Thursday, April 21, 2011

Analysis of School Performance Scores

As much as the authorities governing education would like to link school performance primarily to the effectiveness of educators, the statistics tell us otherwise. Just as educators have warned for years, the most important factor affecting school performance is poverty. Now you can see it in powerful numbers as calculated from Excel spreadsheets using data collected by the LA Dept. of Education. The data and accompanying chart includes data on every public school in the state that had an assigned SPS.

This analysis was created by using the student poverty data as measured by free and reduced lunches from each school compared to the school performance score of each school. A total of nine data points were created using the free and reduced lunch percentages for schools related to School Performance Scores. The average SPS using data for all schools with 10 to 19.9% students on free or reduced lunch was used to produce the first data point (There were no schools with less than 10% poverty students according to the data collected by the Dept. of Education).The next data point was produced using an average SPS for schools serving 20 to 29.9% poverty students and so on to 90 to 100% free or reduced lunch. The data below and the chart shows the relationship between poverty and average school performance score. The relationship is striking in its consistency. (Click on image to enlarge)
In addition, an analysis of individual schools within each poverty group, shows very few schools have SPS scores that differ greatly from the average SPS for their poverty group. For example: In the lowest poverty group, 10-19.9% free/reduced lunch, all schools scored above 120 SPS. In the 20-29.9% poverty group, only 6% scored below 100 SPS. At the other extreme, (90- 99.9 % free/reduced lunch) only 8% of the schools scored a 90 or above SPS.

The state and federal governments have mandated that all schools in Louisiana regardless of poverty factors are expected to reach an SPS of 120 by 2014. With only 3 years left and an average growth of 1.2 SPS points per year that has occurred since the beginning of this mandate, high poverty schools are placed at an impossible disadvantage. Louisiana has a huge majority of high poverty schools, placing the whole state at an extreme disadvantage.

The other unfair disadvantage is the newly adopted school grading scale. This fall the public and parents will be told by newspapers and by letters to parents that certain schools are performing very poorly, when all that is being determined is the level of poverty of the students attending. A school serving high poverty students may have an SPS score of 89 at the end of this school year, and have shown significant growth over the previous year, but if the school did not achieve its state mandated growth target, that school will be assigned a D-minus grade even though it is outperforming 90% of the schools in its poverty level.

One of my readers from another state sent me an email stating that "Blaming schools for the academic failure of poor children makes no more sense than blaming hospitals for the lung diseases of people who smoke cigarettes."

Another major factor affecting SPS scores is student selection by certain schools such as magnet schools or alternative schools. A magnet school may have truly top notch teachers but the most important factor affecting the SPS is the admittance of only students that have high aptitude and motivation. It is not fair for the grading system to compare them with general admittance schools. The opposite situation exists for alternative schools that primarily take students with academic or discipline problems. These schools will always be graded unfairly compared to regular or magnet schools.

The above analysis shows that there are certain dominant factors that far outweigh the influence of effective teachers in determining a school's SPS. My question then is: Why are professional educators in Louisiana allowing their schools and their own performance to be improperly reported to the public as poor or failing by this unfair school grading system?

I don't know of any way this new letter grading systems for schools could be made fair, but Senate Bill 35 in the upcoming legislative session by Senator Yvonne Dorsey would delay implementation of the letter grading system and require BESE to review and possibly revise the program. The results of the BESE reconsideration would have to be reported to the Education Committees of the Legislature before final adoption. I hope all persons interested in improving rather than damaging our public education system will contact their legislators and ask them to support this bill. Get the email address of your State Representative by clicking on the highlighted link, and your Senator at this link.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Limiting Opportunities For Graduation

The governors and leaders in big business from the Achieve group have decided once again what is important for all students in our public schools to learn, and you the educator will soon receive your marching orders to implement it! According to a recent article by Peter Whoriskey in the Washington Post, the Achieve group, an influential education reform organization formed by business leaders and governors that focuses on high school graduation requirements is pushing for the requirement of Algebra II for high school graduation. According to the story, 20 states have already adopted this requirement.

Achieve is touting a study they commissioned that shows a strong correlation between Algebra II takers in high school and success in graduation from college. From this study they have concluded that if all high school students were required to take Algebra II they would have a much better chance of graduating from college and in getting a great jobs, and from that we can assume that our country would guarantee its position as the leader of the world in business and technology. Never mind what the teachers say about trying to force this medicine down the throats of every grumbling kid; the business leaders know best. These are the same business leaders by the way, who created sub-prime mortgages, mortgage backed securities, derivatives, credit default swaps etc. that ended in a meltdown of our financial system. Its ironic that the bankers and Wall Street firms were using the services of young math whizzes who were hired to create these complex scams for the enrichment of the few, who in turn were bailed out by the hard working people of this country who never use Algebra II in their daily lives!

