2009-03-1 Education Roundup

Former Granberry PTA treasurer will do more time. Julie Buchanan has only done 2 years out of a 15 year sentence for " theft, money laundering and forgery" involving some $150,000 according to this Tennessean article. Part of that money was raised to benefit a child who has since passed on. Buchanan's actions harmed more than that child. She made fundraising and PTA activities across the state more difficult as systems overreacted to a simple lack of accountability over these finances. I'm glad Buchanan's doing well in prison. School volunteers and their students are still suffering as a result of her actions.

CitizenNetMom thinks spending 'stimulus' money on personnel might be acceptable this time around. "Thus, it seems to me that the most appropriate use would be to use those funds to continue programs like extended contracts, where teachers are paid a small stipend to do extra things like before- or after-school tutoring (of particular benefit to special ed or economically disadvantaged students)."

Will Frist SCORE? Not if he keeps moving the same pieces around the same game board. It's going to take some real backbone, some willingness to offend the status quo and its keepers and some dollars to get the message out to the public in order to obtain their backing. Without that backing the progressives will win the day and we'll be a full step behind where we are now.

This from the SCORE website http://TennesseeScore.org

"SCORE will achieve this goal by (1) developing a strategic plan for K-12 education reform in Tennessee via a statewide Steering Committee of key stakeholders (2) launching a number of Project Teams to initiate both statewide and local education projects and (3) running a grassroots campaign to promote the state's new standards, identify education activists across the state, and create conversations among local community leaders about how each community can improve its local schools."

Sounds like the same old same old to me.

Martin Kennedy has other thoughts:

"Don't even begin to tell me about programs that have "worked" elsewhere in terms of graduation rates or test scores until you make clear that a fundamental goal of reform is to expand parental choice. Those who believe in the power of programs miss the point. It is the power of a system that is important. On the one hand you have a thriving market system that serves affluent consumers and on the other a public monopoly system that enjoys a captive market, those who can't afford the market system."

Sarah Moore opines about our coddling of students. Here's a snip:

"Students should not get an “A” just because they really, really tried. You might study for hours every day for your organic chemistry and never understand some of the tougher concepts. So, you earn a “C” in the course. Sounds fair to me. A graduate school or employer who looks at your transcript and sees an “A” should be able to assume that you actually understand the content, not that you just read the book."

Along that same train of thinking:

The Rev. Enoch Fuzz sees big problems when students earning A’s and B’s in their Metro high school classes cannot earn high scores on the nationally standardized ACT test.

“These are children who study, and get good grades, and aren’t disciplinary problems,” Fuzz said Monday. “Someone should offer a type of relief, or apology, to some of these families.” City Paper 2/17/09

I don't think I'll ever forget a call I got from a woman whose child had received excellent grades in MNPS schools and suddenly crashed into reality at MTSU. She felt betrayed and cheated. She and her child had been lead to believe things were fine when they were far from it.

Adult literacy spurs confusion. Yes. I'm confused about how these adults lived under the compulsory attendance laws and yet still didn't master this basic skill. I'm not happy at having to pay twice for these people to obtain these skills. I think it's a shame that our public education system failed them in this essential skill. Regarding the other classes--I do have a problem with taxpayers providing yoga, basket weaving, swimming and cake decorating classes for the highly discounted rate of $20 or so. Click here for the latest class list and fee schedule. The fees should accurately reflect the cost of facilities and advertising and support. Then we can talk about finding scholarships to make them affordable.

Shearon shares his POV

Dave Shearon (a former MNPS BOE member from 1998 to 2001) made some very helpful observations in two recent posts to the NashvillePTOTalk list. I think they deserve broader publication and he has generously given me permission to post them here as he's no longer including MNPS issues on his blog.

I've been a little confused by MNPS getting "A's" on value-added even though we are losing ground to the state. So, I did a little investigating.

An "A" only means that a school or system is not doing significantly worse at helping students make gains than the state average from 1998. That's right, 1998 is the measuring stick, so it makes perfect sense that, with the vast majority of schools getting better, MNPS could be doing a poorer job of improving and still make A's.

Of course, this means that our students -- at all pre-achievement levels -- are losing ground to their peers across the state. For example, the 25th percentile for 3rd graders in 2002 for MNPS corresponded to the 22nd percentile for the state. Today, those students are at the 16th percentile. Our 50th percentile was the state's 44th, and today it's the 36th. Our 75th used to http://tinyurl.com/2cf6rr.

Members of the public can only see this data at the system level. Board Members, Dr. Garcia, and anyone to whome he gives a password can see similar data (and much more) for individual schools. Thus, if our leadership wanted to, it is possible for them to report on many additional views of our performance. For example, they could report, if they wanted to, on how zoned schools are doing compared to the academic magnets at helping high-achieving students to gain knowledge and skills in exchange for the time they spend sitting in class. This could be similar to the study I produced in 1999 (http://tinyurl.com/ekxuk) or they might find a better format. But it could be done relatively easily.

There are other interesting results that can be pulled from the online data available to Board members and the administration. For example, they could look at the effect of high concentrations of beginning or ineffective teachers in some feeder patterns. (http://tinyurl.com/ys454f) When I did my study, it meant requesting paper copies of a thick bundle of school-level reports, entering that data into spreadsheets and doing the anlysis. Today, it's just a password and a few clicks for any Board member.

