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Santa Fe/ Santa Fe Community Foundation: Panel Discusses How Poverty and Education Connect
By Robert Nott
The New Mexican
October 25, 2012
Efforts are being made to diminish the impact of poverty on education, but more coordination is needed for those efforts to be fully successful.
That was one of the points to emerge from Thursday morning's panel talk, "The Intersection of Poverty and Education: A Look at Successful Models," the second in a series of community conversations hosted by the Santa Fe Community Foundation.
The event was introduced and moderated by community foundation director Brian Byrnes. Six panelists gave brief presentations on their role in the struggle.
- Santa Fe Public Schools Superintendent Joel Boyd got the conversation going with some initial thoughts, noting, "Poverty can have an impact and will have an impact on youngsters if we don't address our students' needs. It doesn't have to impact their learning." Successful schools, he said, don't allow outside challenges to overwhelm their efforts to attain academic achievement.
- Tony Gerlicz, former head of Monte Del Sol Charter School, presented data suggesting American educators are doing better than believed when it comes to reaching impoverished youth.
Gerlicz, who just returned from four years as director of the American School of Warsaw in Poland to head the Office of Parental Options for the state's Public Education Department, said when poverty is taken into account, American students are doing fairly well compared with most of the other countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The U.S. is among the top five in middle-school reading levels, he said.
- Julia Bergen spoke about Communities in Schools New Mexico (formerly Santa Fe For Students), which builds partnerships with community nonprofits to provide literacy, health, and arts support for impoverished students at both Agua Frķa and Salazar elementary schools. Lisa Aguirre-Oveido of Citizen Schools talked about that organization's efforts to give DeVargas Middle School seventh-graders extra learning time with an emphasis on career and college opportunities.
- Tobe Bott-Lyons, deputy director of YouthWorks, which serves at-risk youth, said, "How you think about the problem affects what you are going to do about the problem." He laid out a series of challenges - lack of faith in the education system, a scarcity of job opportunities, high levels of poverty within the city and the absence of caring adults - and then described programs designed to give students "love, connection and significance."
He noted that YouthWorks utilized a federal grant of almost $1 million to promote college readiness and job training stressing leadership skills and community involvement.
- Finally, Tony Monfiletto, founder and principal of ACE (Architecture, Construction, and Engineering) Leadership Charter School in Albuquerque, spoke about the need to build vocational trade curriculum and spoke to his school's success in reaching students who have already dropped out of conventional public schools.
Asked whether there actually is a correlation between education and poverty, Boyd said, "Yes, but you can't define it by geography or the demographics of youngsters."
"I don't think educators can solve this problem," Monfiletto added, suggesting that those concerned bring in an outside thinker to tackle the problem.
Missing from the discussion, held during school hours, was the voices of young people. Several people in the audience suggested that the community foundation make greater efforts to include them in future panel talks.
Visit www.santafecf.org for more information or to find out when the next poverty/education talk will take place.
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ABQ/ Contract Gives APS Superintendent Winston Brooks $23,000 Pension Bump
By Hailey Heinz
ABQ Journal Staff Writer
October 26, 2012
APS Superintendent Winston Brooks' annual retirement benefits could increase by more than $23,000 due to a change in his contract earlier this year, which the school board says is aimed at encouraging him to stay with the district.
The move will eventually save APS $19,500, although it will initially be contributing more than under Brooks' previous retirement plan.
During his time leading APS, Brooks has been asked to interview for positions in Charlotte, N.C., and Dallas, Fort Worth and San Antonio, Texas.
School board members say that was a consideration when they adjusted his retirement benefits in January.
If Brooks stays with the district until he turns 65 in 2018, the change will increase his annual New Mexico retirement pay by $23,500.
Ultimately, the change means Brooks will get an $82,250 retirement annuity from the New Mexico retirement board compared to the $58,750 he would have received without the extra years.
Brooks earns $256,000 a year.
