Tag: Kevin Carey


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Read: Monday Morning Quarterback Edition


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What the dropout nation is reading this Monday morning:after the NFL playoffs: John Fensterwald notes Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s effort to revamp the state’s teacher seniority rules, which force districts to…

Photo courtesy of Jose Vilson

What the dropout nation is reading this Monday morning:after the NFL playoffs:

  1. John Fensterwald notes Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s effort to revamp the state’s teacher seniority rules, which force districts to lay off their younger teachers first without regard to their performance. Fensterwald notes that if Schwarzenegger succeeds, districts will have to step up to the plate and conduct strong rigorous evaluations of teacher performance. Fensterwald also reports that some school districts are getting cold feet about Race to the Top participation.
  2. In the Daily News, Tom Carroll takes to task Randi Weingarten’s replacement as head of New York City’s AFT local. Sample quote: “Mulgrew’s point is not actually the advancement of any specific proposal, but rather to throw out there as much mischief as possible to gum up charter schools”.
  3. In Dropout Nation comments for Friday’s Read. Southern Education Foundation’s Steve Suitts, who co-wrote the recently-released A New Diverse Majority report, responds to Monise Seward’s criticisms of the study (and of education think tankers in general). He makes some important points about the study and its overall focus. I’m reading the report now for an upcoming Spectator report.
  4. Virginia’s Democratic House leader argues that support for charter schools shouldn’t be a “partisan” issue.
  5. School administrator Deron Durflinger offers a voucher-like kind of school reform: Give vouchers to parents, who can then directly select the teachers they want to teach their children. Intriguing idea. It could actually lead to greater parental engagement, improve student achievement and make teachers true professionals the way lawyers usually are.
  6. Alan Bonsteel of California Parents for Educational Choice offers historical perspective on school choice and the Golden State’s recent school reform efforts.
  7. Julia Steiny focuses on a union-sponsored charter school. A school not sponsored by either the NEA or AFT.
  8. Kevin Carey observes the financial havoc within California’s university system and takes shots at the University of California’s leaders and wealthy students for their “faux solidarity” with poor collegians.

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Read: Special Ed Edition


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What’s happening in the dropout nation: There are children such as this child in this photo (a sufferer from Shaken Baby disorder and blind) who need special education. But why…

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What’s happening in the dropout nation:

  1. There are children such as this child in this photo (a sufferer from Shaken Baby disorder and blind) who need special education. But why is it that at least ten percent of black, white and Latino boys are routinely labeled as learning disabled and often landing in special ed? Especially when the nature of their “learning disability” is likely specious at best? I lay out the scope of the special ed crisis today in The American Spectator.
  2. By the way, let’s be real: Special ed, along with alternative schools, is the black hole of public education. It is also the black hole  for the school reform movement; it isn’t as sexy to talk about as charters or vouchers or as dry and yet seemingly meaningful as national standards. The inaction by both traditional public school supporters and many school reformers speaks volumes about what they really think about improving education for every child. Badly.
  3. The most-disappointing state competiting for Race to the Top funding? The dubious distinction goes to Maryland, according to Andy Smarick. But Texas — once a leading pioneer in school reform — may end up ranking a close second.
  4. Kevin Carey analyzes the NAEP urban math results and notes how far down Detroit has gone.
  5. Why the New York City Department of Education remains the gold standard for school reform: A willingness to shut down failing schools such as this one in Harlem, according to the New York Times (via EducationNews).
  6. Like stopped clocks, Heather Mac Donald gets one right every now and then. This time, it’s on the decades-old move by California to make full immersion in English the standard for bilingual education.

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Read: Tuesday Morning Teacher Edition


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What’s happening in the dropout nation: – The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial board sniffs at the Ford Foundation’s school initiative. Given the foundation’s history of getting itself — and the…

Rarely seen: Black male teacher such as Brandon George. Also under that list: Teachers with strong subject-matter competency. More of both needed.

Rarely seen: Black male teacher such as Brandon George. Also under that list: Teachers with strong subject-matter competency. More of both needed.

What’s happening in the dropout nation:

– The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial board sniffs at the Ford Foundation’s school initiative. Given the foundation’s history of getting itself — and the entire philanthropic sector — in trouble in the school philanthropy arena, it may be best for Ford to stick to something more traditional.

