GreatSchools: Bill's Blog

The Future of NCLB, Pigs, and The Most Important Lesson of All

Today I'm in Texas for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's annual education gathering. Actually, the event is put on by the Institute for a Competitive Workforce (ICW), a new Chamber initiative in education. I've learned a thing or two at the conference, including these tidbits about No Child Left Behind (NCLB):

• Leading members of Congress on both sides of the aisle want to see NCLB get renewed next year. Roberto Rodriguez, a staff member for Senator Kennedy, spoke eloquently about ideas that some leading Democrats have for changing the law, including fixing some of the problems I identified in my last post about the "Adequate Yearly Progress" (AYP) provision of the law.
• Americans are sharply divided about NCLB. According to Allan Rivlin, a pollster from Hart Research, people's opinions about NCLB likely have as much to do with how much they like President Bush than what they think about the provisions of the law and their effect on schools.

Then, this evening, a bunch of us headed over to the Texas State Fair to take in the action. On the bus over, I met a friendly woman named Ann Kennamer, who runs the Impact Learning Center in Scottsboro, Alabama. We stumbled on the swine competition.

Soon after we walked in, the stands erupted with the announcement of the Grand Reserve Champion: Josh Vincent from Howe, Texas, about 60 miles north of Dallas. I knew I wanted to meet this young man. A senior at Howe High School, Josh  beat out hundreds of other entrants, including many more experienced adults, to raise the Grand Reserve Champion (second place) pig in Texas. Ann took this photo of Josh with his pig (Josh is on the left.)

Chatting it up with his mother, Becky, I learned that Josh had been raising pigs since he was 9 years old. I asked for her thoughts about how her son had come to manage to raise the Grand Reserve Champion Pig in Texas? "Well, you'll want to meet his Ag teacher, Stevie Horton." From him, she said, Josh had learned responsibility, and how "It's not all about winning."

I found Mr. Horton and asked him about how Josh had come to do so well at the Texas State Fair. "He's a great kid," he replied. From Mr. Horton, I learned that Josh is a straight-A student, class president and linebacker on the football team. Mr. Horton is a leader of the school's chapter of Future Farmers of America, where Josh got guidance and support in his quest to raise a champion pig.

Finally, I talked to Josh himself. Josh is not a man of many words, but he is extremely appreciative of all that Mr. Horton has done for him. He did tell me that he intends to study animal nutrition at a four-year university in Texas, perhaps West Texas A&M. And, when I asked him about the number one thing he had learned from Mr. Horton, and from the long process of raising the Grand Reserve Champion Pig in Texas, he offered up one word: responsibility.

How meaningful is the NCLB AYP measure?

With the 2007 reauthorization of the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) fast approaching, it's  worth asking the question: How meaningful is the "Adequate Yearly Progress" (AYP) measure that is at the heart of the legislation? How much should parents pay attention to whether their school is making AYP?

Two scholars have published an interesting piece in the Fall issue of Education Next which suggests that AYP is not very accurate or meaningful. They compared the Federal AYP designation to Florida's A-F accountability system and concluded that the Florida system is much better at identifying schools where students learn more, and also identifying schools that are truly bad.

Before exploring this issue further, a few words of background: to make AYP, a school needs to reach a certain threshold — set by the state — of students meeting the "proficient" standard on a state test. The state has to set targets that increase each year until 100% of students are "proficient" in 2014.

In contrast, Florida's A-F school accountability system is based partly on absolute test scores (the percentage of students who achieved certain levels of proficiency), but also partly on student year-to-year growth in test scores.

The authors of the Education Next piece, Paul Peterson of Harvard University and Martin West of Brown University, found that schools that did not make AYP demonstrated almost the same level of learning gains as did schools that made AYP. The authors write:

Because NCLB (evaluates) schools...primarily on the basis of achievement levels, the evaluation cannot readily detect how much growth is taking place within a school, simply because children come with dramatically different educational endowments. The correlation between school average levels and growth in the 2003–04 school year was just 0.63 in math and 0.71 in reading—a positive relationship, to be sure, but hardly one on which to construct a meaningful accountability system.