Brooks previously received a retirement annuity from the school board that started at $15,000 when he first came to APS in 2008 and increased by $5,000 per year. He has a three-year rolling contract that is renewed annually.
In January, Brooks asked the board to discontinue that annuity and instead pay him a flat annual rate of $51,500 through 2018, to be used to purchase years of service from the state Education Retirement Board. By the start of this year, the district's contribution to Brooks' annuity under the original arrangement had increased to $30,000.
Board member Kathy Korte said part of her decision to vote for Brooks' requested change in benefits was to give him an incentive to stay in Albuquerque.
"That's always a fear, that if you say 'no' to everything, he will get up and leave," she said.
"I'm going to vote for longevity in a boss in this district," she said, comparing the superintendent to school principals. "I believe strongly that some of our better schools are better because a principal has been there for awhile. You can't just change principals or superintendents every two years and expect any solid results."
Brooks was not threatening to leave APS in January when his retirement benefits were adjusted, and he emphasized in an interview Thursday that he is not looking to leave APS or sell his services to the highest bidder. But he said it was a factor in his negotiations with the board.
"I'm in a market that they need good urban superintendents with experience," Brooks said. "It was a way for the board, without paying me more money, to be able to influence me in not being motivated to go somewhere else."
The change was approved by the board in a 4-3 vote. The discussion was held in closed session but the vote was public. Voting for the change were board members Korte, Paula Maes, Martin Esquivel and David Peercy. Voting against it were Analee Maestas, Lorenzo Garcia and David Robbins.
Korte emphasized Brooks did not get everything he asked for during contract negotiations, and the board viewed the new contract as a compromise.
The board voted unanimously to extend Brooks' contract, and split only on the details.
Robbins said he voted against the benefits change because he did not think it would provide Brooks an incentive to stay at the district. That's because Brooks would actually get more of his benefits up front, rather than having to stay at the district to collect them.
"If we want to keep him for this period of time, why would we frontload his retirement?" Robbins said. "If, after one, two, three years he says 'I don't want to take this anymore,' he's gotten the lion's share of the benefits then."
Lawmakers in Santa Fe are looking at ways to keep the Educational Retirement Board solvent. The fund has an unfunded liability of $5.9 billion, the difference between the benefits due to be paid out and the assets on hand, according to its most recent assessment.
Its fiscal condition has worsened in recent years due to a combination of factors, including market-driven investment losses and the Legislature's decision to delay an approved increase in taxpayer-funded contributions to the fund.
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Farmington/ Municipal Schools Consider Proposed Bilingual Recognition Program
By Joshua Kellogg
Farmington Daily Times
October 25, 2012
Seats were hard to find during the Farmington Board of Education meeting Thursday evening when a potential new bilingual program was presented that could honor students for language skills.
Parents and children filled the Central Office boardroom as Farmington Municipal Schools officials gave a presentation on the possibility of introducing a Bilingual Seal program during the board work session.
The presentation was given during a work session and no action was taken by the board.
- "Our department believes we are getting more and more students proficient in home languages like Spanish and Navajo," said Director of Bilingual Education Gayle Barfoot.
The proposed program will honor students who have finished a bilingual program and met certain criteria, recognition with on their diploma and transcript.
- Spanish Language Facilitator Modesto Rascon gave a presentation to the board members and the audience on the benefits to students who participate in the program. Rascon switched between English and Spanish during this talk to ensure those in attendance could follow along.
The Bilingual Seal could increase the graduation rates of English language learners, aid students with acceptance into colleges and universities and more.
- "It could facilitate scholarships for bilingual students," Rascon said. "Students recognized as bilingual will have helping finding a job."
Rascon said the program is available to any student.
Specific guidelines and criteria were proposed, involving applying for the seal during 12th grade after a specific number of years of bilingual courses, including taking Spanish as a foreign language.
During the workshop session, a number of people voiced their concern about Navajo language requirement being the same as the Spanish.
