Tuttle SVC

Students on the Fringe

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Hoffman) — Fri, 24 May 2013 01:31:00 +0000

With 83% of the state’s special needs students and 90% of the state’s limited English students scoring substantially below proficient on the last NECAP math test,* even with remediation many of those students will likely not graduate in 2014. Even more troubling is that the gap between these students and ‘average’ students has actually increased over the past 4 years; as has the gap for low income students.** Let’s be honest, many people, including several in the business community, aren’t that concerned whether these kids graduate or not. These aren’t the young people they will want to hire. Those who do care, the students and their parents, are confused, bewildered and genuinely afraid for their future – and many are close to giving up. Teachers who work with these students have been so overwhelmed with data reporting, effectiveness ratings, outcomes, forced curriculum, test prep and standardized tests (which they know are not valid or reliable assessments for these students***), are close to giving up, too.

Sometimes School "Choice" Means Choosing to Site Your School on Toxic Waste

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Hoffman) — Thu, 23 May 2013 14:01:00 +0000

Steve Ahlquist:

Last year the General Assembly unanimously passed the “Environmental Cleanup Objectives for Schools” sponsored by Senator Juan Pichardo and representative Scott Slater. The bill, which took over three years to pass, was signed into law by Governor Chafee on June 6, 2012, nearly a year ago. Commonly referred to as the “School Siting Law,” this was an important and landmark piece of legislation that prohibits school construction on contaminated sites where there is ongoing potential for vapor intrusion.

This common sense piece of legislation, that keeps our children from attending schools where toxic gases can wreak havoc on their health, is doubly important because the bodies of children are still developing, and triply important in poorer communities where children already face greater levels of hazardous environmental poisons such as lead.

It’s therefore even more baffling that this legislation is being challenged and potentially weakened by two new bills that have been introduced to the General assembly, House Bill 5617 and Senate Bill 520. These bills would allow construction of schools on vapor intrusion sites, completely gutting the intent of the original bill. This legislation is being introduced on behalf of the Rhode Island Mayoral Academies (RIMA),which wants to expand a charter school on potentially hazardous land.

RIMA wants to manage the contamination by leaving it in the ground, and then monitoring the vapor intrusion with sophisticated and largely untested technologies that they hope will protect children, teachers and staff from unhealthy levels of exposure to toxins. The technology and monitoring will be an additional expense that the school will have to manage, money that will not go towards education.

I'm sure this will all turn out well for everyone in the end. Smell the freedom!

There's No Spinning Away the Ratliff Victory

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Hoffman) — Wed, 22 May 2013 16:42:00 +0000

Russo:

Underdog LAUSD classroom teacher Monica Ratliff has won a surprising upset victory in her school board runoff agaainst rival Antonio Sanchez...
Ratliff only campaigned part-time (she's a 5th grade teacher) and didn't have any outside campaign contributions (compared to Sanchez, who had boatloads of money). She didn't even have the unequivocal endorsement of her union (UTLA endorsed both candidates). In the March primary, she was a whopping 10 percentage points behind Sanchez, 34 percent to 44 percent. This time around, it was 52-48 in her favor.

Dumping Gist and Heightening the Contradictions

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Hoffman) — Wed, 22 May 2013 16:29:00 +0000

Bob Plain at RI Future has a good rundown on the state of play leading up to the likely renewal of Deborah Gist's contract as Education Commissioner. I'm all in favor of dumping Gist, but it is an awkward time to do it. We've got a newly reconstituted Board of Education which does not seem to have a charge to change direction on education policy overall. Or maybe there is a quiet voting majority for change, but if so, it is quiet. Maybe insiders know Gist doesn't have the votes on the board and this push is designed to provide political cover and justification, but I don't think that's what's going on.

As it is, we're just getting to the point where you can say Gist's policies have had enough time to start showing real results, and the lack of serious improvement in outcomes is just starting to become clear. We're also right in the middle of this graduation requirements mess.

If the alternative is just a new Broadie following the same playbook, I'd rather keep Gist. If we're really ready to change direction, I don't think the political foundation is built yet.

I'd rather have this settled through next year's gubernatorial election -- although there is a real risk all the candidates will still be pro-reform, since Chafee has been so... patient with Gist.