Peterson and West raise great questions: Should a federal accountability system be based at least partly on student learning gains? And how can we avoid the confusion that inevitably results when you have dual federal and state accountability systems? How can we improve NCLB when it is reauthorized?

Do Parents Need Their Own Union?

Public school teachers in most states have been unionized for a long time. What if parents organized themselves into some kind of union? And if they did, what would they stand for?

This idea is getting a test ride in Los Angeles, where educator Steve Barr and other activists have formed the Los Angeles Parents Union (LAPU), a "parent-run, parent-operated coalition dedicated to ensuring that the Los Angeles Unified School District is transformed into the best school district in the nation within the next 10 years."

The Los Angles Parents Union believes that all public schools in LAUSD can be transformed into high performing public schools following the Six Tenets of High-Performing Schools. Here they are, from the organization's Web site:

1. Small schools: All schools should be 500 students or less. LAUSD is undertaking a $14 billion bond-funded construction program that can be used to create small schools;

2. High expectations for all students:  Every student will take a rigorous curriculum.  All high school students will have a college-prep curriculum that meets the University of California/California State University A-G requirements for college entrance;

3. Local control: Increase local control so that critical decisions at each school, including budgets and personnel, are made on site and by school principals and teachers (and not by people who don't have contact with students and parents); 

4. Getting dollars into the classroom: Shift school revenues away from central administration and toward teachers.  Teachers should be paid more and be granted increased input into key policy decisions such as curriculum selection and elective classes;

5. Parent participation: Welcome and expect greater parental participation by requiring that families of students dedicate at least 30 hours annually to their child's/children's education experience (through volunteering, tutoring at home, etc.); and

6.    Keeping schools open later: Schools will be kept open until at least 5 p.m. during school days to accommodate the schedules of working families and the needs of the community at large.

The group got its start when Barr, founder of Green Dot Public Schools (a Los Angeles charter school management organization), sought to organize parents to support L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's bid to take over the L.A. Unified School District. A July 7 piece in the Los Angeles Daily News quoted an involved parent: "I think it's time for parents to say, 'Enough,' for us to be united, to claim our rights and our benefits."

Barr believes that parental discontent can drive school reform in Los Angeles and beyond. An insightful analysis  of the situation by the Education Sector quoted Barr: "There are a lot of parents [at the parents union meetings] who are in communities that are coming to Green Dot and asking them to open charter schools in their neighborhood out of desperation," Barr said. "What we're saying to them is, 'Hey, forget opening charter schools in your neighborhoods. Let's organize and take over the existing schools and demand that all schools have the same values as our charter schools.'"

This is revolutionary stuff. Parents don't normally get involved in large numbers when it comes to big-time fights about power and control in schools. All too often, students and families and their everyday concerns are nowhere to be seen as politicians, teachers unions and business leaders duke it out over money and power in schools. I hope that the L.A. Parents Union can change that balance in Los Angeles.

At the same time, it's too early to say whether these parents, armed with these Six Tenets, will be able to really improve education in Los Angeles.

Barr is telling parents to "demand that all schools have the same values as our charter school." But what are those values exactly? How well are they captured by the Six Tenets?

To get a better sense of why parents like Green Dot schools, I spent some time on GreatSchools.net checking out parent ratings and reviews of their five schools that have been open for more than a year. (You can link to GreatSchools profiles of all of these schools here.)

Checking out the parent reviews of Animo Leadership High School, one of the first Green Dot schools, I found this gem:

"Animo is an excellent school in the sense that the teachers and staff are caring, energetic, intelligent and highly informed. My daughter's experience in this small school environment has been incredibly positive. The class sizes are small, and the teachers prove themselves time and again to take a personal interest in the student's well-being and success!"

Aha, now we're getting some insight into what might make this school special. Exploring further, I checked out the Web site of Animo Leadership High School and learned what animo (a Spanish word) means in the eyes of the principal there:

"Animo is the desire, ganas, heart, fun, loyalty, dedication, perseverance, intensity, commitment, determination, sacrifices, power, patience, tolerance, dreams, change, a promise, family, challenge, support, knowledge, team work, love, devotion, friendships, vigor, a new start, a key, faith, strength and most important hope. Hope for the students, hope for their families, and hope for the community. Hope that turns dreams into a reality. Hope that explains why parents make the sacrifices that they make every day."