One woman told Rascon that she was concerned about those students learning Navajo possibly being less proficient because some of them begin learning the language in high school.
The idea was taken into consideration by Rascon. He said the proposed program is still taking shape.
It will need to be approved by the Farmington school board first before a committee can be formed to create assessments for succeeding in the program.
Rascon said he was optimistic about getting the program before end of the school year.
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Grants/ Grants-Cibola County Schools: No Bullies in the Classroom
By Bob Tenequer
Cibola Beacon Staff Writer
October 26, 2012
"Bullying is not only a local problem but also a national problem," said Richard Jones, Grants/Cibola County School District Board secretary.
And now the district has started a program to deal with and identify bullying-types of activities.
Gloria Chavez, district assistant superintendent, said at the Oct. 16 meeting that the district has begun to offer train-the-trainer workshops for principals, teachers and support staff.
"We need to have our staff recognize and identify the signs of bullying," said Chavez.
She acknowledged that it is important for teachers to know what they can do to prevent bullying in the classrooms.
The Edu-Safe Program provides professional development and different strategies for bus drivers, cooks, parents and community members to identify signs of bullying.
"With these tools we will be able to provide this training to all stakeholders in our district," said Chavez.
School Board member Dion Sandoval mentioned an anti-bullying campaign that is being led by Cibola County Sheriff, Johnny Valdez, and Bobbie Littlebear, businesswoman and parent.
Sandoval suggested that the district collaborate with the Cibola County Sheriff's Office.
The superintendent said that understanding the concept of bullying is very complex and noted, "It isn't something you can just turn on and off."
"We just have to be aggressive and provide a lot of awareness," explained the superintendent.
"Our school policies make it very clear that bullying is not allowed," said Superintendent Kalino Marquez.
William Estevan, board member, asked, "How many incidents have occurred in the district?"
Marquez responded, "In my office there have been no more than five, however, there may be more. The good thing about this is that these incidents are being taking care of at the sites. I know for sure that bullying affects the self-esteem of victims."
He went on the say that it is important for students to know that by engaging in bullying that there are consequences.
Estevan said he asked the question because there was a parent who had come to him and informed him that they were transferring their student to another school because the youngster was being bullied.
Liz Elkins, Cubero Elementary School principal, said by that it is important to understand the different categories of what is considered bullying, because not every incident may be bullying.
She added that "texting" or "Cyber bullying" are other forms.
"I think the number one strategy is awareness and bringing it to the attention of the right people," said the Superintendent Marquez.
School Board President, Joel Stewart said he was pleased with the informational discussion, which heightened awareness of bullying in the district.
"Every person in this room has been bullied in some point of their life, and it is a horrible thing that we [each have] had to endure," he acknowledged.
Chavez said that as the program moves forward she feels that it is important to share with the board information pertaining to who has been trained and whether the program is being successful.
Board Vice President, Jerry Smith, asked that the board be given information as to the current status at each school site, identify trends to help the board understand whether this program is helping.
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Charleston SC/ Haut Gap Middle School: Basic Behavior
A Charleston middle school joins the growing number nationwide that use PBIS strategies to teach students how to behave
By Nirvi Shah
Education Week, Vol. 32, Issue 9 [Edweek.org]
October 25, 2012
Along with reading, science, and mathematics classes, every student here at Haut Gap Middle School takes a course in how to be a Haut Gap student.
For most students, the class is 40 minutes a day for nine weeks-even for returning students. But it can last 18 weeks for students who need extra time to nail concepts such as how to own up to mistakes, accept feedback, and apologize appropriately.
- Those lessons are part of a school-wide approach to addressing student behavior that Haut Gap has used for about five years: Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, or PBIS.
- "The whole goal of PBIS is so instruction doesn't have to stop" later for teachers stuck dealing with problem behaviors, said Julianne Moffatt, the school's PBIS coach. She teaches the behavior courses and some writing classes along with overseeing the school's behavior approach.