Gotham Schools reports that New York State’s Education Commissioner and Board of Regents Chancellor wants to allow for the use of student test data in measuring teacher performance during the first two years of their careers before they attain tenure. This is essentially a revival of a law passed two years ago during the first year of former Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s tenure that was kibboshed a year later by the legislature and Gov. David Paterson last year at the behest of the state’s AFT affiliate. Nice idea. At least one study suggests that the teacher performance remains constant before and after tenure. But until tenure is eliminated and school districts actually take time to assess teachers, the proposal is rather meaningless. After all, some of the research so far also shows that teacher performance declines after they reach tenure.

– So far, this week, neither Kevin Carey nor Checker Finn have taken potshots at each other over whether stimulus funds should be used for saving teacher jobs. Unfortunately, neither side is focusing on the real problem: How to improve the quality of teaching in America’s schools. The stimulus debate, like the money, will eventually go away. The  impediments to improving teacher quality —  including woeful training at the ed school level, state policymaking that blocks effective performance management, poor selection of aspiring teachers who are both competent in their subjects and care about the children they teach, human capital policies that encourage teacher absenteeism, and lack of diversity in the teacher ranks — will still remain. It’s time for both of them to go back to their laudable work.

– Maureen Downey takes a look at the Florida ACLU suit and former Sunshine State governor Jeb Bush’s response. Hint: Another example of what happens when education statistics(accurate, maybe) and education statistics (unreliable, definitely) collide in public policy debates.

– The Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Brooke Dollens Terry takes a look at teacher quality in the Lone Star State. She isn’t impressed.

– EdSector’s Erin Dillon peruses Teachers College’s report touting desegregation. She not only finds that it lacks rigor, but it uses a “strawman” of free-market school reforms that doesn’t define which form (in the form of charter schools and other school choice measures) at the heart of their discussion. Ultimately, argues Dillon, the need is to ultimately improve the quality of education in every neighborhood in order to achieve true equity between majority-black , majority-Latino and majority white schools.

– The Boston Globe wants Massachusetts legislators to raise the dropout age to 18. Fine. Hopefully, the Globe editorial board will hold state officials accountable for improving curricula, teacher quality and opportunities for engaging students and parents as equal partners with teachers and principals. Increasing the dropout age alone won’t solve much of anything.

Jay Mathews joins Andy Smarick in advocating for shutting down dropout factories and other poor-performing schools.

– Sara Carr’s fascinating series about school choice in New Orleans offers a point I have been making for some time: School reformers must now focus on developing systems for giving parents the information and guidance they need to make decisions. This means improving the quality and delivery of school data — or simply put, let a thousand SchoolMatches bloom — and fostering grassroots organizations that can help parents make decisions.

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The Read


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All there is to know in the dropout nation. Updated throughout the day (updates and new stories are *): No standard left behind: As large a role poor instruction plays…

These kids need to be back in school, not in truancy court. So let's help keep them there.

These kids need to be back in school, not in truancy court. So let's help keep them there.

All there is to know in the dropout nation. Updated throughout the day (updates and new stories are *):

  • No standard left behind: As large a role poor instruction plays in fueling the dropout crisis and the nation’s overall crisis of low academic achievement, another can be found in efforts by many school districts to essentially water down academic standards set at the state and federal levels. From social promotion of laggard students (when they should be left back and given different teachers and instructional settings that fit their learning styles) to grade inflation, school districts engage in the kind of, well, let’s call it fraud that would lead to prison sentences if it were consider criminal offenses. Essentially, the districts are arguing that they are improving academic performance when all they are really doing is providing children with a slipshod education. So the report by the Dallas Morning News that teachers are annoyed at such an attempt by officials in the city’s Independent School District is both wonderful and disheartening to hear. The former, because teachers are being serious about their job. The latter? Because the district is up to the old nasty tricks again.
  • When math teachers aren’t being well-instructed to teach math: The National Council on Teacher Quality released a study earlier this year on the woefully inadequate math instruction training by almost all of the 77 schools of education it surveyed. Now George Leef of the Pope Center offers some pointers on how math instruction must be reformed in order to improve the poor math performance of America’s students.
  • Speaking of math (and immigration and teachers and H-1B): At Free Trade Nation, your editor analyzes one immigration skeptic’s criticism of the “H-1B Education” piece that ran earlier this week in The American Spectator.
  • Teacher pay reform on sight: Kevin Carey gives a full report on the battle between new D.C. schools chief, Michelle Rhee, and the lackluster district’s teachers union over a teacher pay reform plan. Rhee may actually be winning over the younger (and more performance-oriented) teachers. But, while Carey is more optimistic about the results, I would argue that being the head of a school district within the nation’s capital — with a bevy of Democrat congressmen and senators who collect donations from the two major teachers unions – is no easy task; succeeding in winning salary reform may lead to a Congressional edict that will end the plan altogether.
  • Speaking of Carey: Alexander Russo takes a shot at him for arguing with the Broader, Bolder gang. Although I understand Russo’s complaint that so many ed policy types aren’t as willing to engage in the dirty work of reforming schools in order to improve the education of poor kids, I would argue that the fact that Broader, Bolder includes the ones who do doesn’t mean that they are on the right side.  The latter, after all, is arguing for letting schools off the hook for their rather sizeable role in perpetuating the nation’s dropout crisis.

