Washington DC/ OIG Audit: US Oversight of Charter School Funds Lax
By The Associated Press
Education Week, Vol. 32, Issue 10 [Edweek.org]
October 24, 2012
An audit of the U.S. Department of Education's division overseeing hundreds of millions of dollars in charter school funding has criticized the office for failing to properly monitor how states spend the money.
The report by the department's Office of the Inspector General, which was released in late September, also singled out state education departments in California, Florida and Arizona for lax monitoring of what charter schools do with the funds and whether their expenditures comply with federal regulations.
- The education department's Office of Innovation and Improvement spent $940 million from 2008 to 2011 on charter schools, which are autonomously operated public schools.
- Most of the money is funneled through state education departments, although some is given directly to charter schools.
- The funds are administered through competitive grants aimed at helping launch new charters and replicate successful charter models.
The inspector general said the innovation office has not given proper guidance to states on monitoring the use of the money and does not have policies to ensure that states corrected deficiencies when they were found.
Additionally, the audit, which was conducted by San Francisco-based education research company WestEd, found that the office did not review expenditures to ensure they met with federal disbursement requirements.
The office has agreed to beef up its procedures to track federal funds and ensure states are adequately overseeing charter schools, the report said.
WestEd also examined state charter oversight policies in California, Arizona and Florida, which collectively received $275 million in federal funds for charter schools from 2008 to 2011.
Among the findings:
- In California, which has received nearly $182 million in federal charter grants from 2008-2011, auditors found "significant weaknesses" in charter oversight, such as school reviewers being unqualified to conduct on-site school visits. One reviewer felt "awkward" conducting site visits because of a lack of knowledge and experience, the report said.
- In Florida, state officials had no records of which schools received federal grant money nor which schools received on-site monitoring and audits. Florida received $67.6 million.
- In Arizona, which received about $26 million, reviewers lacked a monitoring checklist and thus collected inconsistent data when they visited schools.
The office has agreed to beef up its procedures to track federal funds and ensure states are adequately monitoring charter schools.
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Miami FL/ College Board Puts Spotlight on Needs of ELLs, New Kinds of Tests
By Catherine Gewertz
Education Week [Edweek.org]
October 24, 2012
The annual meeting of the College Board got off to an unusual start: with a high-profile session on English-learners' "right to rigor," moderated by none other than the organization's brand-new president, David Coleman.
The session, a panel discussion by three nationally known ELL experts, sent a bevy of potent signals to the field about the organization's priorities as new leadership takes hold. Not only do these priorities come straight from the top-as symbolized by Coleman's presence on the dais-but they feature a big shift in thinking about how to teach students who are learning English.
Coleman, widely known as the chief architect of the common standards in English/language arts, made it clear that the central place of "complex text" in those standards extends to English-learners. As many teachers already know-but too many still don't embody in their teaching-students learning English can be robbed of opportunities to grow when they are given watered-down texts in response to their still-developing English-language skills.
While the impulse to shift text complexity downward to meet students is understandable, Coleman said, he urged educators instead to teach deep, interesting, complex texts to their English-learners and meet them there with "artful scaffolding." He cast it as a civil rights issue, saying that "once the quality of texts shifts downward, there is no way out" for students, who are then trapped in lower levels of learning and can't catch up to their English-speaking peers.
He solicited the thoughts of Stanford professors Kenji Hakuta and Guadalupe Valdes, and UC-Berkeley professor Lily Wong Fillmore about the best ways to ensure that English-learners have the same access to the demands of the Common Core State Standards as do their native English-speaking peers. Their discussion ranged from handling complex text to plumbing the reasons why English-learners-along with low-income students and racial and ethnic minorities-often don't pursue academic challenges they are qualified to handle, and don't apply to or enroll in college as often as other students do.
- Fillmore, a widely respected scholar on ELL issues, noted the importance of providing teachers training to teach the more complex texts to English-learners. The students, she said, can handle it.
- "[ELL] children are well equipped to deal with complexity as long as teachers are given some of the training it takes to work with complex texts," she said
- Scaffolding is particularly challenging because it has to take into account the gaps in cultural and historical knowledge that students learning English can stumble over in the texts they are reading, said Valdes.