While the classes and the many other facets of PBIS take time, educators here say there's a payoff: Haut Gap recorded about 170 out-of-school suspensions when PBIS was adopted in 2007-and student enrollment was just 250. Last school year, it had nearly 500 students, and the school suspended fewer than 100 of them.
"You don't have time not to teach this," said Katherine Lewis, a school climate specialist for the 45,000-student Charleston County district who helped establish the PBIS approach at Haut Gap.
The approach, developed in the 1980s by education researchers, has since been adopted-and adapted-by about 18,300 schools nationwide.
PBIS values teaching all students appropriate behavior as much as teaching any academic subject. It's the opposite of what many school rules say: everything students shouldn't do. It emphasizes creating a common set of expectations for students' behavior, no matter where they are on campus.
- The underlying premise: Schools must become predictable, consistent, positive, and safe environments for students.
"Creating that common set of expectations is really what creates a learning community. Culture makes a huge impact on the effectiveness of the school," said Robert Horner, a co-director of the U.S. Department of Education's Technical Assistance Center on Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports and a special education professor at the University of Oregon, in Eugene.
Data-Based Discipline
The original intent of PBIS was to help students improve their chances for academic success by reducing overall problem behavior, but now it is more commonly being looked to as a way to reduce out-of-school suspensions and expulsions, Mr. Horner said. That's especially true now as schools search for alternatives to zero-tolerance discipline policies, which have been linked to high numbers of suspensions-especially among African-American students, Latinos, boys, and students with disabilities.
"When you have an increase in students engaged, you have a decrease in minutes spent managing deviant behavior," added Mr. Horner.
- A new study by Johns Hopkins University researchers looking at more than 12,000 elementary school students in schools using PBIS found that the approach has significant effects on their behavior problems, concentration problems, and social-emotional functioning, and that
- children in those schools were 33 percent less likely to receive an office discipline referral than peers elsewhere.
- The younger the students were when PBIS was introduced, the stronger the effect.
But getting to that point is a major undertaking-and the effort doesn't end even after a school has used the approach for a few years.
- Schools establish their own common expectations for students,
- consistent rewards for appropriate behavior, and
- consequences for behavior that isn't right, and quickly add
- interventions for students who don't always do the right thing.
Educators also constantly evaluate their campuses, tracking student behavior and determining how to change something about the school to address inappropriate behavior. Schools must constantly gather data about how students act, when, and where.
- "When you're looking at your data, where is it that you need to improve?" said Isabel Villalobos, the coordinator of student discipline and the expulsion-support unit for the Los Angeles schools. "Maybe it's the hallway. Look at the lunch area. Do we need more supervision? Is it a lighting issue?"
In 2007, the 664,000-student district adopted PBIS and other strategies to address an epidemic of out-of-school suspensions. So far, about a third of the district's schools have fully implemented the approach, Ms. Villalobos said. Days of instruction lost to suspension in Los Angeles have dropped from nearly 75,000 in the 2007-08 school year to about 26,300 last school year.
Haut Gap Middle School went through a similar self-evaluation, bolstering student supervision in some campus trouble spots. Expectations for how to behave on campus are posted everywhere now.
Like many others that employ PBIS, the school created an acronym to define its expectations so students can remember them: PRIDE, for personal responsibility, respect, individual readiness, demonstrated learning, and effective behaviors.
In the hallways, respect is defined as keeping hands and feet to yourself; in the restroom, flushing the toilet. Personal responsibility means walking single file on stairs and two abreast elsewhere. In class, individual readiness means arriving on time, having all materials, and following the dress code.
The approach may seem prescriptive, said Robert Stevens, the Charleston County district's PBIS coordinator, but shifts in societal and cultural norms demand it. "One of the things PBIS does, it levels the playing field: Everybody is taught the same things. We're taught how to behave. We are reinforced for doing it properly," he said.
Ms. Lewis puts it another way: "We have to have a set of behaviors that are neutral to where you come from. The [school] culture has to be as strong as their culture is."