If you read all of the Washington post article however, you find that the chief researcher, Anthony Carnevale, who produced this study for the Achieve group is highly skeptical that a causal relationship really exists between Algebra II and college success. He points out that it may simply be that smart, hard working students who are willing to tackle Algebra II are also smart and determined enough to succeed in college. . . . . Yet the so called business leaders who have never set foot in a classroom have decided that every student should be forced to take and pass this if they are to be granted a high school diploma. Soon I predict that Bill Gates and Arne Duncan then President Obama will insist that Algebra II be required in all states. You can be sure that our State Superintendent is already planning to add this requirement in Louisiana. Never mind that the graduates we are starting to produce have no clue how to build anything, how to hang a picture straight, how to use a square or a level, how to use power tools, or how to do basic math (because we are moving them on to Algebra) or how their bank plans to rip them off with excessive overdraft fees and traps in the credit card fine print.

These so called education reform leaders are still using the old discredited theory that requiring difficult subjects in school “trains the mind” to think better and solve many other problems in unrelated fields. It used to be that Latin and French was required of all educated people, but more recently it's difficult math courses that are never used again by the average person. Cognitive learning studies over the last 100 years have demonstrated that such “train the mind” theories are invalid. Training the mind to do Algebra II or Chess, or puzzles only trains the mind to do those very things. It does not transfer to other useful skills in life. That's why there are bums in Central Park in New York  who are experts at Chess but who have never held a productive job. I have a grandson who is a genius at playing video games on the internet but who dropped out of LSU because college was too boring and stressful. He had made an “A” in Algebra II and a 32 on his ACT, but never learned to work.

Arkansas was one of the first states to adopt the Algebra II “for all” requirement. Recently their students were tested after taking the Algebra II course and it was found that only 13 percent of the students had achieved any sort of proficiency in the subject. But instead of reassessing the wisdom of forcing all students to take this course, the state education officials said the teachers are just going to have to work harder to make the course work. What do the teachers think? According to the Washington Post article, some of them are worried about students dropping out without a high school diploma because of this requirement.

The personnel director at Northrup Grummond shipbuilding in New Orleans complained to the High School Redesign Commission that local kids were not prepared in high school to go to work at his facility because they did not know enough math. Yet when you check Northrup Grummond's employment of entry level workers, you would find that the company has a preference for hiring Hispanic/Mexican origin workers with no high school education at all and limited English skills. Why the discrepancy in their talk and their hiring practices? It turns out that Mexican origin workers have a habit of showing up for work on time every day and are willing to learn and do anything the foreman requires while many of the of the local origin kids are just plain unreliable no matter what their education. Its a sad fact that our young people failed on work ethics more than on math background. Do you think this could be fixed by requiring Algebra II?

Look, I was a Physics and Chemistry teacher. I love math and science. But I also know that every kid is different in his/her aptitudes and interests. Our country needs good plumbers, electricians, medical technicians, truck drivers, office workers, musicians and teachers just as much as it needs mathematicians. (Do you think our Superintendent or BESE members would pass an Algebra II test?) If we followed the example of Finland and tried to identify a student's aptitudes and interests and focused on developing the skills related to those interests instead of demanding the same of every student, our educational system may be more successful. It would also help if we did more to connect what we do in school to potential careers in many varied fields. Will it help our students and our state instead to flunk kids out of high school just because they have trouble with logarithms and quadratic equations?

Monday, April 11, 2011

Coalition For Louisiana Public Education

Click here to see the full press release announcing the formation and priorities of the Coalition For Louisiana Public Education. This coalition now includes many of the major organizations involved with public education in Louisiana. The coalition intends to advocate for positive changes in education that will preserve and enhance traditional public education in Louisiana. The group has adopted seven priorities including proper education funding by the Legislature, the ending of unfunded mandates, and a halt to the takeover and privatization of public schools. This group is encouraging all educators to speak with a unified voice to legislators and BESE members. This blog will inform educators each week on actions by the Coalition, and encourage contacts with legislators on specific issues.