Wow! This looks like a school that's got heart and soul, and will go to great lengths to inspire and support each of its students to find their way to success in college and life. The API numbers for Animo Leadership are not great, but I'm still inspired if it is true, as the Green Dot Web site says, that 61% of the Class of 2006 from Animo Leadership High School is attending  a four-year university in fall 2006.

So let me now venture an answer to the question I asked earlier: it seems to me that the Six Tenets do not capture much of the essence of what makes Green Dot Public Schools special and successful.

What's missing from the tenets is animo itself! Or better yet, "animo + teaching skill." Yes, it would help, as the tenets suggest, if many urban schools were smaller and open later. And parents need to be more involved. But to make this formula work — especially the local control — you have to have great teachers and principals who know how to build and run an urban school with heart and soul, and who have the knowledge and skill required to teach really well so that kids can transcend immense barriers, graduate and get to college.

Heart and soul AND technical teaching skills are necessary. Great schools are built by teachers and principals who create programs and support systems to serve their students. They know where to find the best curricula and how to adapt it to their situation. They  know (for example) algebra  well enough to teach it — something that cannot be taken for granted in urban high schools. They're deeply committed to building a culture that values learning, and to helping students find the joy in learning and accomplishment.

So here's my advice to the Los Angeles Parent Union. Add Tenet Seven: Great principals and teachers. And march on the Los Angeles Unified School District and City Hall until the district and city leadership comes up with a crackerjack plan to recruit, develop and retain teachers and principals with that ganas and the skills it takes to drive schools to greatness.

Steve Barr and Green Dot Public Schools may have figured out how to recruit and retain quality staff in their 10 charter schools. But if L.A. schools are going to get much better across the board, as the Parents Union wants, someone is going to have to figure out how to build the skills and capacity of thousands of teachers and principals at hundreds of schools across the city.

Maybe the Parents Union can put pressure on L.A. leaders to come up with some answers to this challenge. I hope so!

In Praise of Great Teachers

As we return to school, it's a good time to pay homage to the people who do the work and who make the difference for students in in schools: the teachers.

A million and one researchers have made it clear that schools are exactly as good — no better and no worse — than the teachers who teach in them. (See, for example, a study by Stanford's Linda Darling-Hammond, and  research from Australia's classrooms.)

So what exactly is a great teacher?

A great teacher has four traits: 1) subject matter competence; 2) a genuine personal interest and enthusiasm for learning and for the subject at hand; and 3) command of effective teaching techniques; and 4) an ability to communicate with and motivate young people. Let's take each of these one by one.

1. Subject matter competence. Easier for an elementary school teacher, but not to be assumed, particularly once children get to middle and high school. I've worked with a bunch of Harvard graduates who can't write; don't assume that your child's eighth-grade English teacher can write. Maybe she can, but maybe she can't.
2. Personal interest and enthusiasm. Did you have teachers who exhibited so much interest and enthusiasm for their subject that they could barely keep quiet? They were personally thrilled by what Shakespeare teaches us about human nature, or the symmetry of a quadratic equation, and they shared their excitement in a way that we could not ignore.
3. Command of teaching techniques. This is harder to remember, but back in first grade, you might have had a teacher who knew what to do with you when you just didn't "get" certain blended vowel sounds. She knew to try a new way to help you "get it," or to have a peer explain it to you in a certain way. And then you got it.
4. Ability to communicate with and motivate young people. Some teachers care. They care deeply about the well-being of each of their students, and they know how to reach out and touch young people. Sometimes they have interesting stories themselves that captivate us, or maybe they just have an intuitive sense about how to connect with young people.

I had a teacher like this. Her name was Pat Rose, my ninth-grade English teacher at Sewickley Academy, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Mrs. Rose knew her stuff. (She'd read David Copperfield at least 27 times, so she had no trouble spotting those of us who hadn't done our reading for the week.) She taught young writers how to choose their words carefully and to omit needless words. She insisted on precision and elegance in written expression.