She told a story of a 10th grade student who had immigrated from Honduras only 18 months earlier and was asked to write an essay about equality based on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech and a quote from television talk-show host Jon Stewart that suggested there were no longer any racial or ethnic barriers to freedom in the United States.
Valdes said it was impossible for this boy to navigate all the historical references and cultural allusions in those readings in order to write that essay; When she spoke to him after class, he said he thought Martin Luther King Jr. was British. So as teachers undertake the "complex text" demands of the common core, they must be trained to understand and deal with not just linguistic complexities in text, but cultural, historic, and other kinds of complexities there as well, she said.
The question of "undermatch" in college selection-what Coleman described as a "preoccupation" of this annual meeting-offered a glimpse of yet another area of complexity. He asked the experts what could be done about the phenomenon of students-particularly English-learners and Latinas-not attending college or choosing colleges that are far less selective than what they can handle.
- Instead of a response about how to get students to choose more challenging colleges, however, Coleman got an earful from Fillmore about all the powerful and nuanced family dynamics that go into Latinas' college choices, and why undermatching "might not be so bad" in many cases. Not going to college at all is one thing, she said, but choosing a college that is less demanding than a student is qualified for could be a suitable and appropriate solution to a host of social and cultural factors, she said.
She spoke of a California student named Carolina, who had immigrated from the Mexican state of Michoacan as a toddler and had done well in school. She applied to a state university near her home, but chose to go farther away, to UC-Berkeley, because of its reputation and the scholarship it offered her, Fillmore said. But she struggled with little support, felt out of place, and missed her family. "It was as if she walked into a totally different world," Fillmore said, and she left after a year.
Less than two weeks into Coleman's tenure at the College Board, and undermatching-an area of special focus for the College Board, with new research about to be released-is put on display as a highly layered problem inclined to elude an easy solution.
Coleman asked the panel what the College Board can do to advance rigor for English-learners.
- Fillmore suggested using College Board data to highlight the districts that do well with those student groups. And she urged educators not to shortchange counseling as a powerful tool to help English-learners learn about and prepare for their future choices.
"Every student I've worked with has failed to get the kind of counseling early enough to make a difference" in their college trajectory, she said.
- Hakuta urged the College Board to advance the view that bilingualism is a key 21st-century skill. Valdes urged Coleman to "rethink the SAT" so that it doesn't "overprivilege language." That doesn't just mean the ability to speak English fluently, she noted; it means being highly articulate. Some of the most brilliant people, who solve some of society's most pressing problems, she said, aren't the most articulate, and their skills-creative skills, hands-on skills-have to be recognized as crucial and tested as such. Tests need tasks that measure the strengths of "geeky students who don't talk well at all," Valdes said.
One of the most potent messages of the session was sent in response to audience questions. One teacher expressed worry about whether teachers would be evaluated for "teaching Latin or for teaching students." Without addressing how teachers should be judged, Coleman responded by discussing what tests should be. Assessment makers, he said, should design them as "work worth doing."
"You should hold us accountable for making assessments worthy of you and your best work," he told the teacher. He added that under his tenure, the College Board would be "hostile" to tests that fall short of this mark, tests that don't support "authentic learning."
I heard someone behind me say, for the second time during the session: "Wow."
It was a California teacher who conducts professional development for the staff at her school. She said she has been to many College Board forums, but has never heard such a high priority-and high profile-placed on English-learners, or heard assessment framed in the way Coleman had done.
"I'm thrilled," she said. "I'm really encouraged."
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Washington DC/ OPINION: Crippling Consequences of a Disappearing Preschool Data Source
By Lisa Guernsey [Director, Early Education Initiative at the New America Foundation]
Huffington Post
October 24, 2012
Despite a growing chorus of champions for better early education for America's children - from military leaders to Ben Bernanke to an official from the Reagan Administration - a piece of our country's early education infrastructure is about to fall away.
For 10 years, the National Institute for Early Education Research, a non-partisan research center at Rutgers University, has taken painstaking effort to gather data on publicly funded preschool from all 50 states and Washington, D.C.
The institute, known as NIEER, publishes the results in a series of reports known as the State of Preschool Yearbooks,
- the only source in the country for data on which states are funding pre-K,
- how much those states are spending per pupil,
- what percentage of three- and four-year-olds are served,
- what ages of children are eligible,
- what training and credentials are expected of their teachers, and more.
