Author: André-Tascha Lammé

Pictures of Inequity

July 7, 2015 11:25 am July 7, 2015

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The old adage of a “picture is worth a thousand words” is oft utilized precisely because it is so often true – especially when it comes to complex data sets….

The old adage of a “picture is worth a thousand words” is oft utilized precisely because it is so often true – especially when it comes to complex data sets. This becomes especially clear when discussing the need to overhaul traditional school funding throughout the nation.

Today, school reform organization EdBuild released an interactive mapping tool that shows some pretty stark examples of some of the patently crazy ways that school districts across the United States have drawn their borders. Surfacing some excellent examples, the EdBuild team clearly delineates the differences between the “haves” and the “have nots”, as measured by the poverty levels of more than 13,000 school districts.

As EdBuild points out, school districts across the United States get a significant portion of their funding from local property taxes. This creates scenarios wherein neighbors send their kids to schools with vastly different financial resources. The result: “these invisible walls often concentrate education dollars within affluent school districts, and ensure that low-income students are kept on the outside.”

As EdBuild points out, Camden, New Jersey has the highest poverty rate of any city in the United States (42.6 percent in 2013). Ninety percent of the kids in the Camden City School District are on free or reduced lunch, while it is almost surrounded by school districts with lower poverty rates. As EdBuild points out, traditional district school boundaries, zoned schooling and other Zip Code Education policies result in keeping poor kids in Camden from being able to access better educational opportunities more easily available (at least in theory) to wealthier peers.

Another example shown by EdBuild is that of the Spencer-Sharples School District in northern Ohio. Considering the racial overtones, it is one that is particularly unsettling.

The Spencer and Harding Townships wanted to split their school system and respectively merge with the Springfield Local School District and the Swanton Local School District. Everything worked out fine with Harding Township’s kids attending school in Swanton. Unfortunately for the kids in Spencer, Springfield rejected the “much larger proportion of low-income, African-American” families from Spencer.

Spencer schools were under-funded and losing enrollment. None of the surrounding school districts would take them. At the request of the state, Toledo Public Schools eventually annexed the Spencer schools, but eventually closed them. To this day, the Spencer kids are bused across two district boundary lines to get to their nearest school.

As one utilizes EdBuild’s mapping tool, it quickly becomes apparent that the disparity in funding creates rather dramatic divides between neighbors. Areas of concentrated poverty, coupled with reduced funding resources, makes it much more difficult for some school districts to provide kids with the high quality education that they have been promised.

I shall not presume to give the solution to these funding inequities, but it is plainly apparent that an over-reliance on property taxes makes it decidedly more difficult to provide an equitable quality of education across all populations. This issue must be addressed. Across the country, lawmakers from both parties need to work together to find creative and fair ways to fund our education system. In states like Pennsylvania, bipartisan efforts to install a student-focused funding formula are well underway. Efforts like this, along with the expansion of school choice and Parent Power (both of which will be helped with the school funding reform), must continue.

It may have been more than 60 years since the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. But today, it sometimes appears that “separate, but equal” may still be the de facto standard – as long as one ignores the fact that there is little equality.

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This is Dropout Nation

Testing is Key to Civil Rights

André-Tascha Lammé

June 12, 2015 4:15 pm June 12, 2015

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Life is full of bloody tests – and we bloody well need them. As toddlers, we sought to test our environment, and we tested our parents. When we started school,…

Life is full of bloody tests – and we bloody well need them. As toddlers, we sought to test our environment, and we tested our parents. When we started school, we were tested on our ability to recite the alphabet. As we progressed through our education, we were tested on our vocabulary, on our comprehension of the Constitution, on differential equations.

When we entered the workforce, we were tested on our ability to do our duties properly. Many of us received regular performance reviews or evaluations. If we worked in a profession that required licensing or certification, we were tested.

In short, testing is part of life. For good reason. When it comes to our children, especially kids of color, annual standardized testing is critical to gaining data on how well they are doing in school as well as how schools, systems, and adults are helping them. For children of color, annual test data (as required under the No Child Left Behind Act and state laws) is helpful in the fight for ensuring their civil rights. Without such data, all we have are anecdotes, none of which will help families and civil rights activists fight to provide our children with better schools and high-quality teachers.