The most important point here is that Deb Gist isn't Omar from the Wire; this isn't a "You come at the king, you best not miss" situation.

Even if she survives this, Gist and her allies will come out weaker than at any point in the past four years.

I would note that I am susceptible to wanting to wait for events to "heighten the contradiction," for example, by leaving Gist in place and letting the new graduation policy controversy fully come to a head over the course of the next year.I have to try to resist that because I don't think it works as a tactic and hurts a lot of vulnerable students in the meantime.

But in thinking about it, it does seem like a lot of reformers, Gist included, have that same revolutionary tendency themselves. It is like they'd rather take risks to draw the teachers' unions into a decisive battle than collaborate and actually improve schools. I don't think "heightening the contradictions" is working out for them either.

Comments Which Don't Inspire Responses

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Hoffman) — Tue, 21 May 2013 15:41:00 +0000

Me, commenting on Grant Wiggins On close reading, part 2:

The CC standards do not call generically for close reading as it is broadly defined in the discipline. They *could have* and other standards have done so, but they chose not to. Standard one only calls for students to “Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it,” that only refers to a single aspect of the close reading process.
Most of the rest of the reading standards address a small number of specific tasks which would commonly be part of the close reading process, with a multitude of variations on these tasks piling up over the grade levels.
Discussing close reading generically misses the point. The question should be whether close reading as systematically specified by the Common Core is the best, or at least sufficient, approach for a complete K-12 course of study in ELA. Indeed, the examples of other descriptions of close reading cover a wide range of interpretations.
I would argue that Dr. McClennen’s definition is very different than what the CC asks for (and I would prefer something like hers): “‘Reading closely’ means developing a deep understanding and a precise interpretation of a literary passage that is based first and foremost on the words themselves.” The CC is very consistent in not requiring students to create an original interpretation of a text as a whole — and they could, there are many examples of standards that do. For that matter, they avoid requiring “understanding” as much as possible.
The CC’s overall approach to reading is more like the UW one “..close reading does not try to summarize the author’s main points, rather, it focuses on “picking apart” and closely looking at the what the author makes his/her argument, why is it interesting, etc.” That is, focusing on textual analysis, craft and structure.
So, for example, if we look at your Frog and Toad example, I certainly like your questions, and they do require close reading. However, how well aligned with the Common Core are they? In general you’ve hit standards 1-3 pretty well, although way above the second grade level (if that’s the reading level of the text), but you’re missing the other five relevant standards.
This may seem like a pedantic technical point, but from reading the responses of NY teachers to their first Common Core ELA test, I suspect that a lot of them were generically teaching close reading as you demonstrate, when in fact they needed to be preparing their students for lots of tasks like “Describe the overall structure of a story, including describing how the beginning introduces the story and the ending concludes the action (RL2.5).” Or whatever multiple choice question asks students to “Acknowledge differences in the points of view of characters (RL2.6).”

For a Polarized Debate, a Lot of People are on Both Sides

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Hoffman) — Mon, 20 May 2013 20:23:00 +0000

Dan Meyer has called our attention to the recent NCTM keynote by Uri Treisman:

This is the core of Treisman's critique:

So the notion was: "Let's focus on teachers as the central driver of reform and rethink how we evaluate teachers." They had the view that teachers were the single most important in-school factor in student achievement. And math people know that was just an artifact of the way they modeled the problem.

This goes well with my conclusion that Rhode Island does have a problem with math instruction and learning, but we're largely applying these intrusive unproven systemic solutions instead of investing in math instruction.

But it is worth highlighting here that Dr. Treisman is the founder and director of the Charles A. Dana Center at The University of Texas at Austin. The Dana Center has had a big consultant role in Rhode Island I think pretty much since Gist arrived, for example:

$2.86 million, the second largest contract so far, has been awarded to the Dana Center for an intensive review of the Common Core Standards, a set of national standards Rhode Island has pledged to adopt. The Dana Center will also look at how local districts can align their curricula to meet the new standards.
The Dana Center has been working with the State Department of Education on aligning local curricula to state standards for several years and participated in a multi-million dollar curriculum re-design in Providence. Since the district introduced its re-vamped Math and Science courses in 2009, proficiency rates on state science tests have increased from 9.4% to 16.8%. Math results have been slower to improve, but only one year of data is available.

