the illness.

Read, for example, this LA Weekly article titled “LAUSD’s Dance of the Lemons.”  What is fascinating here, apart from the sheer injustice of the practice, is that among LA’s public employees, the inability to terminate poor performers is unique to the school system:

Just a few blocks from LAUSD’s skyscraper headquarters, Los Angeles City Hall’s approach to firing public employees provides a stark contrast to protections enjoyed by teachers, also public employees. Despite civil-service protections, City Hall fires from its 48,000-plus workforce of garbage, parks, street-services, engineering, utilities and other employees more than 80 tenured workers annually. During the past decade, in which LAUSD fired four failing teachers, 800 to 1,000 underperforming civil service–protected workers were fired at City Hall. City Personnel Department General Manager Margaret Whelan says nobody is paid to leave. She was dumbfounded that LAUSD is paying to dislodge teachers, saying, “That’s ridiculous. I can’t believe that. Golly, it makes no sense. Some are not even mediocre, they’re horrible.”

Also worth reading is the New Yorker essay — generally recognized as one of the best long-form pieces of journalism last year — on New York City’s rubber rooms.

Lastly an Op-Ed from NYC Chancellor Joel Klein — who found that prosecuting Microsoft for monopoly practices was a cakewalk compared with trying to fire NY teachers with a history of poor performance.

Denver is not LA or NYC (thank goodness).  The problem of forced direct placement here is — like the city itself – smaller and more manageable.  However just because the harm is on a lesser scale is not a reason for inaction.  At least one member of the board has already dismissed Boasberg’s proposal as a PR stunt.  But until Denver and other cities do away with forced placement altogether and move to a system of mutual consent, the disease of direct placement will continue to claim as its primary victims the one group that has no say in the practice and does not participate in the debate: children.

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Lemon musical chairs

Monday, February 8th, 2010

In another sign that antiquated and harmful education practices once thought sacrosanct are starting to fall, Denver’s “Dance of the Lemons” — the process by which the teachers no principal will hire are forcibly placed into a classroom somewhere in the public school system — may finally change.

Last year, the Denver Post noted:

Nearly three-quarters of unassigned veteran Denver Public Schools teachers who have not found jobs are forcibly placed into schools with the poorest students… Under union and district rules, these direct placements are made without regard to the desires of the teachers, school principals or parents.

On Friday, DPS superintendent Boasberg announced his intention that the District’s lowest performing schools — almost all with high poverty student demographics — become exempt from receiving any of these teachers.

This is a significant move by DPS, and also long overdue.  Now the music still plays, and lemon dance is not over yet, as under the DCTA contract these teachers will have to be placed somewhere, but the seats are going to be a little harder to find, and far better illuminated.  When higher-performing schools, which generally have a stronger culture and leadership, and more engaged parents, get stuck with lemons, you can bet the chance the system undergoes change increases, because the tolerance for bad teachers will be far lower.  I’ve written about the power of affluent parenting previously — if some of Denver’s best schools suddenly face the forced hiring of several teachers, expect some parents and civic groups to finally take a stand on this deplorable practice.

There is increased agreement that education hiring should be by mutual consent (both the teacher and the principal agree to the hire), an approach that was embraced by the rest of the employed world, oh, just a few decades ago.  Changing the lemon dance to a game of musical chairs is a good first step, but far better would be to turn the music off entirely.

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Will Charter 2.0 help to quell the backlash?

Friday, December 18th, 2009

This will be my last EdNews commentary for 2009. (Okay, I’ll pause a moment to allow that to sink in … Or at least long enough for the wild applause to stop.)

Reading the Colorado Charters blog recently, I learned that the Adams 12 school district (for the uninitiated, Northglenn-Thornton, north Denver metro area) this week denied two more charter school applications — by best estimates, making it six applications in a row shot down by this board. (Full disclosure: I was on one of these start-up charter school boards, Milestones Academy, that was rejected by Adams 12.)