The good news is that civil rights groups understand this reality. Last month, 12 of them, all with hundreds of combined years of fighting for equal rights and opportunities, issued a statement wherein they stated their opposition to efforts to discourage the utilization of standardized tests and “subverting the validity of data about educational outcomes”.

These groups, including the NAACP, the National Urban League, and National Council of La Raza, were wholly right and justified when they said that “data provides the power to advocate for greater equality under the law.” They were clear when they stated that there were “legitimate concerns” about testing in schools, but that it was critical to have objective measurements of student growth.

There is no person with the slightest cognitive ability who honestly believes that public education is equally serving all populations. As they said: “We cannot fix what we cannot measure.” What these civil rights groups declared was no different than what I wrote on these pages last October – and no different than what parents and caregivers say each and every day in their homes.

Those of us who know how important it is to actually know what is happening with our kids are praising the stance these organizations are taking. But none have been forthcoming from other quarters.

First came Mark Tucker of the National Center on Education and the Economy. He took to the pages of Education Week to chastise civil rights groups for supporting annual testing and accountability. Why? Because, in his opinion, annual testing “does not help [children of color].”

In a solid example of “me too!”, Judith Browne Dianis of the Advancement Project), Schott Foundation for Public Education President John Jackson and education professor Pedro Noguera jumped onto the bandwagon with Tucker in the pages of the Hill, accusing civil rights groups and others who understand the benefits of standardized testing of believing that children can be “tested out of poverty.”

Now I will agree that Browne Dianis, Jackson, and Noguera raised some good points. They are right in saying that all too often results from standardized tests do not get into the hands of schools (and parents) for too long a time. But as Education Post‘s Chris Stewart put it on the pages of his eponymous site, they seem to be complaining that “annual assessment of student proficiency doesn’t cure cancer.” Their (not so) subtle insinuation that support for testing by civil rights groups was somehow akin to wanting to keep Rosa Parks on the back of the bus is also grating.

The good news is that others have pushed back against Tucker, Browne Dianis, Jackson, and Noguera.

Education Trust President Kati Haycock put it perfectly when she stated that the evidence for Tucker’s “assertions” were “weak” and ignored the fact that these groups have “fought against the misuse of tests for decades”. Jonah Edelman of Stand for Children smartly asserted that civil rights groups “wisely understand that the growing resistance to accountability is directly related to the fact that it’s starting to work.” This includes the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, who, as Dropout Nation Editor RiShawn Biddle reminded us yesterday, are key backers of the organizations that Brown Dianis and Jackson represent.

Tucker offered a response to the points made by Haycock and Edelman. But those, in turn, were then addressed thoroughly, honestly, directly, and completely by Morgan Polikoff of University of Southern California’s Rossier School, who pointed out that Tucker couldn’t possibly produce evidence to support his assertions because it isn’t supported by the academic research.

I am certainly not a public education policy expert like any of the folks I have cited. But I am a parent with a child in a public high school. As NEA itself points out, schools and systems that partner with families and address their concerns “sustain connections” that improve student achievement.

Being able to see if there success at “improving student achievement” means we need objective measures to ascertain how individual students and whole populations are performing. One of the obvious examples of such are (fair and comprehensive) standardized tests. These give parents a source of data to be the partners we need to be in the furtherance of our kids’ educations. The civil rights groups that support annualized testing understand this. Tucker, Browne Dianis, Jackson, Noguera, and those who back them do not.

As a parent, and as a member of the education community, I do not want to go back to the time when we did not have the objective data we needed. Are we expected to go back to that time when we simply trusted that our kids – regardless of which population group they may belong to – were getting the best education possible?

That path leads to greater mediocrity and discernment of achievement through anecdotalism.