Dr. Treisman is also on the board of The New Teacher Project, which has been reforming teaching hiring in Providence for years now with absolutely no discernible positive effect on student performance.

My point here is not to try to brand Dr. Treisman as a hypocrite or undermine his message in this keynote. What all this illustrates is the incredible institutional momentum that was created for Race to the Top. The Dana Center doesn't belong to Dr. Treisman, it is essentially a business run by UT, so yeah, it is going to follow the money and try to do what's best for kids along the way. Treisman doesn't have the option of shutting down the Center and laying off its employees if he doesn't like the direction the wind is blowing.

Maybe Dr. Treisman is a useful "critical friend" to TNTP, I don't know, I'm not saying he has any power there.

I guess what I'm trying to point out here is that this is a very pointed critique of the country's -- and Rhode Island's -- overall reform agenda by someone who should be considered one of Deb Gist's key allies when it comes to actual teaching and learning issues. Might be another sign the wind is changing.

Comment Liberation

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Hoffman) — Mon, 20 May 2013 19:38:00 +0000

Robert Shepherd:

I think that two things are being confused here. What the Common Core State Standards (more exactly, the Publishers’ Criteria that accompanied the standards) attacks is not the necessity of background knowledge for reading comprehension but, rather, a kind of prereading activity that has become ubiquitous in educational materials that is typically called something like “Activate Prior Knowledge” that does not, typically, address the background knowledge issue. This is an extremely important issue, so I hope that people will bear with me while I explain it in some detail.

Going Into the College Readiness Weeds

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Hoffman) — Mon, 20 May 2013 19:12:00 +0000

I'm somewhat suspicious about all the statistics and rhetoric about "college readiness," not so much because I believe all our students are ready for college -- or that we thought it was the minimum standard for getting a high school diploma until the day before yesterday -- but because there is no particular reason to take numbers reported by colleges at face value. They certainly have their own interests and biases, and neither college administrators, professors, or especially adjuncts or TA's have any particular training or expertise in the subject of "college readiness."

Anyhow, The Readiness is All has a good post illuminating some of the practical complexities entitled THE FOG OF COLLEGE READINESS: ALARMING FACTS ABOUT THE CSU EAP/EPT:

This year Assistant Principal Kirk Kennedy and I attended an informational meeting on the CSUF campus regarding the EAP and EPT. When I found out that 95% of all students pass the EPT after taking a three week course on their campus I raised my hand and asked, “Can you please distribute the curriculum of this course because I would like to see how you get students prepared to pass this test in three weeks with a 95% pass rate when we have students for four years and can only achieve a 55% pass rate.” This question was met with stony silence. I then asked a follow-up question, “Can you at least show us our student scores disaggregated by multiple choice section and essay component so we can see what we need to work on at the high school level.” This question was answered by an emphatic “No we are not going to do that.” I found this shocking since the college board does this for the AP and SAT test and the entire purpose of the EAP test as stated by the CSU system is to help students see what they need to work on senior year to get ready for the CSU system, but yet they won’t tell the schools where the students need more assistance.

What's the Rush?

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Hoffman) — Mon, 20 May 2013 18:27:00 +0000

Erik Robelen:

Rhode Island may prove to be the first state to adopt the Next Generation Science Standards issued in final form last month. The state board of education is expected to vote on the standards at its next meeting, on May 23.

I waste too much time on standards in subjects I actually know something about, so I'll keep my mouth shut other than to wonder what the rush is?

This is a national PR move.

Skate Providence

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Hoffman) — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:17:00 +0000

A little tour with some legends, starting at my beloved Neutaconkanut.

Student & Task Models in the Common Core Revisited

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Hoffman) — Wed, 15 May 2013 21:28:00 +0000

I tried using the basic psychometric concept of student and task models to look at the structure of the Common Core ELA standards. My premise was that an individual grade level standard represents the student model, or "what we want to say about what a student knows or can do—aspects of their knowledge or skill." For example the grade 9-10 version of reading literature standard 5:

Analyze how an author’s choices concerning how to structure a text, order events within it (e.g., parallel plots), and manipulate time (e.g., pacing, flashbacks) create such effects as mystery, tension, or surprise.