Good-Conduct Rewards
To encourage students to stick to the rules, PBIS schools work hard to reinforce appropriate behavior.
For example, once every quarter, Haut Gap students who have collected the right number of PRIDE coupons earn a special privilege.
They also can cash in their coupons for prizes. They earn coupons for asking thoughtful questions in class, being prepared for a lesson, and asking for permission the right way. Coupons or not, when students behave the right way, they are told.
"You have your reading book out," English teacher Brandon Bobart told his students during a recent class. "I can tell you're committed to your learning."
Earlier this month, 6th grader Saniyah King happily reported she had earned 10 PRIDE coupons. If she has 20 by month's end, she'll get to take part in a school-wide dress-up day, when students swap school uniforms for business attire.
The steps to earning those coupons roll off Saniyah's tongue.
"When you show personal responsibility, when you have your materials, accepting feedback-positive or negative," said Saniyah, 11. "It feels easy."
Tracking and rewarding students' behavior-along with all the standard responsibilities of lesson planning, grading, and teaching itself-is a lot of work, said Lindsay Lawes, who teaches algebra and geometry to Haut Gap 7th and 8th graders and is in her second year at the school. For a while, she and her colleagues sent detailed weekly reports to parents outlining students' progress. The letters acknowledged students who are sometimes overlooked: Those who neither excel academically nor have chronic behavior issues.
"It forces you to look at those kids," Ms. Lawes said. In the PBIS system of tiers that group students by whether their behavior needs much, some, or minimal intervention, students who aren't engaged get attention, too.
"It ups the game," Ms. Lawes said. "They have to be engaged."
When Haut Gap first adopted PBIS, the school had failed to make adequate yearly progress under the federal No Child Left Behind Act for several years, giving parents the option of transferring their children from the school. Enrollment had declined to about 200-so low the school board contemplated closing the school, which is on rural Johns Island on Charleston's southern side. Although Haut Gap is just a few miles from the resorts and golf courses on Kiawah Island, most families living within the school's attendance zone are poor and African-American.
After the program was implemented, the school's academic performance swung in the opposite direction, which the school attributes at least in part to its new focus on student engagement. The school went from an F grade to an A on the state's school grading system.
When it added a magnet program, more parents opted to take a chance on a school previously labeled persistently dangerous. Now Haut Gap has 523 students; enrollment is a blend of white, black, and Hispanic students.
Next-Level Interventions
While PBIS operates on the principle that most students respond to clear expectations and positive reinforcement, 15 percent to 20 percent of students are likely to need something more intense, Mr. Horner of the University of Oregon said. Those next-tier interventions could include a mental-health screening or daily, one-on-one check-ins with students but in some cases, interventions can be simpler-and downright ingenious.
For Haut Gap 6th grader Travis Coach Jr., peppering teachers with comments and questions-regardless of whether he was called on or his commentary was on point-was a big problem. It's the kind of behavior that elsewhere might have been regarded as insubordinate or defiant. But Haut Gap didn't want to squelch Travis' exuberance. Instead, the school equipped him with a stack of Post-it notes.
"Each class, I get three comments," said Travis, 11. After that, he can jot his thoughts down on the sticky squares of paper and pass them to his teachers.
Similarly, in Memphis, Tenn., which adopted PBIS district-wide about six years ago to replace corporal punishment, one student's knack for vulgarity was channeled into something else entirely, said Brady Henderson, the district's PBIS supervisor.
"This child liked throwing hand signs-vulgar hand signs," Mr. Henderson said. He was instructed to learn two American Sign Language words each day as an intervention.
"He took to it like duck to water," Mr. Henderson said. "They looked at it in terms of a strength." And his crude hand gestures haven't been seen since.