Perhaps most important, she taught us that the proper length of an essay "is like a woman's skirt: long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to keep it interesting."

Mrs. Rose was somewhat old-fashioned. She was also extremely good at commanding the attention of 14-year-old boys.

Visiting her Web site the other day, I was thrilled to discover that Mrs. Rose is still teaching, and that she still loves poetry. (She tried her best to make me love it back when I was 14 — with limited success.) She writes on the poetry page of her Web site: " By making us stop for a moment, poetry gives us an opportunity to think about ourselves as human beings on this planet and what we mean to one another. I wrote the following poem for my eighth-grade students in the spring of 1999; however, it is a poem that is really for all my students past and present. It is dedicated to my students and all the teachers, family members and friends who care about young people."

Here is the poem she wrote:

On the day
When the world turns from you and
Shadows steal the light,
And you stumble in the dark,
Remember those who believed in you.

On the day
When you hesitate to step forward toward your own horizon,
When you doubt your dreams and
You stand before a closed door,
Remember those who placed the future in your young hands.

On the day
When your wish for wisdom exceeds your need for reason,
When you look for the truth that will explain your life, and
There are questions in your heart,
Remember those who taught you to value the search.

Then on the day
When a wreath of laurel is placed upon your head,
When you thrust strong arms into joyful skies, and
You lift your face to the warming sun,
Remember those who gave you a compass
So that you could chart your course among a complexity of stars.

Thank you, Pat Rose. And thank you to all the teachers who believed in me and who helped me find my way.

Public Attitudes Toward Public Schools

Phi Delta Kappan (a professional association for educators) and Gallup just released their 38th Annual Poll of the Public's Attitudes Toward the Public Schools.

While 56% of public school parents gave the public schools in their community an A or a B, only 21% of public school parents gave an A or B to the public schools in the nation as a whole. What's going on here? Are parents viewing their own schools through rose-colored glasses? Or are they being led to believe by the media that public schools "everywhere else" are a mess?

The pollsters asked: "Which is most at fault for the problems currently facing public education in this community — the performance of the local schools or the effect of societal problems?" Of the respondents, 22 % blamed the schools, while 70% blamed "societal problems." While 85% of parents think it is "very important" or "somewhat important" to close achievement gaps among groups of students, they are evenly split over whether it is the responsiblity of schools to do so.

Parents oppose vouchers while supporting charter schools. While they are concerned about the impact of testing, they believe students should be required to pass an exit exam in order to graduate.

Parents think high school kids should be asked to work harder. When the pollsters asked parents of public school children whether their local public high school was requiring students to work "too hard" or "not hard enough," only 18% of parents said "too hard," while 67% said "not hard enough."

And what should kids be working harder on? Math, for starters, say 76% of public school parents, who think that high schools should require four years of math, including a minimum of two years of algebra. And 62% of parents think that all kids should be required to take a college prep curriculum, even if they don't plan to attend college.

To make time for all of this (or to keep their kids out of their hair for longer), 68% of parents would like to see their local schools lengthen the school day by an hour per day.

And a final interesting tidbit: while 26% of respondents say that the federal No Child Left Behind Act is "helping" schools and 21% say it is "hurting" schools, a substantial 37% say that it is "making no difference." Could it be so?

Charter School Wars

On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Education came out with a new study showing that fourth graders in traditional public schools are doing significantly better in reading and math than comparable children attending charter schools.

Most experts are not making much fuss about the study. The head of the National Center for Education Statistics, the U.S. Department of Education agency that put out the study, advised parents to pay no attention.Other experts interviewed by Washington Post Reporter Jay Matthews agreed.

But this study and others like it do add up to an inescapable conclusion: Charter schools are not currently performing way better than traditional public schools on standardized tests.

That in itself is a significant finding.  Some people have supported charters over the years because they thought that they would do way better than traditional public schools on these tests. Freed from most regulations and open to innovation, these schools would soar.

Earlier this year I heard Ted Koldrie, a father of the charter school movement, discuss charter school  performance at a conference. The original motivation for the creators of the charter school concept was not to prove that schools freed from government regulation do better, he said. The idea, rather, was to set up a legal structure that would allow and encourage educational innovation beyond what the traditional public school system was affording.

