UPDATE: Stanford charter school study

Earlier I wrote about this CREDO report on the effectiveness of charter schools in Michigan, with the headline, "Charter Schools More Effective."  Today my MEA e-newsletter sent me this gem from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research, which links to a review of the study by somebody else.  (I believe this is why people refer to the self-sustaining nature of bureaucracy.)  That person, one Andrew Maul of U Colorado Boulder, writing for the Think Twice Project (not a project I'm familiar with), suggests that there is almost no difference in performance between charter school students and public education students.  The effect of charter schools was responsible for a performance improvement of .1%, considerably less than the effect of having a teacher that knows how to use compare-and-contrast charts effectively.

Caveat lector: I still have not read the original CREDO study, nor have I read the full Maul report.  I pass this along as a summary of news, not as a position.  However, clearly this new summary of other people's research matches more neatly with my biases than the summary of the original report.

Education in the State of the Union address

Essentially a re-posting from my FB page.  President Obama had a lot of ground to cover in his State of the Union address, and as I read the prepared transcript, it seemed like he did a fairly good job of touching all of the bases.  Education didn't play a major role, but it got about as high a word count as, for example, re-building the housing market, so that's okay, I guess.  I liked his shout-out to Germany's education program, although I'm not certain it works strictly the way he says it does.  It at least shows that our comparison shopping of other nations' education systems don't end with FINland!!1!Q1!  Although, in fairness, I kind of freak out about Finland, too.  The idea of graduating from high school with a technical degree of some kind is definitely an interesting one, worth exploring.  Our county already has a careers and technical education program in place; can we buff it up to the point where some kind of recognized certification comes out of it?

But the most interesting thing is early childhood education.  I have to get ready to work now, so I'll just say this: Leaders, get it done!

I'm an exciting person who does exciting things

How I spent my Saturday morning:

Made coffee.  Drank coffee.
Reflected on classroom management difficulties I'm having in one class and how that class compares to other classes.
Reviewed previously-used sources for classroom management: First Days of School, CHAMPS, assorted resources accumulated through the years, like you do.
Tried to figure out how applied behavior theory fits into a teaching methodology as fluid as TPRS.
Figured out that some of these things relate to the same difficulties I have with standards mapping in general.  Spent 20 minutes on a standards-mapping tangent.
Wrote new classroom management system informed by research review.  We'll see how it goes.
Read up on Kindergarten Reading, a TPRS event.  Decided I won't have time to do anything about it until next year. 
Blogged about it.

EDITED: I almost forgot!  I read an article about tech integration.

On NCLB and the role of business in education

From The Answer Sheet, Valerie Strauss's often-informative blog in the Washington post, we learn that  business leaders are urging Congress to re-write NCLB.  I have a love-hate relationship with NCLB:  It was being passed at a time when I was deeply cynical about the way Washington was writing and passing legislation.  (Since then my cynicism has only deepened, which doesn't bode well for the NCLB rewrite.)  It also came as I was learning about what I now think of as the "old way" of teaching: grades based on points with an emphasis placed on completing homework assignments, class placement based on expected future education goals (although I didn't believe in rigorous tracking), special ed students in their own world.  I think NCLB went a long way to changing the systemic view of the way schools work.  It starts from the philosophy that all students can learn, including those with profound learning disablilities, students who come from nothing, and kids that the teachers really don't like, and from there it draws the conclusion that schools have the responsibility for teaching those students.  In the last 10 years, this has resulted in a major shift in the way school systems work, even as we break a lot of the systems that worked fairly well.

On the negative side, a less nuanced reading of NCLB led directly and inevitably to the "blame the teacher" and "test test test" mentalities that permeate the way the education world (and the rest of the world, for that matter) now behaves.  The fact that schools can do a better job of the way it organizes information and prioritizes spending has been taken to mean that teachers do a lousy job of teaching our children and teachers' unions are stealing all the money from our classrooms.  (In fairness, this is mostly believed by people who already believed that, many of whom make quite a good living believing that.) 

Back to today's reading, though, Strauss takes the buisness community's insistence of a rewrite of NCLB as evidence that it is broken beyond repair.  I have a different take on it.  I of course welcome the engagement of the business community into the conversation about education; the more stakeholders are involved, the richer the conversation will be, even if that doesn't end up doing anything for the final product.  I have two worries about this, though.  The first is that the business community almost always ends up having more impact on education priorities than educators.  Maybe that's just the nature of politics, but I'm not sure asking the CEO of Starbuck's what he wants to see in his prospective employees is the best way to determine education goals.  As Strauss puts it, "
"Critics of education reform note that educators don’t presume to know about business to tell business leaders how to reform their own institutions, but never mind."

The second, and the more important, is that I'm suspicious at best, and cynical at worst, about big business's motives.  When the business community talks about what it wants from schools, all I hear is, "We can't be bothered to train our employees in the skills we want, so we want schools to do it for us.  Also, don't tax us to pay for it."  Particularly troubling is this part from the Business Roundtable's 2013 Growth Agenda: "America also has a very real skills gap. More than 12 million U.S. workers are unemployed, yet businesses report close to 4 million open jobs.(23) Many of these jobs cannot be filled by previously displaced workers because of gaps in skills and training." 

I don't understand why companies can't grab 4 million of the best and brightest of the people they have right now, train them in the skills they need, promote them to the new positions, and then hire 4 million previously-unemployed people to fulfill the new, less-skilled openings.  There has to be somebody working in the mail room at Stryker Instruments who really really wants to be a mechanical engineer; send her to mechanical engineer's school.  Or better yet, develop an in-house, on-the-job training program that leads to some kind of recognized certification and also provides your employee with the skills you need her to have right now.)