Each spring, data from these yearbooks spark headlines on preschool funding and disparities in access - news that would otherwise be invisible to the general public and elected officials.
- This spring, for example, analysis of NIEER's data showed that state funding for pre-K decreased by almost $60 million in 2010-2011 when adjusted for inflation, a second straight year of decline.
- While pre-K is often left out of education stories, NIEER's yearbooks provide journalists with an annual release of data that helps shine a spotlight on trends in early education.
But this year may be the last for the preschool yearbooks.
Until now, the Pew Charitable Trusts have provided the vast majority of the funding. Since the first yearbook in 2002, Pew has donated $5 million for the yearbooks over 10 years.
- But last year, Pew stopped funding preschool advocacy and research, saying that it had never intended to continue making grants beyond a decade.
- W. Steven Barnett, NIEER's director, says he has inquired about new funding sources from other philanthropies, but to no avail.
- It's not entirely clear why other philanthropies aren't stepping up, but when it comes to early childhood programs, charities often prefer to pay for direct services to children instead of research or policy initiatives.
- The unintended consequence will be less accurate data on how many children are enrolled in each state, which states are decreasing funding, and where inequity is rising in children's access to high-quality pre-K.
The likely loss of the preschool yearbooks is becoming increasingly worrisome to many of us who follow trends in early education.
The void comes at a bad time. Although education and brain research continues to show the benefits of high-quality early learning programs, public dollars for expanding access to good preschools are drying up in many states, and federal initiatives, such as Promise Neighborhoods and Head Start, are poised to lose funding if the budget sequesters go through or if austerity budgeting arrives without protections for programs targeting children and low-income families.
Without good pre-K data, people will be left in the dark, unable to compare how well their states stack up in funding good early childhood programs. The result will stunt our chances for better policy-making in education.
Unlike in K-12 education, the U.S. Department of Education does not require states to report on preschool.
- The U.S. Census collects some data in its American Community Survey, but the survey questions are not designed well enough to provide answers on how many children in this country are served in publicly funded programs, let alone how many children are in preschool or preschool-like settings, period.
- And it doesn't address questions of state and federal expenditures per pupil, data that are critical to telling the story of whether children get a well-rounded, age-appropriate learning experience.
- Aside from NIEER, no other group is doing the hard work of sorting through how programs are designed in each state and which pools of public funds are paying for them, let alone making that information visible and meaningful to the rest of us.
The idea behind the yearbooks, Barnett said, was "to create an archived data set that would be consistent across the states."
By making the information available to all, he explained, reporters and policymakers who wanted data would not have to call all 50 states, "and state officials could provide information that was comparable to what was provided by the state next door." NIEER, which is advised by experts on early childhood education from around the country, sought to halt the spread of misinformation about which states were offering good pre-K programs and enrolling high numbers of children, and which ones weren't.
- Before the days of the yearbooks, Barnett said, researchers around the country "worried that people would draw the wrong conclusions" about equity, access or the impact of high-quality pre-K because the data were misleading and incomplete.
- Leaders around the country had no idea that Oklahoma was a leader in high-quality, universal pre-K, for example, until the institute provided its state-by-state comparisons.
The value of the yearbooks became even clearer to me and my colleagues at the New America Foundation this year as we embarked on a project to expand our Federal Education Budget Project to include pre-K data.
- The budget project started in 2008 with a focus on K-12 education, providing information by state and by school district on per-pupil expenditures, demographics, achievement test data and more.
- With 39 states now funding pre-K programs, the federal government running the Head Start program, and many public schools offering pre-K classes or contracting with community-based providers to offer pre-K, the database was long overdue for the inclusion of pre-K data on enrollment and funding.
Gathering data from each of our country's nearly 14,000 school districts was not practical, but we were able to gather data from those states that track data by school district.
- The problem was, some of these data arrived in cryptic formats with no context, making it virtually impossible to detect which pre-K programs were, say, half-day versus full-day programs, or which ones served both three- and four-year-old children, instead of just four-year-olds.
- To make sense of the data and to ensure that we were comparing apples to apples as much as possible, we relied and continue to rely heavily on the NIEER yearbooks.