Perhaps it’s becoming a rote activity for the Adams 12 board, but I did note that lack of parental demand was not listed among the reasons for denying the applications. And I didn’t get a close look at the claims that academic quality was an issue. So I’m not exactly sure why parental public school choice was shot down here, though I’d be glad to learn more. But the incident raised two questions in my mind:

1. Given the recent “witch-hunt” audit proposal that came this month before a legislative committee (and thankfully was defeated), is the Adams 12 board’s rejection streak part of a growing anti-charter school backlash? and

2. To what extend would implementing the “Charter 2.0″ agenda temper these attacks? The League of Charter Schools plans to focus its 2010 agenda on setting higher standards for charter authorizers, building a specialized charter accreditation program and on increasing support for underperforming charters. But how much will that really mean for the Adams 12 boards of our state?

Food for thought, at least until I re-join the discussion here next decade. Until then, may students and teachers enjoy your time off, and may all have a blessed end of Hanukkah, Christmas and New Year.

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Fixing evaluations and tenure: a few thoughts

Monday, December 14th, 2009

A story from last week’s Denver Post — that for more than 24 hours after its release had surprisingly received no reader comment, no arguments, no name-calling, no off-topic soapbox remarks, zilch, nada, nothing — previews one of the K-12 education issues upcoming in the 2010 legislative session: teacher and administrator evaluations.

Interestingly, two lawmakers on different ends of the majority Democrat education reform spectrum — Sen. Michael Johnston and Rep. Mike Merrifield — have teamed up as co-sponsors. Of course, those who have been paying attention to the Colorado education scene are well aware of the problem: 99 percent of teachers in Denver and Pueblo are rated satisfactory (PDF). While the devil will exist in the details of the actual legislation, the article hints at some of what might come down the pike:

Johnston, a former principal in the Mapleton School District, said teachers and principals would be evaluated on four levels of performance.

“We know teacher effectiveness is more nuanced than ’satisfactory’ and ‘unsatisfactory,’ ” he said. “You have teachers who are outstanding, some who are novices and have a lot to learn. We want an evaluation that accurately assesses that. ”

The bill is being crafted in cooperation with the teachers union.

Under the proposed legislation, new teachers also would earn tenure based on three years of positive evaluations and positive impact on student achievement, Johnston said.

Since the legislation “is being crafted in cooperation with the teachers union,” I’m not very optimistic about any substantive change and don’t expect what I write to be taken much into account. (Though maybe if I wrote anonymously, it might make a difference.) Nevertheless, here goes …

If the idea Sen. Johnston stated of having to meet a truly meaningful positive performance evaluation before acquiring tenure rights, that would be a step forward. I would add that perhaps the current three-year length of the probationary period itself should be up for discussion. A few other states have probationary periods as long as four or five years.

Additionally, if equally meaningful periodic performance checks were added for veteran teachers to maintain their non-probationary status, that also would be an improvement. Because after all, as we know, in state law alone the procedures for dismissing an ineffective or “unsatisfactory” non-probationary teacher are burdensome.

Finally, I wholeheartedly agree that such performance accountability in our public schools needs to extend beyond classroom teachers. Find and apply clear and effective performance metrics with similar consequences for school-level and central administrators, as well.

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming already in progress….

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SchoolView just got a lot cooler

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

EastThe Colorado Department of Education’s SchoolView website just added disaggregated data to its offerings. making the user-friendly, downright cool site even better than it already was. Search a school, say Denver’s East High. Now, instead of just a bubble showing its growth percentage and status, you can see how subgroups of kids are doing.

It’s the easiest way I’ve seen to look at data in detail, and very quickly. So East, Denver’s flagship high school, looks pretty good, depending on who you are. In reading, East overall has a 53.5 growth percentile, and 74 percent of the ninth and 10th graders (the only grades tested under CSAP) or at or above proficient.

Click on the little ethnicity tab, and you see that Hispanic students at east have a 49.5 growth percentile, and 58 percent are at or above proficient. Not bad, especially by Denver standards, but not quite as high-flying as the school as a whole.

You can also look at several schools simultaneously, to see how they compare.

The software makes achievement gaps glaringly visible at the school level. If there’s a way to look at the disaggregated data on a districtwide basis, I couldn’t find it. I’m sure someone at CDE will weigh in if I missed it.

Colorado may not be at the top of state ranking in many education categories, but in the robustness and accessibility of its data, it’s definitely in the top tier. What a change from a few short years ago.