This is a particular manifestation of the anchor College and Career Readiness Standard 5:

Analyze the structure of texts, including how specific sentences, paragraphs, and larger portions of the text (e.g., a section, chapter, scene, or stanza) relate to each other and the whole.

Which is rather similar to a standard from the English (that is for England) 2007 Programme of Study for Key Stage 4:

Students should be able to understand how meaning is constructed withinIt’s not too late for the Washington Post to insist that the City Council put Dr. Sandy Sanford, former Chancellor Rhee, Chancellor Henderson, former OSSE head Deborah Gist and others under oath. sentences and across texts as a whole.

I would note that deleting the word "understand" from standards is a very important ideological point in American standards politics. It is kind of a dog-whistle, but also emphasizes the collapsing of the student and task model in American standards, particularly the Common Core. The goals of learning, this approach says, should avoid fuzzy abstraction and focus on observable outcomes (but don't say "outcomes," that's another dog-whistle).

On the other hand, however, I keep forgetting that the standards also say "Students advancing through the grades are expected to meet each year’s grade-specific standards and retain or further develop skills and understandings mastered in preceding grades."

So the "narrow" grade 9-10 literature standard 5 really also includes:

Recognize common types of texts (e.g., storybooks, poems).
Explain major differences between books that tell stories and books that give information, drawing on a wide reading of a range of text types.
Describe the overall structure of a story, including describing how the beginning introduces the story and the ending concludes the action.
Refer to parts of stories, dramas, and poems when writing or speaking about a text, using terms such as chapter, scene, and stanza; describe how each successive part builds on earlier sections.
Explain major differences between poems, drama, and prose, and refer to the structural elements of poems (e.g., verse, rhythm, meter) and drama (e.g., casts of characters, settings, descriptions, dialogue, stage directions) when writing or speaking about a text.
Explain how a series of chapters, scenes, or stanzas fits together to provide the overall structure of a particular story, drama, or poem.
Analyze how a particular sentence, chapter, scene, or stanza fits into the overall structure of a text and contributes to the development of the theme, setting, or plot.
Analyze how a drama’s or poem’s form or structure (e.g., soliloquy, sonnet) contributes to its meaning.
Compare and contrast the structure of two or more texts and analyze how the differing structure of each text contributes to its meaning and style.

Exactly how this ever growing list of standards is meant to be addressed is not spelled out. Should there be 10th grade questions about the kindergarten "types of texts" standards, just with an appropriately 10th grade range of text types? There's no real indication that there shouldn't be, or particular reason not to.

If we want to do a full comparison with the single standard from the English Programme of Study, we would also include the informational text standards:

Identify the front cover, back cover, and title page of a book.
Know and use various text features (e.g., headings, tables of contents, glossaries, electronic menus, icons) to locate key facts or information in a text.
Know and use various text features (e.g., captions, bold print, subheadings, glossaries, indexes, electronic menus, icons) to locate key facts or information in a text efficiently.
Use text features and search tools (e.g., key words, sidebars, hyperlinks) to locate information relevant to a given topic efficiently.
Describe the overall structure (e.g., chronology, comparison, cause/effect, problem/solution) of events, ideas, concepts, or information in a text or part of a text.
Compare and contrast the overall structure (e.g., chronology, comparison, cause/effect, problem/solution) of events, ideas, concepts, or information in two or more texts.
Analyze how a particular sentence, paragraph, chapter, or section fits into the overall structure of a text and contributes to the development of the ideas.
Analyze the structure an author uses to organize a text, including how the major sections contribute to the whole and to the development of the ideas.
Analyze in detail the structure of a specific paragraph in a text, including the role of particular sentences in developing and refining a key concept.
Analyze in detail how an author’s ideas or claims are developed and refined by particular sentences, paragraphs, or larger portions of a text (e.g., a section or chapter).

And we also have History/Social Studies versions:

Describe how a text presents information (e.g., sequentially, comparatively, causally).
Analyze how a text uses structure to emphasize key points or advance an explanation or analysis.

And science (I'm just going up to 10th grade, btw):

Analyze the structure an author uses to organize a text, including how the major sections contribute to the whole and to an understanding of the topic.
Analyze the structure of the relationships among concepts in a text, including relationships among key terms (e.g., force, friction, reaction force, energy).