Appointment of Recovery District Superintendent Ignores the need for Professional Qualifications
State Superintendent Pastorek's appointment of John White, a charter school and Teach For America advocate with minimal education qualifications as Superintendent of the Recovery District continues the trend of lowering professional standards in the hiring of administrators by our Department of Eduction. Mr White had just left the collapsing administration of New York Chancellor Cathleen Black, another non-educator. Ms Black served as chief administrator for the nation's largest school system for only three months before finding she could not cope with the job. See the article about this fiasco at this link. Dianne Ravitch has pointed out the serious flaws in the so called education reforms recently inflicted on New York and Chicago. These are the two systems where White got his administrative experience. White has a BA degree in English, three years as a Teach For America teacher, and a couple of years practice as a vice Chancellor in charge of dismantling and converting public schools to charters in New York. The salary has not yet been determined for this new appointee, but apparently BESE has given Pastorek carte blanche on the salary issue. This appointment continues the attack on the teaching profession in Louisiana.

Reform based on myths
Ben Wildavsky writes in Foreign Policy Magazine that much of the criticism of U. S. public schools is unfounded. He points out as I did in an earlier blog that our schools are working just fine for Asian origin and Caucasian kids. The problem we have is in closing the achievement gap for high poverty Hispanic and Black students. I emphasize high poverty here because there are plenty of more advantaged minority kids who are doing just fine in our public schools. This article shows that it makes no sense to label a school as “failing” just because it happens to be serving the most difficult population to educate. I believe you will find Wildavsky's article very much on target.

My concern is that some of the reforms being implemented in Louisiana to deal with so called “failing schools” that somehow just happen to be serving high poverty minority students, is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing. Grading the schools using primarily student scores will automatically stigmatize and demoralize the educators serving high needs students while ignoring real progress made by these educators in reaching the most challenging students. The introduction of value-added teacher and administrator evaluations will also do the opposite of what is desired by driving the strongest teachers away from the most challenging schools. We should be providing real incentives (financial and otherwise) for solid experienced teachers to do the extra work needed for moving these students up instead of running the teachers out! Finally, the continued threat of school takeover or the new waiver options that may require the principal and at least half the faculty to be fired from a school sends the message that members of the teaching profession are expendable as experimental schemes are tested on children.

Sunday, April 3, 2011

Education in Louisiana: A High Stakes Game For Adults

It's not about the children anymore. It's about the adults who want to gain fame and high salaries by gaining control of public education. What we have done in Louisiana by introducing high stakes testing, school takeovers, privatization, and competition between schools is a game for adults that victimizes the very children it was supposed to save.

Much of the education reform in Louisiana was designed by people with no experience in education (with the exception of the late Cecil Picard) who gained control of state education policy making. They designed education reform based on the assumption that low student performance was mainly caused by lazy or incompetent teachers and administrators. As announced by reformer and charter advocate Leslie Jacobs, "We can no longer blame abysmal performance on issues external to the schoolhouse such as poverty and demographics.”

Round one of the game of education reform included the testing of students every year on basic skills such as English language arts and math, publishing the scores by school and producing a rating system for schools based primarily on student scores, student attendance and dropouts. The State Department of Education would classify some low-performing schools (based on student scores) as failing schools and threaten those schools with state takeover if the scores did not improve according to state demands. This should improve the schools by embarrassing educators into doing their job.

That was Round One of the reform plan. How did it work? Soon local school administrators realized that the game was to raise student test scores at all costs, and state test scores (LEAP) started going up. State education leaders hailed the score increases as a sign that Louisiana education was improving. Maybe this would be a win-win in the game of education reform. Some schools, however, serving underprivileged students turned in shockingly low scores and ended up being classified as failing schools. Then it was found that on national tests such as the NAEP, which measured the same things as the state LEAP test, overall student performance had barely improved over a period of 8 years and sat near the bottom of state rankings. Many students were losing in the game of Education Reform!

Round two of the game began as some schools still failed to produce better test scores and the state actually had to make good on its takeover threat. Also, other school test scores did not continue to improve dramatically as had been expected. Apparently the education establishment was so rotten it could not be reformed. The theory now changed to: “Lets let private business do the job. Free enterprise and competition should be able to solve any problem in education!” The new State Superintendent seized the opportunity in New Orleans presented by the devastation of Katrina to convert many of the takeover schools to privately operated charter schools. Most were non-profit, but operated by high salaried administrators paid with taxpayer dollars. The game now got really serious with reputations and high income on the line.

Some claim that the conversions to charter schools have resulted in dramatic improvement. The truth is, a few of the charter schools in New Orleans have produced good student performance and other schools have shown some gains in student test scores. But in recent years most public schools have started teaching to the test, so all scores across the state have improved.  Also it was found that if you taught basic test taking skills to children, even the lowest performers could improve their scores. Some charter schools found they could use tax money to hire a test prep company that would pretest all students and then instruct teachers about how to teach each student to improve his/her scores. That might have been OK if it would have resulted in real learning as measured by the NAEP. It did not. The emphasis on only two basic subjects also resulted in the neglect of other subjects such as science and social studies. School became a game and a competition for adults rather than an education for children.