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Anonymous comments

Sunday, December 6th, 2009

I’ve blogged under my name on this site for some time, and I am not one to duck hard posts and controversial issues. Recently, in response to an anonymous post and the continuing presence of an anonymously authored blog, I responded anonymously myself.

I’ve now been “outed.”  In hindsight, I think that is probably good — my comment was harder and more direct than I would generally say, but I don’t regret the point.  It is my personal view, and I’ll stand by it.

I’ve posted a few anonymous comments on blogs (pretty rarely — most in the last few days).  I think there is a valid role for anonymous blogging – it lets comments stand on their own as the identity of the speaker can sometimes be illuminating and sometimes obscuring.  But I think that for controversial posts, it probably is a mistake.

So, here is the initial anonymous comment, and I am reposting my response under my name.

SaveLakeIB says: Without getting into the perennial quality vs. quantity debate, authentic community engagement isn’t a numbers-of-meetings issue. There are many community voices, and one of the things that has emerged in the discussions about northwest Denver is the large amount of common ground among these different voices. There are a lot of great models of how you authentically bring community together and have conversations, not presentations, and reach common ground. The Save Lake IB blog did a posting over a month ago with a youtube clip of one of Richard Harwood, a guru on this stuff. View the clip and let’s start thinking again about how we do this.

—-

Alexander Ooms: Nothing should surprise one any more in this dispute, but the claim that the SLIB blog has been calling for “common ground” with “many community voices” is a stunner.  I was late to this dispute, but  SLIB is, to my mind, the single most intolerant, abusive and divisive participant in this dialogue.

Time after time, the SLIB has dismissed any other opinion that does not support their point of view for a variety of claims: people were not “from the neighborhood,” activists who were “paid,” and the claim that anyone who did not agree with both you and “Arthur” Jimenez was motivated by race and ethnicity. DPS Superintendent and A+ committee were compared to Enron.  Anyone who who cited another opinion were “anti-union” and “against teachers,” claims that this was a schools “privatization” effort.  Stoking up fears that “your school may be next”. Rampant intentional errors of fact, as was your photo display on the “basement” classroom at Lake – which it turns out are at ground level and wonderfully light.

And now, suddenly, you have cleansed your site and your comments of all the vituperative bile, and are claiming to want “common ground” as casually as a teacher cleans a chalkboard after class.  The damage this bitter divisiveness of your comments and site in the NW  ”community” is likely to linger for years. To drape yourselves in the cloth of common ground after erasing your blog pages accusatory invective is perhaps the most cynical and disgusting act yet.

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A lower bar

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

EdWeek, citing new data from the National Center for Education Statistics, reports that 26 states made their standards less stringent between 2005 and 2007 with the 2014 deadline looming for bringing all students to proficiency.

Colorado’s proficiency standards actually went up a tiny bit in reading – one point on the NAEP scale — in fourth and eighth grade reading and eighth grade math, and remained the same in fourth grade math. However, as the following chart shows, Colorado’s proficiency measure is among the weakest in the nation (math doesn’t look much better):

NAEP

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Unspinning Colorado NAEP scores

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) provides the best data on the performance of U.S. students over time, and the new 2009 NAEP math results were released last week.

As always, the interpretation of new national results is in the eye of the beholder – do we praise increases because at least the scores aren’t flat or negative, or damn them since they are so small and “at this rate it will take X decades until we catch up to Finland” ?

Unspun, the national results show flat math scores at 4th grade since the 2007 test, and a small increase in 8th grade scores – after two decades of small but steady increases at both grade levels for math.

Former Bush administration NCES Commissioner Mark Schneider suggests that with enough data now, we can see that scores have not increased more post-NCLB than they did previously – NAEP scores actually went up more in the pre-NCLB period than afterwards.  With 4 rounds of NAEP tests administrated in the 7 years since the 2002 NCLB, this is probably enough data to suggest that NCLB has not raised student performance more than prior programs.

This finding suggests that accountability programs by themselves are not enough.  One can argue that NCLB did some good by focusing attention on subgroups within schools and setting benchmarks, but it hasn’t propelled American schools forward, perhaps because of lack of resources provided, a punitive approach to low achievement, a simplistic notion of teacher quality (“high quality teachers”), or a variety of other possible diagnoses.