In fairness, I should note that any Board member who undertook such an effort would open themselves up to attacks on three fronts.

First, they would be accused of not being supportive of the system. Many in the system and many parent and community supporters treat hard but fair questions as "attacking public schools."

Second, although I think access could be given to a Board member only down to the school level, for example, the system available to Dr. Garcia and those he designates (other administrators, principals for their own schools, etc.) goes to the teacher and even the student level. This leaves the Board member as a possible suspect if confidential data becomes public. Note: the kind of performance analysis I am suggesting is not confidential.

Third, some analyses would leave the Board member subject to accusations of mis-placed priorities. This line of attack sounds like "As long as low-achieving students are struggling, how can you be concerned about whether we're wasting the time of those who are already doing well?" For "low-achieving", feel free to substitute "minority", "poor", "ELL", "special-education" or any other categorization. The truth is that ALL parents want their children to be engaged, happy, and learning at school and Board members SHOULD represent ALL parents.

To me, the political risks to Board members are the price of leadership. We should have better information on how ALL our students are doing than we do today, and the fact that we don't is the responsibility of the Board.

David N. Shearon, JD, MAPP
Nashville, TN
Contributing monthly to www.pos-psych.com

and Dave continues in this second post:

I think it is fair to say we have not made the stunning gains that the PR campaign of MNPS has tried to claim and that we have made NO WHERE NEAR the jaw-dropping gains that Dr. Garcia claimed for his former district when he was being recruited.

Further, the data suggests that, at least through 2005 (the last year this study was updated), we weren't helping students learn as much between grades 3 and 8. Now, does this apply to every group of students, or is it weighed down by group differences such as increased ELL. Or, put another way, are early high-achieving, non-FARM students doing as well now as they were in 2008? Impossible for us to determine, but Dr. Garcia or his staff or a Board member could provide the answer.

Yes the state standards for proficiency are weak, and thus AYP under NCLB is weak, though we're not even achieving it. Remeber that AYP is based on a minimum cut score that creates no pressure to be concerned about high-achieving students (or those so far below the system determines they won't make it).

David N. Shearon, JD, MAPP
Nashville, TN
Contributing monthly to www.pos-psych.com

Cost of Public Education

Ben Cunningham has a very illuminating chart at his site about the rising cost of public education vs. the cost of oil which he got from Carpe Diem . We're all complaining about the price of gas but we really need to take a hard look at our education dollars.

Carpe Diem's Mark Perry writes in the comment section:

The comparison is between: a) real spending/price to educate one student in a public school and b) real spending/price to purchase one barrel of oil. Even without using oil as a comparison, we can still say that REAL spending to educate one student in a public school has increased by a factor of 10.

and

Since World War II, the real price per public school student has increased by almost 40% each decade. My point was that rising oil prices get a lot of media attention, even though real oil prices are the same today as 1980-1981. During the same period, the real price per public school student has doubled, and receives significantly less attention in the media.

It gets significantly less attention because we're wrongly shamed into silence. To look at the dollars and ask if we're receiving a good return for our money is forbidden. It's for the children, you see. Some would deny us the right to question how this money is spent as if because it's for children it's not possible that's it's being misspent or could be better spent. A 10 minute conversation with a teacher, an aid or even a bus driver will reveal plenty of waste. Likely it will also provide some legitimate insight into how that money could be better spent.

Here's another chart. This one compares dollars to ACT outcome. MNPS is wildly out of line.

Tennessee for example

Today's educational must read is provided by William J. Bennett and Rod Paige. These are two men who know a thing or two about the subject of educating Americans.

They write:

We need to find better and more efficient ways to produce an educated population and close the achievement gaps in our education system. Americans do ultimately get themselves educated -- at work, after school, online, in adulthood -- but a lot of time and money are wasted in the process.
(snip)

The education "establishment" has wrongly insisted that more money (or more teachers, more computers, more everything) would yield better schools and smarter kids; that financial inputs would lead to cognitive outputs. This is not so.
(snip)

A new Fordham Foundation report shows that most states have deployed mediocre standards, and there's increasing evidence that some are playing games with their tests and accountability systems.

Take Tennessee, for example. It reports to its residents that a whopping 87 percent of its fourth-graders are "proficient" in reading. Yet the National Assessment of Educational Progress reports that the number is more like 27 percent.
(snip)

The remedy? As both of us have long argued, Washington should set sound national academic standards and administer a high-quality national test. Publicize everybody's results, right down to the school level. Then Washington should butt out.

I know that no measuring stick is perfect and that you've got to find the right one for the job. I also believe you shouldn't be allowed to recalibrate it at will when you realize that you're unable to measure up. It's at times like this when it seems reasonable to have a higher authority be the keepers of the ruler. Frankly, I would prefer a Tennessee legislature and local school boards that have backbone enough to tell the professional educators that what they're doing isn't good enough and we're going to try some real freedom and competition instead. If they do a good job they can keep their jobs. Otherwise, they better make way for merit pay, bonuses, firings, charters and online schools of all sorts and some real sunshine into what's been going on.