The important question, he suggested, is not whether charter schools as a group do better than traditional public schools. Rather, we should be asking: Which charter schools are doing well and why? What kinds of innovations that charters have piloted show promise? What can we learn from them?

It would be nice if we could say that being a charter school — being free of regulations — leads to much higher academic achievement for students, but no such luck. We're going to have to follow Ted's advice and look deeper for lessons that we can use to improve all schools, charter and traditional.

Parents in the Driver’s Seat

With Back-to-School season in full swing (In some parts of the country, school has already started!), it’s a great time to keep in mind that—as important as schools are—they do not make as much difference in the educational development of children as families and communities do.

Most parents I talk to recognize this. They know that what they do with their children is very important. They know that schools can’t do it all themselves, and they seek out schools where parent involvement is high.

Research confirms parents play a leading role in their children’s education.

In a 2001 review of dozens of research studies on this topic, MIT economist Caroline Hoxby reported that the consensus view is that family factors account for about 90% of the education attainment of 30-year-olds, while school factors account for less than 10%.

The studies generally show that the parents’ education level is the single most important factor for predicting their children’s educational attainment. But what parents do with their children matters a great deal, too. 

Reviewing the research, Hoxby noted that “Family conduct variables that are statistically significant predictors of good student outcomes include owning an atlas, owning a dictionary, owning more than 50 books, having a computer for child’s use with homework, having attended a school event, parents’ checking that homework is done, parents’ planning course-taking with child, visiting the library, visiting science or history museums, parents’ knowing what courses child is taking, parents knowing how well child is doing in school, and parents knowing graduation requirements.”

Of course, these aren’t the only important things that parents do. This is a representative list of behaviors that researchers were able to measure.

The key point is that we parents need to be involved with our children’s education. What we parents do is more important than what we say. We need to demonstrate to our children that learning is important.

A key way we can do this is to never stop learning ourselves, whether we have Ph.D.s or whether we haven’t yet graduated from high school. We need to constantly ask questions of our children, ensure that our children do their homework, attend school events and take our children to interesting places that spark their curiosity.

GreatSchools offers some helpful tools for stimulating your thinking about how to be a great parent when it comes to your children's education. I suggest starting with our grade-by-grade newsletters that help you know what to expect in your child's development this year.

Welcome back to school, parents!

Hippy Valley Middle School

Last week I sat next to an 11-year-old on the plane as I returned from Washington, D.C., back to San Francisco. We struck up a friendly conversation and I asked him about school. I learned that he just graduated from elementary school and that he'll be entering middle school this fall.

I also learned that he does not like school.

"Is there anything about school that you like?" I asked.

"No."

"What didn't you like about your elementary school?"

"The teachers, principals and the kids."

"Sounds rough," I said. "What kind of school would you like to go to?"

"It would be called 'Hippy Valley' Elementary," he replied. "Everyone would wear tie-dyed shirts and glasses shaped like hearts."

"What would you learn there?"

"How to fight the people who want to cut down trees."

"What do you think you need to know in order to do that?" I asked.

"I don't know," he replied.

"Do you think you're going to like middle school?"

"No."

Nice to see some social justice passion there, but this kid seemed to have really low expectations — even for an 11-year-old.

After learning that he lives in the Oakland/Berkeley area, I suggested to him that he and his family look around for charter middle school options. There are some good charter schools in the area, I told him, and if he looked around, he might find a school that would teach him a lot and that he would actually enjoy attending.

"Nobody likes school," he responded. "You can't like school and have a life," he responded.

OK, it was clear to me: This kid really needs to be surrounded by teachers that ask a lot of him and work hard to ignite his own passions. I hope his parents recognize his potential and know that they have choices.

I hope he finds Hippy Valley Middle School and that the teachers really rock.

Weighted Student Funding

Ever been frustrated trying to understand a school budget?

Ever wondered why your school gets however much money it gets — and why other schools seem to get mysteriously more or less?

Well, there's a funding idea floating out there that would be good for everyone in the educational system, including students, parents, teachers and administrators. It's called weighted student funding.