Colorado, as usual with NAEP, scores better than national averages.  Colorado’s 8th grade scores went up one point since 2007, compared to the 2 point national gain, but Colorado remains 5 points above average.  That leaves Colorado in a middle pack, not significantly different from a group of 20 other states, with 8 states clearly performing better, and 23 states clearly performing worse in math.

For 4th grade math, Colorado’s scores went up 3 points, while the national average was flat, leaving Colorado 4 points higher than average.  That leaves Colorado in the middle pack, again not significantly different from a group of 21 other states, with 5 states clearly performing better, and 25 states clearly performing worse.

Not bad performance.  But, where Colorado continues to lag is with our achievement gaps.  For grade 4, we have the 40th worst gap between white and Hispanic students, and the 36th worst gap between white and black students. For grade 8, we have the 42th worst gap between white and Hispanic students, and the 35th worst gap between white and black students.

None of these 2009 achievement gaps are significantly different from the same gaps identified by NAEP tests in 1990.

So, despite two decades of attention to the achievement gap, the gaps by racial groups in Colorado are basically unchanged.  Frustratingly, no state policy change has made a dent, in terms of measurable impact on the benchmark national test.

This argues for bolder initiatives, as we Race to the Top and pursue another generation of reform efforts, both in DC and in Colorado.   Whatever efforts we pursue, my own belief, partly evidence-based and partly intuition, is that school funding really matters most for lower-income kids.  Within a reasonable range, middle-income kids will still do OK with subpar funding.  Lower-income kids largely will not.

With K12 funding levels in the range of #35-40 among the 50 US states (depending upon how you measure it exactly), it is no surprise that the Colorado math achievement gap is in the #35-42 range.

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Standards review & CSAP revision: Reform or repeat?

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

In December, state officials are expected to adopt revised Model Content Standards for elementary and secondary schools.  These standards would replace the original ones, which were adopted in 1995.  The current standards remodel is being heralded as thoughtful, inclusive, and relevant. Yet upgrading standards is the easy part. The success of the reform depends on how standards translate into assessment, instruction, and student learning. Unfortunately, the revised standards are unlikely to lead to improved student achievement. To understand why, we must look at the results of Colorado’s first effort at standards-driven reform.

Fourteen years after the original Model Content Standards were implemented, we know one thing for sure: most Colorado students are not meeting them. The proportions of 10th graders performing proficient or above on the 2009 CSAP are not much higher (and in some cases they are lower) than they were when the tests were first administered all at once at the high school level, in 2001.

Percent of Colorado 10th Graders Proficient and Advanced on CSAP: 2001 vs. 2009

YEAR All Colorado

Reading

All Colorado

Writing

All Colorado

Math

2001 63% 51% 25%
2009 69% 49% 30%

Hidden in these results is the fact that low-income students’ performance on CSAP is miserably low, with only 35%, 19%, and 6% of 10th grade Title I students scoring proficient or above in reading, writing, and math (respectively) in 2009. In all cases, these proportions are lower than in 2001. In spite of the crusading rhetoric at national and state levels, the standards-based reform initiated in the 1990’s has indeed left many children behind.

In some respects, the revised standards are an improvement over the originals. They are leaner, clearer, and grade-level specific. But while educators in Colorado may be getting better at formulating standards, there is no evidence that they are better able to teach to them. And it’s not for lack of effort. Teachers, school and district administrators, and policy makers have worked hard to turn the tide of low performance in Colorado. Their failure reflects not the magnitude of the effort so much as the magnitude of the challenge.

That so few Colorado students perform proficiently on CSAP is certainly a cause for concern. Yet even more alarming is the fact that many students who do perform proficiently are still not prepared for life after high school.   Over 50% of recent high school graduates who matriculate into two-year colleges and 20% who matriculate into four-year institutions require remediation in at least one subject (reading, writing, or math). Among the poor and students of color, the proportions are much higher. Research shows that remediation predicts college attainment: Each remedial course in which a student enrolls diminishes that student’s chance of completing an undergraduate degree.

Standards assessment should certify that a student who performs at grade level is prepared to meet the demands he or she will face after high school graduation. It is a betrayal of the promise of standards-driven reform that a student can perform “proficient” on CSAP and still need remediation in college.