- In addition, our state-level data are based on NIEER's research. (For more information about the pre-K expansion of this database, see Counting Kids and Tracking Funds in Pre-K and Kindergarten: Falling Short at the Local Level.)
The NIEER yearbook project is run by three staff members who are involved in contacting officials in every state, keeping up with new data coming from those states, and making sure data do not include duplicates (a daunting task when some children are enrolled in Head Start, special education programs and funded by state dollars at the same time).
Tracking trends in legislation and new programs - or cuts to programs - is also part of the work, as is presenting ratings on which states meet NIEER's defined benchmarks for quality. Since the federal government has no control over pre-K programs (aside from Head Start), there is wide variation in how states define pre-K. The appendices of the yearbooks are treasure troves of information on such details.
NIEER did win a $1.4 million federal grant last month to help schools identify and measure how well children fare in early learning programs - but that's an endeavor separate from the preschool yearbooks.
- To deal with the loss of yearbook funding, Barnett says NIEER is already designing ways to automate its data collection from each state, which may save several hundred thousand dollars.
- But the task of making the yearbook data meaningful - providing narrative and context to explain changes in each state and in the state of preschool funding nationally - is not something that can be easily automated.
Journalists under deadlines - not to mention elected officials and other policy makers - need that context to provide accurate reports.
It will require an investment of a half-million dollars a year, Barnett estimates, to publish the yearbook and continue its communications work, including the customized video and press releases for each of the 50 states, as well as Spanish-language outreach. "We would love to expand to include kindergarten and child care," Barnett says, but expansion is just a pipe dream at the moment.
Unless new funders come through for NIEER soon, the strength of the preschool yearbooks will diminish, leaving a huge hole in preschool advocacy, research and policy analysis on early education around the country. Early childhood programs - often seen as a luxury or "add-on" - are already vulnerable to budget cuts.
Without good data, the picture of how early education is funded and which children are enrolled, will only get cloudier - and prospects for including pre-K in the full system of public education will only get worse.
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Washington DC/ OPINION: Gamification in the Scientific Process
By Scott Schonberger and William Ball [Ball is a writer and Schonberger is an Information Scientist]
Education Week [Edweek.org]
October 23, 2012
It would stand to reason that a country like the US, built on technological innovations ranging from the Model T to supercomputers, would place a high value on ensuring that it's students received the best education in math and science. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
The 2009 Program for International Assessment (PISA) conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) shows U.S. students ranking far behind their peers in foreign countries. Specifically, our students ranked 31st out of 74 countries in math and 23rd out of 74 in science. In both math and science, Asian countries dominate the top 10, claiming 6 of those top 10 spots in the math rankings and 5 in science. Does this lackluster performance by the American teenager represent a fundamental flaw in the American education model? We believe it does.
Anyone who has traveled around Asia has experienced the profound differences in child rearing between cultures. While we abhor upholding stereotypes, there is a degree of truth to the idea that diligent attitudes are inscribed in the youth of Asian nations through their structured upbringing, attitudes that lend themselves well to the rigid "yes and no" world of science and math. On the other hand, American children are, stereotypically, the most coddled in the world. We place a high value on "playtime" and allowing children their space outside of the classroom, space to "just be kids." Instead of pushing our children to study harder, we ponder creating four-day school weeks to save money and consider summer vacation a precious time that should never be shortened, despite numerous studies pointing to its detrimental educational effects.
It would seem that the solution is a radical overhaul of American society and the destruction of the whimsical life of the American child. Sounds practical. Except, America is not Asia and trying to draw conclusions by comparing the two results in a circular conversation. The solution is not to draw on Asia's example but to alter and adopt policies that seize on the American way of learning and stimulate interest in math and science. The way forward is to use the emphasis our country places on playtime and integrate that atmosphere into the classroom.
The term for such is "gamification", usually referring to, say, an app that will reward you with a digital gold-star for trying out a new restaurant. At its highest level, though, gamification is simply the recognition that any system with rules can be considered a game and any game can be played.
- Governance is a game, a so-called "nomic" game that modifies it's own rules.
- Language is a game, said the great philosopher of games Ludwig Wittgenstein, as are: "...Giving orders, and obeying them-Describing the appearance of an object, or giving its measurements - Constructing an object from a description (a drawing)-Reporting an event-Speculating about an event-..." etc.
Games are pervasive.