The other aspect of this that bothers me is that, during the height of the recession (depth of the recession?), I read an article (citation needed) that said that qualified people were applying for all of these high-skill jobs; companies didn't want to pay high-skill wages to fill those positions, though.  So when they say they can't find people to fill those positions, they're being disingenuous: what they mean is they can't find people to fill those positions for a price they're willing to pay.  A greater number of people with engineering degrees will drive down the cost of expertise in engineering.  (That also explains business's motivation for immigration reform.  Engineering students from India are a whole lot less expensive than engineering students from the US, at least for the first couple of years, and after that, you can fire them and hire new ones.) 

None of this analysis of business's motives is intended to get me and my colleagues off the hook.  I share the business community's goal of a better-educated work force which is able to learn, unlearn, and re-learn a variety of skills and knowledge bases as high-tech fields develop.  I want creativity, clear thinking and effective communicating to be at the heart of our schools.  I want every student who comes out of an American public school to be prepared for anything he or she wants to do.  Business and I want the same things for our students.  I'm just not sure that we want it for the same reason.

Also, I somehow doubt that lawmakers will hear my voice as clearly as they will hear the voices of the CEO's of the Business Roundtable.

Stanford: MI charter schools more effective

Just a quick note to promise more analysis later.  I am against charter schools for a wide variety of reasons.  One of them was, until this afternoon, that all evidence indicated that charter schools are less effective than public schools.  This afternoon, I saw a report released today by Stanford University (download page here; click on Michigan).  The conclusion they draw is that Michigan charter schools produce better educational outcomes in students than comparable public schools.  I clearly have my doubts, but it seems likely that the researchers at Stanford would have taken these into account.  More from me after I actually read the report.  I mostly didn't want to feel like I'd neglected information I find inconvenient.

Their teachers' financial stability IS good for students

Michelle Rhee used to be the chancellor (whatever that means) of the Washington, DC school district.  She got a lot of traction, at least politically, on the notion that teachers were the problem with her failing school district.  (I don't remember the numbers, but I remember believing that the district was underserving its students.)  She pushed through a lot of education "reforms" and took the teachers' union out at the knee in a blow it never recovered from.  She fired large numbers of teachers at a time and then bragged about it publicly.  The film "Waiting for 'Superman'" looks at the reasoning and positive consequences of some of those reforms.  (Full disclosure: I never saw it and, if at all possible, I never will.  I feel able to critique it because I have a pretty thorough understanding of the issues of charter schools vs. public schools and the sort of lottery entry system depicted in the film.)  Now Rhee heads a non-profit organization called Students First.  It purports to work towards reforming public schools so that they work well for all students.  This is, of course, a laudable goal, one I share and one towards which I work passionately every day I get out of bed. 

For Rhee and Students First, teachers are always the problem.  The solution is always that if only teachers would care more, work harder, ignore their own lives, selflessly give, separate themselves from their unions and their negotiatied contracts, divorce their spouses and abandon their own children in favor of their students, then schools would just work. 

Clearly there is a disconnect there.  There are 3.3 million public school teachers in the US (NCSE), and it's just possible that some of them don't feel like they joined a monastic order.  We feel a calling to the profession, sure, but does that automatically mean we give up any right to self-consideration?  When faced with a choice between our students and EVERYTHING ELSE--ourselves, our families, our not-school-releated interests--do we have to choose our students every time, lest we become bad teachers?

This isn't a straw-man argument.  This is the essence of blame-the-teachers education reform.  When money goes to teachers, the argument runs, it isn't being spent "in the classroom."  It's partially for this reason that Michigan has a law that prevents local millages from being spent on teacher salaries and benefits.   (I think that's actually a pretty smart law.)  The thinking seems to be that we coddle our teachers too much and so they fail our students.  The solution is to put teachers in an atmosphere where fear of losing your job is the norm, where competition is more important than collaboration, where you can't trust your administrator to be your ally because your administrator's primary job is to look for a reason to fire you (and incidentally, replace you with somebody cheaper), where any mentoring has the potential for turning in to training your replacement. 


This is all in the context of an article in the Center for Economic Policy and Research (h/t Eschaton Blog) that suggests that Rhee's non-profit organization rates schools and states on whether or not their teachers have a defined-benefits plan--a public pension--or a defined contribution plan--a 401(k) style plan.  The more securely-funded the pension, the worse the grade.  For all the difference it makes to the report card, a state can be giving the same amount of money to the 401(k) as to the pension.  The question seema not to be, "How much on retirement are schools and states spending?", but rather, "Do states put enough market risk on teachers?" As the author notes, it is difficult to see how this has any impact on teachers at all.

I wish I could find it right now.  But there's a fairly extensive meta-study out there that indicates that if you want creative people to come up with creative solutions to hard problems, the way to do that is to instill stability into the lives of your work force.  You don't have to pay them exorbitant amounts, you just have to take care of them.  Rhee's report card and its misplaced emphasis on how schools compensate their teacher is another example of how, when it comes to teachers, our society is doing everything it can to reverse that dynamic.  Frankly, it justifies the mistrust a lot of people in the education community have for the benignly named "Students First," and the good chancellor.

First post of the new year: Nothing to do with school

This post has nothing to do with school, education, pedagogy, teachers, students, legislation, or administration.  I just love this piece of writing.  I'm sticking it here so I can find it later, and in the hopes that my readers enjoy it, too.

Babylon 5, Doctor Who, and World War II