Proponents of the new standards take seriously the charge to prepare students for their lives after graduating high school. For this reason, they have strived to create seamless articulation between high school and college.  The Colorado Department of Education created the Colorado Achievement Plan for Kids (CAP4K) to clarify what college- and workforce-readiness mean. The CAP4K committee has devised competencies that presumably will be built into the P-12 curriculum. But how will this committee’s work be reflected in the new or revised CSAP? What means will educators and test developers use to ensure that students who perform well on the test will be any better prepared for the workforce or college than they are now? Unless the new assessment measures knowledge and skills that are demonstrably linked to college- and workforce-readiness, the promise of standards reform—and schooling itself—will be empty.

State officials are poised to approve the revised standards before considering how the assessments tied to those standards will be designed. Two serious challenges await any effort to develop those assessments.

First, the revised standards include process-oriented competencies, such as how to access information and assess its credibility. While such competencies are certainly desirable, assessing them will be difficult. Tests that ask students to perform rather than just mark an answer to a direct question are much more expensive to create and score than the current CSAP. Thus, reformers face a choice: they can either develop a costly instrument to assess achievement of the new standards, or they can continue assessing content knowledge with CSAP and leave performance assessments to schools and districts. The former option would require a greater expenditure on student assessment than Coloradoans have ever before been willing to make. The latter option would greatly diminish state-level accountability—a linchpin of standards-driven reform. If the revised standards will not be assessed on CSAP, they become merely symbolic.

Second, as useful as process-oriented competencies may be, it has not been demonstrated that they are necessary in order to be successful after high school. Thus, even if the state makes the investment necessary to assess those competencies, a proficient score on the new assessment may not be any more reliable as an indicator of college- and workforce-readiness than the current CSAP.

In my view, the CSAP (in whatever form it takes) should be modeled on the ACCUPLACER®, the exam that community colleges use to determine whether students are prepared to succeed in college-level courses. The ACCUPLACER® is inexpensive to administer, untimed, and student-friendly. It can be taken multiple times in a year, and it provides immediate feedback as to whether a student is prepared to take for-credit college classes or is in need of remediation (The ACCUPLACER® in Colorado assesses three levels of remediation).  Most important, The ACCUPLACER® is extremely accurate in gauging a student’s ability to succeed in a for-credit college class.

New standards should not be adopted before the assessments are developed. Only when there is a demonstrated link between the standards and the assessments should the entire package be approved.  Furthermore, policy-makers should be able to prove to the public that any new standards lead unquestioningly to college- and workforce-readiness. Finally, the new standards should not be adopted unless they are accompanied by a well-articulated, evidence-based instructional program that, this time, can successfully get students to meet the standards.

I am aware that the measures I advocate would defeat the state’s ambitious timeline for implementing the new standards. Yet the first fourteen years of standards-based reform has taught us that creating standards does not necessarily result in improved student learning.  CSAP results confirm that the first attempt at standards-driven education in Colorado hasn’t worked.  How will the next fourteen years be different?

Gary Lichtenstein owns Quality Evaluation Designs, a firm specializing in education research, evaluation, and policy.  His book about Mapleton School District–Against the Odds: Insights from One School District’s Small School  Reform, co-authored by Larry Cuban and others—is scheduled for release by Harvard Education Press in early 2010. He can be reached via email at:  gary@QualityEvaluationDesigns.com.

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Digging deeper on Lincoln High

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

After reflecting on my quote  in this morning’s Denver Post, I decided to go back and look at the history of Lincoln High School’s  publicly available achievement data.   My edited comments in the Post were based on recent CSAP status scores, CSAP growth and the college remediation rates relative to other high schools.

I did not talk enough about the schools overall development over time in the story.  I’m sorry that this was not reflected in my edited comments even though Lincoln is still a very low performing school relative to other schools and our state standards.  Lincoln’s principal Antonio Esquibel and his staff should be commended for their good work.

By the way, it is very hard to pull all of this data together for one school since it is in at least four different places at the Colorado departments of education and higher education.  It would be nice if the state had one place to pull all of this data so that you could easily create your own school data summary sheet.

I know there is lots of rhetoric and work being done about data access but this exercise was a wonderful reminder (more…)

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