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The Read


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Thinking — and writing — about the dropout nation. Updated throughout the day: Figuring out ways to keep them in school: Or at least that is the plan for school…

It shouldn't take a cop to bring a kid back into school. We must all do our part to keep the kids in their seats and ready to learn.

Thinking — and writing — about the dropout nation. Updated throughout the day:

    1. Figuring out ways to keep them in school: Or at least that is the plan for school districts in Montgomery, Ala., Skokie, Illinois, and California’s San Bernardino County. All the plans, however, seem like rehashes of earlier regimes of bringing in police officers to ticket students and charging parents with failure to send their children to school. Not to say it doesn’t have some value. But the plans really should address the lack of academic rigor, the achievement gap issues and the other underlying factors that result in chronic truancy and eventually, leaving school without a sheepskin.
    2. How about raising expectations for special ed students: That’s the argument made by Lance Izumi of the Pacific Research Institute in his San Francisco Chronicle op-ed, in which he criticizes the Golden Gate City’s school officials for opposing a state requirement — dictated by the No Child Left Behind Act — that those students must take the state’s high school exit exam. Given that the test only quizzes students on 8th-grade math and need only to get 55-to-60 percent of the answers correct, all but the most developmentally-disabled special ed students can pass it with some extra tutoring and help from their teachers and schools. Given that 28 percent of special ed students eventually dropped out during the 2004-05 school year, according to the U.S. Department of Education, wouldn’t it make sense to figure out a way to keep those students in school?
    3. A GI Bill for K-12 students? That’s what David Kirkpatrick suggests in his latest column at EducationNews.org. And he notes that not only did the original GI Bill plan work, it didn’t bring additional federal regulations as opponents of the idea feared at the time. Perhaps it is time to create a federal voucher program and expand the level of federal funding to public charter schools.
    4. Are you kidding me? The College Board — the folks, along with Educational Testing Services, behind the Scholastic Aptitude Test — will roll out a version of the PSAT in 2010 designed to test 8th-graders and get them into college prep programs early. L.A. Unified may actually offer the new PSAT to all 8th-graders once it’s unveiled. That’s great news, especially for talented young black males and females, both nationwide and in the City of Angels, who often get shunted aside from such programs despite their high intelligence. But a few folks, according to the Los Angeles Times, think the tests should be given far earlier in 6th grade. They may be right, but 8th-grade testing is a start.
    5. Sometimes, Sol Stern needs to put down his pen: Kevin Carey gives the education policy legend the business for misusing the phrase “Lake Woebegon Effect” in his piece on New York’s math scores. My big issue with Stern on this one is more of the put-up-or-shut-up variety: He doesn’t offer any evidence of whether the students are progressing over time, simply comparing scores of whole grades of students — in this case, grade 3-through-8 — instead of, say doing a value-added time series in which he compares 5th grade student scores to their scores as 8th graders three years later. This method would likely give a better picture of how much of the test score improvement relates to the lowering of standards, natural cognitive growth as students or more effective instruction.
    6. Think before you speak?: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution takes a state education department official to task for declaring in a deposition that a school curriculum without a science component is an “adequate education.”
    7. What do Cheech and Chong and Randi Weingarten and the American Federation of Teachers have in common: According to Matthew Ladner, both are, umm, up in smoke.

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