These strategies are a far cry from the "get out" approach that suspensions and expulsions convey, said Paul Padrón, who was Haut Gap's principal for five years and worked to implement PBIS. "It is 'I want you here, I need you here.' "
Getting On Board
Handling behavior so differently takes major staff buy-in, said Charlotte Baucom, the coordinator of the center for safe and drug-free schools in the 100,000-student Memphis, Tenn., district, which adopted PBIS about six years ago to replace corporal punishment. "It has to be believed [that] we can do something besides something punitive to get a child to do what you want them to do," she said.
Groups of staff members at each Memphis school went through PBIS training. And, as at every school working on PBIS, commitment from the whole school is required.
One reason that two-thirds of Los Angeles schools still haven't adopted PBIS fully is that buy-in occurred only on some campuses, said Cheri Thomas, the district's lead coordinator of school operations. When behavior problems arise, she said, some staff members still think first of calling the police.
PBIS presents other challenges: Mr. Horner said more research needs to be done on using PBIS in high schools, for example. And because staffs can turn over quickly, districts must build capacity to train new employees. For that reason, the technical-assistance center now prefers to work with whole districts rather than individual schools.
At Haut Gap, where PBIS is going strong, the school's new principal, J. Travis Benintendo, set aside the first three days of school for teaching students the skills they need to meet Haut Gap expectations.
"That shows how important this is," he said. "Everything else follows nicely."
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Washington DC/ Caution Urged in Using 'Value Added' Evaluations
By Sarah D. Sparks
Education Week, Vol. 32, Issue 10 [Edweek.org]
October 25, 2012
Top researchers studying new "value added" or "growth index" models for measuring a teacher's contribution to student achievement completely agree on one thing: These methods should be used in staff-evaluation systems with more caution than they have been so far.
That area of agreement emerged in an Aug. 9 meeting that drew together a who's who of a dozen of the nation's top education researchers on value-added methods-in areas from education to economics-to build, if not consensus, at least familiarity within a disparate research community for value-added systems. The U.S. Department of Education's research agency, which organized the forum, today released the proceedings of the meeting, as well as individual briefs from each of the experts.
"There's been a huge amount of research in this field in recent years, but it tends to be really siloed," John Q. Easton, the director of the Institute of Education Sciences, told members of the National Board for Education Sciences, IES's advisory group, during a briefing earlier this month.
- "People don't seem to read each other's work, and it's published in totally different journals. It was so typical to read somebody's study who was not citing all the others."
Pros and Cons
Value-added methods, which attempt to measure teachers' performance based on their students' test scores, have gained support in the last decade, as studies by Stanford University economist Eric A. Hanushek and others found inconclusive evidence to support a link between a teacher's effectiveness and his or her degree credentials-the latter of which is the traditional basis for teacher pay. Massive federal support, in the form of the $290 million Teacher Incentive Fund and the $4 billion Race to the Top competition has led to rapid growth in the number of states and districts adopting these methods in their teacher evaluation systems.
- Advocates argue that value-added methods can be more objective than principal observations alone, and if done well can provide information about areas a teacher needs to beef up instruction.
- Critics contend these scores can only be used for teachers of mathematics and English/language arts in tested grades, leaving out both a large proportion of district teachers and any contribution a teacher makes to untested subjects or skills, be they science or self-control.
An influential series of studies by Jesse Rothstein, a public policy and economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a participant in the meeting, found a standard value-added model was biased because it did not take into account that parents and principals often push teachers to take certain students, rather than assigning them at random.
"[Value-added measures] will deteriorate-will become less reliable and less closely tied to true effectiveness-if they are used for high-stakes individual decisions," Mr. Rothstein wrote in a brief for the meeting. "How much will teachers change their content coverage, neglect nontested subjects and topics, lobby for the right students, teach test-taking strategies, and cheat outright? ... We simply don't know."
Tools for Improvement
The Measures of Effective Teaching Project, funded by the Seattle-based Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is expected to release a report later this year in which class rosters were randomly assigned to clusters of teachers by school, grade, and subject area. This may help identify how the selection bias Mr. Rothstein found takes place and can be prevented, according to Thomas Kane, an education and economics professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a meeting participant.