Children pretend to be doctors, soldiers, detectives. Anyone ever on a debate team has fancied him or herself a lawyer before the court, or a politician before the camera. Some scenarios are more fanciful than others, but they share a common property, that children like to mimic and that mimicry is an incredibly effective learning-tool. After all, mimicry is the first learning-tool, before phonetics or multiplication tables, an adult points, says the name of a thing and a child repeats it. On and on, to everything ever built from language. The human brain is hard-wired to mimic its surroundings, consciously and unconsciously (see, research into mirror-neurons).
So, how to play scientist? It's not as straight forward as "cops and robbers," it's puzzles aren't easily translated into rule-and-points-based systems. Still, science is a discipline with rules like any other. Those rules may be harder to learn but in many respects they are easier than most to mimic because the rules are baked right into its structure, the scientific method.
Enter here the LARP, or "live action role playing," once (maybe) the purview of men in parks with foam swords, it has become a kind of existential experiment in the hands of some Nordic game designers.
"Live action" role playing evolved from its table-top cousins, familiar games like Dungeons & Dragons that encouraged players to fully inhabit another personality in a world wildly different from our own.
- These table-top games relied on statistics and imagination to create that consistent, if fantastical, experience. LARPs, though, incorporate physicality, add another layer to the immersive experience of playing at being someone else.
- It seems inevitable that they would eventually be abstracted away from swords and sorcery, toward something more immediate:
"First played in 1998, Ground Zero has a good claim to ur-game status, and is a great example of the 'un-fun' ideas that Nordic larp plays with: its players sat in a room standing in for an Ohio nuclear shelter circa the Cuban Missile Crisis, listening to mocked-up radio reports of a blossoming bout of Mutually Assured Destruction, then spent the rest of the game having their characters come to terms with the annihilation of the world outside."
It is not clear to most people how they would get on in a cold war bunker at the (potential) end of the world. Imagination can take us a ways, you can empathize, but there is a wide chasm between empathy and action. Something like a LARP has the ability to span that chasm, and that's very powerful.
You likely have as much trouble imagining being a scientist as you do imagining the end of the world. Still, think of an elementary school science experiment, in this case actually undertaken by one of your authors. Give each student 5 cups of nameless white powders, a row of chemical beakers and task them with discovering what rests in each cup. It's a tricky little exercise, designed to exploit the natural inclination of kids that age, namely to just start pouring cups into beakers at random. Patterns quickly emerge. One liquid always turns blue in contact with a particular powder. Another combination foams wildly. Some powders dissolve, one hardens. Keep a table of these results and you have a proper data set, an accidental inquiry into the properties of cornstarch and iodine, baking soda and vinegar, water and plaster of Paris, etc., science disguised as children making a mess of their classroom.
In the humanities, teachers and professors have already begun testing out these techniques. Take Ivanhoe, a game for learning about literature, or perhaps more importantly, learning about literary discourse:
- Students, working in groups of 3-5 (obviously no magic about those numbers), choose a text, and then take turns making a series of interpretative moves.
- To make those moves, the students must take on a different identity, and the range of identities is quite large. Maybe it's a character in the text. Maybe it's an unseen editor, rewriting the text...
- Once students have chosen their roles, the only constraint is that it needs to be clear that moves respond in some way to earlier moves-that is, one's understanding of the text in question should evolve over the course of the game.
In a following post about educational games, Jason Jones quotes author Stuart Brown, who wrote that, in childhood, play is how we gain an understanding of the working world: "children do so initially by imagining possibilities-simulating what might be, and then testing this against what actually is." This statement bares a remarkable resemblance to basic science. It's the amateur's version of testing a hypothesis.
Ivanhoe is a kind of role-playing game. Students take on the role of character or critic, adopt their perspective and posit something new from there. Games encourage systemic understanding, the same as science does. Science is, after all, a process. Just as important as formulas, the "method" of science is a participatory thing. Within the structure of a game, the player builds a mental model of, not just the game, but whatever larger thing the game symbolizes.
