A crack in the KIPP facade?

Study Finds High Dropout Rates for Black Males in KIPP Schools. A new study out of Western Michigan University takes KIPP to task. Beyond high drop out rates, the report concludes that KIPP schools enjoy a significant funding advantage over other schools thanks to private donations. The full 39-page report is here.

Now, before anyone starts pulling down the walls of KIPP schools across the country, it is worth reading KIPP's response. Link. It is actually very open and honest. It's defensive, of course, but not the type of blanket denial of culpability we're used to in official responses to criticism. The Western Michigan study has some problems, most notably, the incomplete data with which they started.

You can't write this stuff

Yet another news story on McKinley Tech. The investigator assigned to the McKinley Tech case was fired by DCPS for lying. Story here. Given that police investigators routinely lie to people to obtain information, it's interesting (and commendable) that DCPS would take such a principled stance.

All that glitters is not gold

Is it scandal season or something? It now appears that many DC schools may have doctored DC CAS answer sheets. In the case of Noyes Education Campus, test scorers noted an abnormally high rate of wrong-to-right erasures. One classroom averaged 12.7 wrong-to-right erasures per student versus the district-wide average of less than 1 erasure. Here is a link to several internal DCPS documents discussing Eraser-gate. Thank goodness for FOIA.

McKinley spirals out of control

More news on McKinley Tech: the principal has been suspended for allegedly ordering some student transcripts be doctored with grades for courses they never took. Sounds like par for the course to me. I've seen and heard of schools doing all kinds of shady things to get kids their diplomas. Also, as a result of the investigation into the missing AARP money, an employee was fired and arrested for stealing 10 laptops.

Aggregation

Here's what's going on in DC schools. My apologies for the dearth of good news--don't kill the messenger.

Thomson Elementary schoolers were caught eating and snorting cocaine. WTF. Link.

Federal prosecutors are investigating what happened to $100,000 awarded to McKinley Tech. The money came from the AARP and was supposed to create a program to have high schoolers teach senior citizens how to use the internet, or something. Link.

If this academy's a-rockin' don't come a-knockin'. The Rock Creek Academy is being investigated for all kinds of misconduct, and yes, some of it is sexual. DCPS didn't pay special education attorneys all that money for this kind of education! Link.

An opinion on school truancy. It's an important issue that deserves more attention but the author lost me with: "These are not kids who cut class to rent 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off.'" Huh? I'm pretty sure a kid has not cut class to rent Ferris Bueller in 23 years. Damn kids, with their heavy metal music videos and Donkey Kongs. Link.

Kaya Henderson plans to reform schools unto death. Link.

An update on Dunbar SHS and Friends of Bedford. They are friends no more.

An iron fist dipped in honey

There are problems at Dunbar Senior High School. DCPS is adding extra security to stop the violence. Six students were arrested for allegedly raping a 15-year-old girl in the school but "the charges of first-degree sexual assault had been dropped." I don't know what that means. They are charged with second-degree sexual assault? They aren't being charged with anything? Something in between? If you or someone you know works at Dunbar, please tell us what the hell is going on over there.

The story behind Friends of Bedford--the private group hired to operate Dunbar--is particularly interesting. The leader of Friends of Bedford, George Leonard, described his disciplinary style as "an iron fist dipped in honey." Apparently it is not enough to merely smite children under his weighty fist but he must also leave them as sticky insect bait. He supposedly told an audience: "Just stay out of my way and let me create the scholar, because you're usually the problem. I'll see you at graduation."

Most Likely to Succeed

Today I read a modestly dated article by Malcolm Gladwell on hiring great teachers. (Link) I highly recommend reading it. I know many of you won't, so I pulled out some of the most interesting parts (to me), divorced of their context. If there's one thing I learned from trashy campaign ads (or Fox news), it's that you shouldn't let context get in the way of making your point. Gladwell suggests that identifying the next great teacher is as hopelessly speculative as identifying the next great NFL quarterback. (If reading about football will cause your eyes to glaze over in doldrum, start reading the article at section 2.) In his words:

[M]any reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be great teachers. But there's a hitch: no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like. The school system has a quarterback problem.

Before Gladwell gets to this point though, he explains what great teaching is--according to some theorists--and why it is so important:

Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a "bad" school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher.