Mr. Kane and fellow Harvard assistant education professor Andrew Ho, contended that district leaders should focus less on using value-added systems to rank teachers, which Mr. Ho likened to hospital intake questionnaires that identify initial symptoms. "Medicine (and education) is not only about symptoms (and even less so about one-dimensional rankings of symptoms), but, far more critically, diagnosis and ultimately treatment," Mr. Ho said. "How can we use VAM results to improve teaching and the teacher corps?"
Education officials' tendency to average multiple measures or years of data into a single composite score worried many researchers.
- From one year to the next, a teacher's ratings under some of the value-added systems now in use can vary by 4 percent to 25 percent, according to Linda Darling-Hammond, an education professor and faculty co-director of the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.
- She argued that researchers and policymakers must take into account the range of scores available on their state's tests when developing a value-added system. For example, a teacher of gifted students may not show up as very effective, because his or her students are already performing near the top of the test's ability to measure their progress.
Mr. Kane countered that teachers have such a strong effect on student achievement that if value-added measures help identify teachers in the bottom 5 percent of performance and bring them up to the district average, they can lead to an average increase in lifetime earnings for each student of $52,000 as a result of being taught by that teacher for one year.
Common-Core Concerns
Many of the experts see both promise and peril in the rollout of the Common Core State Standards and their effect on existing and emerging teacher evaluation systems.
In most districts, researchers voiced concern that evaluation systems do not take into account the time it will take for even the most effective teachers to adapt to new areas of focus in the standards-not to mention that the common core deliberately omits guidance on specific teaching strategies to meet the new requirements.
For example, Henry Braun, the director of the Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation, and Education Policy at Boston College and a consultant with the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, one of the two consortia developing tests for the common core, has been struggling with how to design an assessment which likely will end up being used for teacher evaluation. He worried that if the teacher accountability "tail" wags the student assessment "dog," tests won't be designed appropriately to measure students' learning rather than teacher behavior.
Experts called for state policy leaders to consider how their individual state tests will affect the validity of individual districts' evaluation systems.
Summit on 'Value Added' Research-The federal Institute of Education Sciences recently convened a meeting of a dozen top researchers on the use of value-added methods to measure teacher effectiveness:
- Damian W. Betebenner, senior associate, National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, Dover, N.H.
- Henry Braun, director, Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation, and Education Policy, and professor of education and public policy, Boston College
- Sean P. Corcoran, associate professor of educational economics, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, New York University
- Linda Darling-Hammond, professor of education and faculty co-director, Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education, Stanford University
- John N. Friedman, assistant professor of public policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and faculty research fellow, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Mass
- Daniel Goldhaber, director, Center for Education Data and Research, Seattle, and interdisciplinary arts and sciences professor, University of Washington Bothell
- Andrew Ho, assistant professor, Harvard Graduate School of Education
- Thomas Kane, professor of education and economics, Harvard Graduate School of Education, and faculty director, Center for Education Policy Research, Cambridge, Mass.
- Helen F. Ladd, professor of economics and public policy, Duke University
- Robert C. Pianta, dean, Curry School of Education, University of Virginia, and director of the university's Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning
- Jonah E. Rockoff, associate professor of business, Columbia Graduate School of Business, and faculty research fellow, National Bureau of Economic Research
- Jesse Rothstein, professor of public policy and economics, University of California, Berkeley, and research associate, National Bureau of Economic Research
SOURCES: Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education
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New York NY/ Eric Eisner: Unlikely Education Reformer Named Innovator of the Year 2012
By Meghan O'Rourke
Wall Street Journal [magazine]
October 25, 2012
When former Hollywood mogul Eric Eisner decided to help the smartest students in the roughest Los Angeles schools reach their potential, he led them to a brighter future the only way he knew how: one dream at a time.