Play, for instance, a first-person-shooter video game, in which enemies are controlled by rudimentary artificial intelligence and you can come to an understanding of the mechanics behind that artificial intelligence. Maybe you'll learn nothing of coding, or how software interacts with hardware, but you'll certainly learn your artificial enemy's behavior, predictable as rudimentary programs always are. Play at being a scientist and you'll learn, maybe not the mathematical foundations of theory, but the procedure of scientific experimentation, the larger culture of science. Play can grant students a mental model of their subject, something which rote-and-repetition-based learning can't.
The obstacle to overcome is the reputation that education, especially science and math education, has assumed in the American vernacular. Science and math are rarely associated with play, let alone fun. Integrating live-action role-playing into our science and math classrooms at the earliest levels will help to shift away from this association, toward more comprehensive learning. With the extra tools afforded by considering play as a learning-tool, the US might be able to bridge its science and math education deficit and, hopefully, usher in a new era of innovation.
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Washington DC/ OPINION: Different Kind of String Theory
By James R. Murphy [Retired educator]
Huffington Post
October 24, 2012
We have a crisis in our education system. Sure, we've heard it before, but it needs to be stated again, particularly at a time when the United States is finding it difficult to compete in the very fields - math, science, technology - that are shaping the global economy. Consider that American high school students graduate with just a 32 percent proficiency rate in math, according to a Harvard study - a figure that puts America behind 31 other countries, including Japan, Korea, Switzerland and Canada.
I propose a solution: Let's revolutionize our schools by teaching our children how to do string figures.
I came upon the idea of using string figures - not just Cat's Cradle or Jacob's Ladder, but thousands of figures from many sources and cultures - as an educational tool while teaching math for more than 20 years at New York's LaGuardia High School (yes, the Fame school devoted to the arts, but an outstanding academic institution in its own right).
Eventually, I was given the option of devoting one entire class to strings and was constantly amazed at how much the students benefited from learning this folk-art tradition (I'm a Native American myself) that can bedazzle the eye and challenge the mind. I became interested in replicating this educational approach with younger students and am convinced that the elementary school level is the proper one for introducing string figures - the younger the mind, the more open-minded the student is.
Why string figures? Because man is a hand animal. Humans became smart because our hands allowed us to develop and employ our intelligence. Therefore, the hands should lead the young modern human to learn how best to develop their unique capabilities to prepare for a full and rich life. It's all about forging a connection between brain and hand - you create and discern pattern from your handiwork, so to speak. And you can take that understanding of pattern and apply it in any number of ways, especially in the technical realm. To know how to manipulate string is to know how to solve a complex mathematical equation. Or create a computer program. Or build a bridge.
But what do strings specifically teach in terms of school-age math? It's actually rather obvious: The figures allow students to wrap their minds around the sort of formulas that legions of mediocre math teachers have struggled to explain. Algebra isn't about "A squared plus B squared equals C squared." It's about representation of pattern. With string figures, patterns are made real: One movement of one hand - or even one finger - creates a change in the pattern. Children see the logic because they literally see it - in the interwoven strings that become works of art unto themselves (I always make sure to provide strings of many different colors to students, so as to add to the visual impact).
Moreover, children don't just see - they feel pride in what they've created. It's a sense of accomplishment that can never be derived from simply telling students they've done a good job - or, even worse, by relying on a testing system that has only fostered bitterness and cynicism from students and teachers alike. Children must internalize a respect of self.
How do I know all this is true? Not one of my students failed to perform far above their expectations in all my teaching of string figures. Moreover, there is a joy of discovery that each of my students has talked to me about. It is they who constantly surprised me with new methods of imagining figures. This curriculum represents a unique opportunity to shape a young person's feelings about their intellectual abilities and about their capacity to learn.
And it's a curriculum that is surprisingly simple in scope, based on only five figures. The students begin by learning the basic patterns thoroughly. From there, they investigate introducing differences into the figures - the subtle manipulations of fingers and hands that can lead to complex and daringly different results. Over time, they also learn by teaching - not just teaching those within the classroom about a variation they've stumbled upon, but also teaching those outside the classroom about this brave new vocabulary they now speak. By winning "converts," they reinforce the lessons they've learned.
In the end, every student comes to realize that nothing is too hard to master. I have seen the results as the years have passed: Most of my students - a group that, by the way, included a large number from low-income families - went on to college. Today, their ranks include architects, actors, musicians and even math teachers. I'm proudest when I see them with a string still wrapped around their wrist, waiting to be manipulated into a new figure.