One of the most interesting parts was reading the critiques of teachers' classroom performances by a team of educational researchers. Bob Pianta of UVA made a keen observation about teaching pre-K, which I think extends to middle school and high school as well:

These are three- and four-year-olds. At this age, when kids show their engagement it's not like the way we show our engagement, where we look alert. They're leaning forward and wriggling. That's their way of doing it. And a good teacher doesn't interpret that as bad behavior. You can see how hard it is to teach new teachers this idea, because the minute you teach them to have regard for the student's perspective, they think you have to give up control of the classroom.

On teacher disparity, Gladwell demonstrates just how wide the chasm is between one great teacher and one not-so-great teacher:

Two and a half minutes into the lesson—the length of time it took that subpar teacher to turn on the computer—he had already laid out the problem, checked in with nearly every student in the class, and was back at the blackboard, to take the lesson a step further.

Nothing too controversial yet, right? Here's where Gladwell gets contentious:

Test scores, graduate degrees, and certifications—as much as they appear related to teaching prowess—turn out to be about as useful in predicting success as having a quarterback throw footballs into a bunch of garbage cans.

But he follows up with a fairly astute point:

It stands to reason that to be a great teacher you have to have withitness. But how do you know whether someone has withitness until she stands up in front of a classroom of twenty-five wiggly Janes, Lucys, Johns, and Roberts and tries to impose order?

Did I say contentious? Gladwell gets downright iconoclastic:

[T]eaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before. ... It needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated. Kane and Staiger have calculated that, given the enormous differences between the top and the bottom of the profession, you'd probably have to try out four candidates to find one good teacher. That means tenure can't be routinely awarded, the way it is now.

Gladwell, as you may know, is not an educator. He seems to be most comfortable with social scientists and that is the lens with which he views education. He's sold me on a lot of his ideas, though I'm not so beholden to social science as he is. He makes a lot of presumptions, which I encourage you to join me in criticizing. For instance, he seems to believe that teachers are born with the ability to be either inherently great or just mediocre. I think he underestimates the ability of subpar teachers to improve, learn their craft and become great educators. Additionally, some promising first-year teachers plateau quickly and never transcend their status as "good for a first-year teacher."

One shortcoming of Gladwell's quarterback analogy is that teaching talent isn't nearly as rare as quarterbacking talent. QBs have such a tough time in the NFL because they face equally skilled opponents who have spent their lives training to make QBs miserable. The analogy would be more suitable if we pitted the world's best teachers against the world's worst students. A good teacher's hard work is not offset by the students' relentless pursuit to be utterly despicable.

New WTU Contract Approved

Bill Turque of the Washington Post has informed the city that the contract was approved by the union. The final step is for the city council to vote on approval of the contract, and if/when that happens it's a go.

Thoughts?

Bust dem union, bust dem union...

I am anxious to see the results of the Washington Teacher's Union vote on the new contract proposed by Chancellor Rhee. Basically it boils down to a significant pay increase for teachers who make significant strides with their students and agree to trade in their tenure (please feel free to correct me if you think I am inaccurate). I love the idea because it is something new, daring, innovative, and I think it challenges the teacher unions in a good way. Pressing for results while stripping people of their entitlement status to a job in the classroom because of years of service.
I was a strong supporter of unions a few years ago, but I watched for two years as the WTU protected a teacher in my former school, fighting for this man to keep his job when he arrived to school late on a regular basis, when he wasn't late he wasn't there, didn't provide lessons for his students, and was accused of three separate incidents of physical abuse of students, one of which he admitted to in a conversation with me. After all of that, he was still employed by the district, still received a paycheck until he finally left the school. When I caught up with him months later, not knowing he was no longer working at the school, I asked what happened and he said, "I just stopped going in."
The bottom line for me is this-unions are designed and work for adults. The union protects the interests of adults at the detriment of student learning. So many of us have witnessed it ourselves-teachers refusing to do work that would help a child or the school as a whole because it is "not in my contract." Teachers leaving the school at 3:15 on the dot regularly, their classes packed up and students ready to walk out the door five minutes before school is over. I think the unions give a bad name to the many teachers who work hard everyday, stay late, arrive early, dedicate their days, nights, and weekends to the achievement and development of their students only to see school wide success held back by the few who live by the union contract.
Jo-Ann Armao recently asked the question 'Is the public turning against teacher unions?" in this piece in the post. I would really like to hear what people think. I am very open to hearing ideas and explanations as to why unions are needed for teachers and the counterpoints to the ideas I presented.

Excuse us, but we are building a public university...or so we say.