So... what the hell does all that add up to? Who knows? It isn't "fewer, clearer," that's for sure. And I don't understand people who say these standards make more sense the longer you study them.

But anyhow, if we're looking at this in terms of a student model/task model frame, I think one can read the individual grade level standards as the task model and the CCRS anchor as the student model. If you read the individual standards as "the situations we can set up in the world, in which we will observe the student say or do something that gives us clues about the knowledge or skill we’ve built into the student model," it all hangs together better, and it would make sense that the people from ACT and The College Board who we were originally told designed the standards would like that structure.

Unfortunately, Not Out In Time for Teacher Appreciation Day

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Hoffman) — Wed, 15 May 2013 21:08:00 +0000

Providence Grays 2013 Brochure

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Hoffman) — Wed, 15 May 2013 01:46:00 +0000

Enjoy.

New National

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Hoffman) — Wed, 15 May 2013 01:30:00 +0000

I'm Proud to be Represented by Sheldon Whitehouse

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Hoffman) — Tue, 14 May 2013 19:32:00 +0000

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

First Murdoch, Now Bloomberg

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Hoffman) — Tue, 14 May 2013 18:02:00 +0000

Natasha Lennard:

Following revelations that Bloomberg News reporters had used the Bloomberg terminals — ubiquitous in the finance sector — to spy on some banker activity, the Financial Times reported Tuesday that thousands of private messages sent between terminal users have been leaked online and available for public view for some time. The latest news “undermin[es] he company’s attempts to restore faith in its ability to keep client data confidential as it scrambles to allay clients’ privacy concerns.”

Yes, the case for giant databases of sensitive student information just gets better and better.

What Jobs Are These Kids Going to Get? WHAT JOBS, WHERE, PAYING WHAT?!?

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Hoffman) — Tue, 14 May 2013 16:09:00 +0000

Mike Petrilli:

Let's imagine that our schools can help the average child born into poverty do somewhat better. Let's say that with a combination of talented and well-trained teachers, a rich and rigorous curriculum, lots of supports, and strong leadership, we're able to get poor students, on average, to a 10th-grade level by the time they graduate high school. Suddenly they can attend a community college, or even a four-year university, without starting in remedial education. They are much more likely to graduate, at least with an associate's degree or a technical credential. Rather than making minimum wage, they will make a living wage.
They are less likely to get pregnant as teens, or end up in prison, or drop out of the workforce. Their children wouldn't be born poor—they would be born middle class. This would be transformative.
Notice the key assumption built into this "theory of action": reading and math matter a lot. Getting to the 10th-grade level instead of the 8th-grade level (even as measured by rinky-dinky standardized tests) would make a meaningful difference in real lives. With that assumption in place, it's not crazy—in fact, it's perfectly rational—to hold schools accountable for helping their students make progress every year with their reading and math skills. It's smart to put in place clear, high standards—let's call them common-core standards—that will delineate the path from poverty to prosperity, that will help schools and teachers focus on the knowledge and skills that matter most, and will get students to true readiness for college and career by the age of 18.
So Deborah, are you ready for the big question, the kicker, the heart of the matter?

The key assumption, the kicker, the heart of the matter is, would there be jobs paying a living wage for all these community college graduates? Even the kids who pick exactly right and get, say, the exact kind of welding certification that is needed when they graduate, how secure is a job like that now? Think it'll last 10 years? Do you know how mediocre the pay for those jobs is now even though the employers can't fill them? Think about how much less they'd pay if there was a glut of newly certified applicants.

And that's leaving out the fact that all the jobs that are currently held by the working poor still have to be done by somebody. Are we going to massively expand low-wage immigration to make up for the ever increasing pool of jobs native-born Americans "won't do?" And then, once our awesome new education system gets their children through college, will we have to import a whole new batch of immigrants for the next generation of service workers?