Roughly speaking, the idea is that funding should "follow children" to the schools that they attend. The amount of money would depend on the "difficulty" of educating the student. For example, English language learners would get a higher funding allocation than students who are already proficient in English.

Here is the plan being promoted by the "100 Percent Solution" group, a project of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute:

1. Funding should follow the child, on a per-student basis, to the public school that he attends.
2. Per-student funding should vary according to a child’s need and other relevant circumstances.
3. The funds should arrive at the school as real dollars (i.e., not teaching positions, ratios or staffing norms) that can be spent flexibly, with accountability gauged by results, not inputs, programs or activities.
4. These principles for allocating money to schools should apply to all levels (e.g., federal funds going to states, state funds going to districts, districts to schools).
5. All funding systems should be simplified and made transparent.

You can learn more on their Web site or check out this example of how it could be implemented. There's also a long list of education leaders and politicos from both sides of the aisle who think it's a good idea.

I think this would be a good deal for parents. It makes schools and school systems more responsive to parent needs, gives local schools more power to "buy" what they really need, and allows everyone to track the money more easily. I'm going to sign my name onto this, and I encourage you to think about signing, too.

Or better yet, talk to your school board member or superintendent about the idea. Might it work in your district?

A New Kind of Education Conversation

Sometimes I feel as if parents and education policymakers are living on different planets.

Listen to us parents talk about what kind of schools we want for our children, and we're likely to talk about school quality in a broad way. We care about the quality of teachers, the breadth of the program, the sense of community at the school and, of course, student safety. We know that educating students is not a "cookie-cutter" kind of operation. We are acutely aware of the unique characteristics of each of our children, and we want schools that pay attention to the complete development — academic, social, emotional, moral and physical — of each child that comes through its doors.

Listen to many policymakers talk about K-12 education, and you hear a lot about test scores. In fact, that's just about all you hear about. Young people will not have opportunities and America will not be competitive, they say, unless we do a better job of raising student achievement. And test scores are the measure of progress when it comes to academic achievement.

Most of us parents do care about test scores when we're looking for a school, but the importance of scores typically goes way down once we've made our pick. Once we've chosen our school, we have a close-up view of how well it is serving our children and the children in our community. We want our child (and all the other children in our community) to be happy and well rounded. We are more likely to get upset over teachers who don't care about students than we are about low test scores.

And to be fair, some policymakers and business people who influence them do care about education in a broader sense than just test scores. They understand that education is the product of an  interaction between students and teachers, and that student success depends on the quality of teachers and programs. But, reading the newspaper, you can't tell that most of the time.

So what often happens in American education? Policymakers make increasingly shrill proclamations about the need to raise student achievement — as measured by test scores — and we parents shrug our shoulders. Raising test scores is not a bad idea in and of itself, we think, but it's not worth it if it comes at a cost of making schools focus narrowly on a test-driven curriculum or if it makes schools less inclined to take careful measure of each child and serve him or her as well as possible.

This is a dangerous standoff and it doesn't have to be this way.

We parents are correct in assessing what education really should be: good schools must pay careful attention to the complete development of each young person. Of course, preparing the next generation to take its leadership role means developing their abilities in a broad sense. And even if academic development is the primary goal, wise parents and teachers know that kids learn better when they are inspired and supported. Success and happiness in life depends on a broad base of social, emotional and other skills, as well as academic abilities. 

At the same time, policymakers are correct in their assessment that many American students are not performing academically at levels that will enable them to take advantage of the opportunities in the 21st Century. The academic preparation that was good enough for us parents is not good enough for young people today. The globalized information economy makes ever-greater demands on the ability of young people to think, analyze, synthesize and communicate. Many young people will "miss the boat" unless we up the ante academically.

So I think we need a new kind of conversation about education in America: How do we reform our education system so as to increase academic achievement while at the same time paying even more careful attention to the complete development of every child? Parents need to recognize the need to improve academic achievement. Policymakers need to recognize that schools are community-serving institutions with broader missions than raising test scores.

How do we do this? Stay tuned — I'll be sharing my thoughts on this critical question in the coming weeks.