So the blog owner graciously allowed me to post an op-ed on this blog and despite my much advertised dislike of the DC Chancellor, my first contribution will not be about her, but about the status of the PR Public University System.

For those of you who have no idea what is going on, definitely start here.

http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/05/23/1644735/student-strike-in-puerto-rico.html


I don't even know where to begin. First of all, Puerto Ricans are american citizens by birth and entitled to all federal programs and services using the same federal guidelines. The catch is, we don't pay federal taxes. In theory, I do believe higher education SHOULD be free and accessible to all who wants it and is willing to work hard for it. What I disagree on are the methods and multiple agendas that the so-called student advocates are pushing for and their reasoning behind it. The part that the mainland (because we are all american, including PR) newspapers are not covering.

It started small, closing down the 4 main campuses after the administration talked about tuition increases and other fee/tuition/grant adjustments. People were not allowed in or out. Professors were not allowed to pick up their laptops, books or any other things from their offices. Research labs have been left untouched, lab rats are probably dead by now, petri dishes dry. All in all, the estimated costs to the university 2 weeks ago was already at 52 million dollars. It gets worse, the professors are now not getting paid, until summer starts. Technically that it their vacation and they have said that they will not finish out their semester until next fall, because they will not work for free. So 3 weeks left to go for graduation and the university if closed down. Closed down because people feel the governement should pay for their cell phones, their cars and their food. Because even though their tuition is covered by the Pell Grant, they feel like they need more.

What makes it worse is the silent majority, the people who do want to go back to school, the people who had applied to grad school, TFA, jobs and internships, people who had plans to go abroad to do something with their degrees and they are sitting and waiting in limbo.

The propaganda by the media is even worse, they feed off each other by calling those who oppose the strike, elitists and capitalists and evil dictators. People are talking about asking the university president to resign. An island wide strike happened about a week ago and demonstrators lowered an American flag from the capitol and switched it with a second PR flag. At another rally, they went after the governor, who was having an event at the Sheraton, they went in there demanding to speak to him and people got maced and hit by the cops. They outcried about police brutality and the "massacre" that is ocurring, even though no one has died yet. People have gone as far as writing a letter to the United Nations, decrying about human rights violations, because the cops would not let parents and grandparents bring food to the strikers. This week they took over a shopping center.

At this point no one even knows what the strike is about anymore, I think the article nails it in the head when it talks about frustration and helplessness. Puerto Ricans are fed up. The situation on the island is unbearable. Every day, 2 or 3 murders, the unemployment rate is in the double digits, the heat is at record highs. I agree that PR needs a revolution, that the status quo is unacceptable, that a new generation deserves much better. I don't think the way they are doing things is the right way, though and I think that the university is probably the little that PR had going for them and now it's closed. So there is nothing left. Everything in the island is shit now.

'Razing' Arizona

As a result of the recent immigration law passed in Arizona, the San Diego school board passed a resolution restricting school employees from traveling to the state on official business. An article from our friends at Fox News can be found here.

Is this appropriate action for a school district to take?

Thanks go out to Andy for sharing the article, and pointing out haw 'fair and balanced' the reporting is.

Waiting for "Superman"

The trailer for the upcoming film Waiting for "Superman." It looks very interesting with interviews of Michelle Rhee, Geoffrey Canada, and others. Thanks go out to Andy and Elke for sharing this with me via Xanga. I wasn't able to fit the trailer properly in this entry, but you can view it if you follow the link above.

I also want to invite anyone interested to participate as a contributor to this blog. Just let me know if you'd like and I will send you an invite so you can post at your leisure.

Yowsa...

I don't even know what to say about this. But I guess I do wonder, if one were to collect all of the incidence of poor behavior, violence, complaints, etc. for an entire school year what it would look like for even the most high performing schools in DC.

Charlie Rose following an interview with students and staff at the Hamilton Education Center in Washington DC.

Whats up?

Anyone read anything interesting recently? I'm a little behind in reading myself. I am doing some work with an organization in Baltimore, the Incentive Mentoring Program. Very interesting. Check out a short video from it's founder here.

Edutopia

If you aren't receiving the magazine Edutopia or haven't been to the website check it out. The magazine version was free when I got it a year ago, but I'm not 100% sure if the hard copy is still free. It is the authority on project based learning, unless you know of something as good or better (ahem a.d.). It also has lots of features about issues in education with a progressive bend.

Anyone have thoughts on Edutopia?