Petrilli:

The typical high-poverty school is, and has always been, pretty mediocre. That's not an indictment of the people who work in these schools; the problem is the system. And it's not unique to education. Any big, bureaucratic government agency is going to struggle to achieve effectiveness, much less excellence. (Think the DMV.) Heck, even most large, private-sector companies are pretty lame, especially ones that don't face much competition. (Think the electric company.) Layer on top of that all of the distracting demands placed upon schools, the fragmented nature of education governance, and, in some places at least, too few resources, and it would be a miracle if the typical high-poverty public school were good, much less great.

Yes, "the typical high-poverty school is, and has always been, pretty mediocre," BECAUSE OF THE HIGH-POVERTY. If the problem was "the system," all of our schools would be equally bad, and in fact, all the schools everywhere would be bad, because "the system" per se isn't that different around the world.

If the argument has to end up with "and pretty much all large organizations suck anyway, so whatever," you're losing.

Last Gasp of the Old Guard

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Hoffman) — Tue, 14 May 2013 03:58:00 +0000

I Hate Music Too!

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Hoffman) — Mon, 13 May 2013 20:18:00 +0000

Student & Task Models in the Common Core

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Hoffman) — Mon, 13 May 2013 20:15:00 +0000

Tom Sgouros keeps dragging me into the psychometric weeds and was trying to explain the concept of "theta" in psychometrics last week. I ended up reading some of this paper on Psychometric Principles in Student Assessment, including this paragraph:

The assessment design framework provides a way of thinking about psychometrics that relates what we observe to what we infer. The models of the evidence-centered design framework are illustrated in Figure 1. The student model, at the far left, concerns what we want to say about what a student knows or can do—aspects of their knowledge or skill. Following a tradition in psychometrics, we label this “θ” (theta). This label may stand for something rather simple, like a single category of knowledge such as vocabulary usage, or something much more complex, like a set of variables that concern which strategies a student can bring to bear on mixed-number subtraction problems and under what conditions she uses which ones. The task model, at the far right, concerns the situations we can set up in the world, in which we will observe the student say or do something that gives us clues about the knowledge or skill we’ve built into the student model. Between the student and task model are the scoring model and the measurement model, through which we reason from what we observe in performances to what we infer about a student.

This gives me a little more language to describe my most basic reaction to the Common Core ELA. I think the most fundamental design principle in the CC is to collapse the task model and student model as much as possible.

Picking one example quickly, here's 2.2b from the English (that is for England) 2007 Programme of Study for Key Stage 4:

Students should be able to understand how meaning is constructed within sentences and across texts as a whole.

You can see that a broad range of tasks could address this student model. You can also see that it would be easy to end up with a task model which does not completely cover to the theoretical student model.

The equivalent in the Common Core would be:

Analyze how an author’s choices concerning how to structure a text, order events within it (e.g., parallel plots), and manipulate time (e.g., pacing, flashbacks) create such effects as mystery, tension, or surprise.

If this is the student model, and the task model is "the situations we can set up in the world, in which we will observe the student say or do something that gives us clues about the knowledge or skill we’ve built into the student model," how much difference is there between the two here?

To be clear, I don't think my observation here is controversial. However, I haven't seen it discussed -- because there has been little serious analysis of the structure or design of the Common Core ELA. My complaint is that as a result, the student model is way to narrow, specific and incomplete to represent what we really want students to know and be able to do.

I'm Proud to be Represented by Carmen Castillo

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Hoffman) — Fri, 10 May 2013 14:48:00 +0000

Everything Is Worse When You Don't Have Enough Money

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Hoffman) — Thu, 09 May 2013 15:47:00 +0000

Carol Lloyd:

When Lutz opened her letter from the San Francisco Unified School District to learn her daughter had landed a spot at Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy, she felt optimistic — lackluster test scores notwithstanding. On the tour Lutz had noticed the small class sizes, the beautiful classrooms filled with light, and the civil rights theme embodied by the rainbow coalition of children beginning their day with a “pledge of allegiance to the world.”
She joined a fundraising nonprofit founded to help raise money for the school from the surrounding neighborhood. That's when Lutz got a glimpse of the hostility between a few of the parents — mostly white and middle-class — and the new African-American principal. “I thought, what have I gotten myself into?”
The fighting was “so unpleasant,” Lutz shifted her focus to co-chair the parent-faculty club. Compared to neighboring schools with turbocharged PTAs, the school’s fundraising paled in comparison. “Teachers even complained about not having the most basic of supplies,” explained one mother. So with a small group of zealous parents, Lutz helped organize events that brought in some $16,000. While the money would have been needed either way, the rising enrollment of more affluent families tipped the scales and changed the school's budgeting for the worse. As the percentage of low-income students and English language learners fell, the school lost funding that helped support teacher aides and the other extra staff. “I think there was a lot of resentment about that,” says long-time Harvey Milk parent Jennifer Friedenbach. (Tracy Peoples, the principal, did not respond to requests for an interview.)
When the YMCA aftercare program asked the parent club to send an email about how to sign up for the program, Lutz found herself on the defensive. One mother — who, like Lutz, is white — objected that email communication would exclude families who most needed aftercare. When Lutz explained that there was room for every child and no one would be excluded, she says she received emails “accusing me of being racist and being an elitist and catering to certain parts of the school. The level of vitriol was off the chart.”

On one hand, yes, these are complex issues, and as it turns out, I don't feel very comfortable with either the affluent white parents at the girl's pre-school or the parents at our daughter's public school, so I've avoided getting very involved with either, which just means I'm a cranky, opinionated misanthrope. I'm sure everyone mentioned in the article would just get on my nerves.

But anyhow, reading over Lloyd's article, it is clear that everything is worse because the school doesn't have enough money:

And for parents whose school becomes a spectacle of infighting, the solution is often to lie low and reduce involvement, or move schools. “Now nobody wants to get involved or raise money,” says Lutz, with a weary sigh. “Since then we’ve lost our parent liaison, our reading specialist, and I think our arts, science enrichment, and civil rights camps will go by the wayside, too.”

We can wring our hands over the nuances of diversity and gentrification, but the fundamental problem is that the school's budget isn't covering a full program, and distracting people's attention away from that fact ensures it will not be addressed.

And indeed, one of the main reasons you want a mixed income student body is so that more affluent parents will lobby the government for increased school funding. If they think they're there to run bake sales, they're missing the point.

The Progressive Reading Instruction Straw Man

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Hoffman) — Thu, 09 May 2013 15:28:00 +0000

Deborah Meier:

Progressive preschools never rejected a rich reading culture or knowing facts as "developmentally inappropriate." They just didn't think you needed direct instruction to kick in this love of reading, of hobbies, of facts, of curiosity, of indefatigable and repetitive practice in subjects and skills they were fascinated by. The kids come to us with curiosity—and our job is to extend it. Progressives understood that the playful mindset that serious learning depends on is too often silenced in school. For example, I frequently step into classrooms where well-meaning teachers are doing as they are told: stopping at the end of every paragraph or page to ask didactic questions that turn great stories into "lessons" with "objectives" that can be "measured." That's hardly likely to whet children's appetite for "more, more."

How Are Those SIG Schools Doing?

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Hoffman) — Wed, 08 May 2013 17:17:00 +0000

Well, all the "persistently low performing" elementary and middle schools that received SIG-funded interventions are clocking in under 50 for mean student growth percentile in reading, so, I guess not so good? At least according to RIDE's favorite metric.

Pleasant View and Sackett Street are doing a bit better in math, at least.

Also, I have seen measurable improvement in my ollie technique after practicing the last three days in the Sackett Street school parking lot.

2012 RI Principal of the Year's School Posts Second Lowest Math Growth in the State

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Hoffman) — Wed, 08 May 2013 16:57:00 +0000

Unless I'm reading this wrong, last year while Veazie Street School Principal Susan Chin was named RI Elementary Principal of the Year, her students were well on their way to posting the second lowest student growth percentile in math in the state (23).

Chin is considered one of the most successful leaders in Providence. A 26-year veteran of the Providence school system, Chin came to Veazie Street in 2007 when it was the worst-performing elementary school in the state.
Veazie Street is now one of the schools that is making substantial gains in English and math, among the highest in the state.

What does any of that mean? Who knows!?!

Anyhow, if you follow the link, I've highlighted Veazie, Reservoir and Vartan Gregorian Elementary. If you flip between subjects and years (above the graph at right), you can see how much the scores can jump around, and if you're actually comparing two schools, it can be pretty extreme. Veazie and Gregorian had the same reading SGP last year, and they're 25 points apart this year.