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Giving Parents Power school data

Data is Critical to Parent Power

André-Tascha Lammé

October 28, 2014 11:23 am October 28, 2014

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Back in 1977, when I was nine years old, my mom stood in the lobby of the Stanford University Medical Center and told her doctor to “go to hell”. Of…

Back in 1977, when I was nine years old, my mom stood in the lobby of the Stanford University Medical Center and told her doctor to “go to hell”. Of course, that’s the nicest way I could put it; the language she used was decidedly saltier. While my mother’s words were uncouth — and as a child, left me shocked — the point she was making to her oncologist was bloody well spot-on.

At the time, physicians would evaluate a patient and come up with the best course of treatment. Any questions other than “how long will I live?” or “what will radiation do to me?” would generally be met with a paternalistic “Mrs. Lammé, you need not concern yourself with trying to understand other options. I have chosen the optimum treatment plan for you.”

That did not sit well with my mother. She didn’t want the paternalism of those physicians. So my mother found an oncologist at a different hospital who was willing to treat her as a partner in her health, rather than a bystander. All my mother wanted was a doctor that would treat her as an equal, help to educate her on the available treatment options, and realize that she was well suited to make decisions about the best choices for her own life. It was from this experience that I learned that knowledge is power.

More than 30 years later, as a public school parent who happens to work in education reform, I am reminded of this old adage. The idea that more and better information is the key to making informed decisions remains a reality. As the Data Quality Campaign points out today in its new brief, Empowering Parents and Communities through Quality Public Reporting, is no other place that this is crucial than in American public education.

Making education data available for public consumption is a relatively new concept. This is why the No Child Left Behind Act’s focus on making school performance transparent was a major step in the right direction. As Data Quality Campaign correctly notes, policymakers realized that shining a light on student achievement, especially for poor and minority children, would help in holding states and districts accountable. But while No Child was an important step forward in making data “publicly available”, it and other efforts didn’t necessarily lead to data that is “easy to understand.

As a society, we have made the promise to provide a quality education to every kid. But, are all kids receiving the same promise? The whole point of No Child’s data reporting requirements was to ensure that all parties – from teachers to administrators to elected officials to policy-makers to parents – had full and complete information that would allow them to make the best decisions for kids when it came to education.

When I served on the School Site Council of my son’s elementary school, we delved deeply into the data that was not generally available prior to No Child. As a Title I school with more than 20 languages spoken and over 70 percent of students receiving free and reduced-priced lunch, it was critical for us to be able to ascertain how different segments of the campus population were performing. We utilized this data to readjust applicable purchases of materials, teaching staff, and other matters. But we did not just look at a report and make our decisions. I actually had to get trained on what the data meant and how it could be interpreted.

As a software engineer for nearly two decades before I joined the School Site Council. I worked on taking complex data sets in different industries and distilling them into information that was easy to understand and use to take action. But even I needed training to comprehend much of the data that I was required to understand when deliberating how the school should focus its efforts.

Transparent and easily understandable data enables state education authorities, schools districts and individual school sites to identify schools and student populations that are struggling and may need additional interventions or resources, by utilizing data comparability. But, this data has to be understandable and useful. Unfortunately many states aren’t doing well on both counts.

As pointed out in the Data Quality Campaign brief, some states are fully recognizing that data needs to be easy to understand, and presented differently for various audiences. One of the states they highlight is Illinois. The state’s board of education recognized that even though its report card was in compliance with the law, its presentation was an impediment to easy comprehension. So in 2011, the Land of Lincoln’s P-20 council got to work. It convened 60 focus groups – including parents, teachers, and school leaders – to make sure that the new report cards would be useful to everyone.

The state recognized that even though they produced a report card that was far better than previously existed, it was important that they continue to evaluate the report card in future years and adjust it to continually meet the goal of relevance to those who have a stake in public education.

I do not claim to be an expert when it comes to education policy. But I am an expert on what motivates my son. I know what my expectations are regarding what he learns and the environment in which that learning is provided.

If my wife and I are to be better partners to our son’s teachers, if we are to make better decisions regarding his education, we need to know what is going on with his school, especially compared to other schools. We don’t want to just be told what will happen to our son. We want to be provided the options and the information so that we can make the best decisions possible on his behalf. States should follow the lead of Illinois and Ohio and others who have made a good faith effort to recognize that a successful education experience comes from data transparency that promotes true partnership, not paternalism.

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