Observers recently pointed out that the special law for takeover of schools in New Orleans had allowed the takeover of many schools that were not failing at the time of takeover. So the new charter schools that were able to attract the most motivated students from those schools had an advantage in getting good scores. Also the latest census shows that fewer of the most at-risk families returned to New Orleans after Katrina. Those charter schools that showed impressive gains, got much of it by carefully screening applicants and pushing out students who did not perform according to expectations. (One of the most successful nationwide charter school organizations also operating in New Orleans has a black male dropout rate of over 40% in grades 6-8). In addition, many under-performing students are counseled into transferring to other public schools that become dumping grounds. (Just part of the strategy in the adult game of school competition) Supporters of charters did a great national public relations job of highlighting only the winning schools in New Orleans and hiding the losers.

Then State education leaders got a little over confident and assumed that any low-performing school could be taken over by any charter organization and produce great results. This euphoria led to aggressive state takeover and conversion to charters in other parts of the state by various groups who wanted to play the game of education reform. In the Baton Rouge area, nine schools were taken over by the state and all converted to charters. But a strategic mistake was made. These schools were taken over with the same student body that was under-performing without seeking out only the best and most motivated students. They tried to play fair! The result has been a serious setback for the charter players. All of the takeover schools in the Baton Rouge area have had major declines in student performance. (see our post on Feb 19). Some of these new charter operators had never run a school before and didn't have a clue! So again the children lost out in the game of education reform.

Round 3: Now we are moving to round 3 of the game. The legislature and BESE have passed three major rule changes in the game that are designed to favor the reformers and school takeover advocates. The first is to increase the minimum scores the state uses to determine failing schools. This will tighten the screws on schools where lazy or incompetent educators have not shown enough progress. If necessary, those schools can also be turned over to charter operators. Or maybe there could be an expansion of the voucher program started in New Orleans that let students in failing schools escape to private schools. That voucher program has been severely criticized by the charter advocates in New Orleans because of a study that showed the voucher recipients' performance had not improved by transferring to private schools. The second rule change was to rate all public schools using letter grades “A" through “F”. The new rating system adopted by overriding the recommendations of educators and citizens, will assign a grade of “D” or “F” to approximately 46% of all public schools this fall. The following year the number of “F” grades will increase when the minimum score for a passing school goes up in 2012. According to the law, parents will receive a report on their child's school's grade each school year. The third change in rules of the game will rate all teachers using a value added model of student achievement. Those teachers and administrators who do not raise student scores by the mandated amounts will be subject to dismissal.

So how will Round 3 of the education reform game turn out? The following are my best guesses based on what I know about Louisiana schools: Parents will get their new school report cards probably in the fall of this year. What do you think will be the level of support and cooperation from parents who see that their child's school has been rated as a “D” or an “F” by state authorities. Poor student performance may become a self-fulfilling prophesy based on deteriorating parental support for public schools. What do you think will happen to property values near the schools with “D” and “F” grades. This new grading system is extremely destructive! It practically guarantees that all inner city non-magnet schools will receive an "F" while magnet schools and other selective schools will get an "A". This has nothing to do with the actual performance of the teachers and administrators. It is simply a direct result of sorting students by motivation and potential for success.

Also, in anticipation of the damaging effects of the new value added evaluation, experienced teachers who are now teaching in low performing schools will start insisting on transfers to the more successful schools. This will result in a talent and experience drain from the very schools that most need solid teachers. The addition of more charters will continue to produce poor results with fragmentation of support for public schools. Vouchers will be tried to send kids to private schools with public money, but the private schools will try to take only the best and most motivated students, leaving the public schools an even more difficult problem. This time everybody loses - - students, parents, teachers and the taxpayers of Louisiana.

If you care about stopping this damaging game being played with public education in Louisiana, please talk to your legislators and ask that we instead give educators the support they need to really improve our schools. Join with the new coalition that has been formed to support our public schools. A program of legislative priorities is now in the process of being developed (More about this next week). The struggling schools and struggling students need help, not criticism! The school reform insanity, if not stopped will drive away our best and most experienced teachers and administrators who cannot easily be replaced. Those who think that private takeover of schools is the answer will be sadly disappointed. But by then it will be too late to fix our schools. Those who say we should not waste more resources on the uderprivileged should also know one thing: It is much more expensive per pupil to house young people in the state prisons than to give them a good education ($80,000 compared to $10,000 per year).