Eric Eisner seems an improbable character to have become one of the great innovative-and philanthropic-forces in education today. As a teenager, he played drums in Greenwich Village clubs instead of getting a good night's rest for school. After attending law school at Columbia, he moved to Los Angeles, where he turned himself into a movie and music mogul, becoming the president of the Geffen Company. As a Hollywood power broker, he made million-dollar deals and lunched with Tom Cruise, Tim Burton and Martin Scorsese. Everything he did, he says today, he did in order to make money- and for no other reason. He reveled in the lifestyle that his success allowed: Bob Dylan performed at his wedding to Lisa Eisner, a photographer and fashion editor who became one of Tom Ford's muses; he bought a house in Bel-Air and sent his children to the prestigious Brentwood and Crossroads schools; having made enough money to retire in his late 40s, he looked forward to perfecting his golf game at the Bel-Air Country Club, which he had maneuvered energetically to get into.
His life could not have been further removed from the poorest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, and yet he became the founder of a visionary organization known as the Young Eisner Scholars (YES). Strangely enough, he says, his glamorous life prepared him to do the work he does today.
- Situated in southwest L.A., YES identifies promising students in disadvantaged schools, helps develop their intellectual potential and finds places for them in the city's best prep and magnet schools.
- What sets YES apart from other well-intentioned programs is the attention that goes into helping these students overcome poverty and poor schooling.
- All of Eisner's energy is directed at figuring out how to make the kids feel a positive drive toward their futures. "To understand kids and how to make things glamorous to them, you have to have been a victim of glamour yourself," he says. "You have to understand why a video game makes a kid want to win, but a teacher might not.
- If you want kids to realize their promise, you have to figure out how to make something seem aspirational to them."
Clearly something about Eisner's formula is working: This fall, 67 YES kids will be enrolled at the nation's most prestigious universities-among them, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, USC and UC Berkeley. Through sheer force of will, Eisner and his organization have had a profound impact on the lives of L.A.'s disadvantaged, opening what the author Malcolm Gladwell, a champion of Eisner's, has called an "underground railroad" out of the barrio.
How was this unlikely partnership between under-performing public schools and a wealthy former music executive formed? A few years after Eisner retired from Geffen, his friend Dorothy Courtney pressed him to get involved with an organization that helps families in the Hawthorne and Lennox areas of Los Angeles. "Dorothy went to work on me a little bit, 'You must have some time,' and so on," Eisner recalls. "I had time, but I had never, ever, ever done anything for anyone in my life. If there was no money in it, count me out. I wasn't even on the student council. But I thought, Try it. So I said, 'What do you want me to do?' And she was clever enough to say, 'If I tell you, you'll stop doing it in six months. Why don't you give it some thought?' "
The next day, he told her what he had in mind: to meet the brightest kids in the worst school. "I told her, 'I want to meet the smartest kids, the kids who are interested in building things, in physics,' " he says. "I want to see what's going on between their ears." The worst of the schools, Courtney told him, was Lennox Middle School. Housed in a grim, unassuming building near the Los Angeles airport, it had lost its high school due to budget cuts, and the dropout rate had soared to nearly 60 percent. To get to school, students had to cross gang lines.
Eisner began meeting with a handful of kids at Lennox, without any clear picture of what he was doing other than listening. One of the first kids he met was Chris Bonilla, who graduated from Columbia University two years ago and now works for YES. Bonilla tells me that he first thought Eisner was there to discipline him. "He was just sitting there, and he had a printout of all my grades and information and he was like, 'Why are you getting a B minus in social studies?' I thought he was a school official who was pretty angry for some reason, so I walked away shook up." Soon, Bonilla and Eisner were regularly meeting to talk, along with a handful of other kids.
The Young Eisner Scholars is the outgrowth of one man's natural curiosity, not a predetermined pedagogical philosophy. Its mission has evolved over time, as Eisner became aware of how he could be most helpful. That first year, he realized that the most difficult thing for these students was verbalizing their thoughts-not having complex thoughts, but expressing them. He encouraged the students to debate him and helped pay for them to attend summer school. When teachers at the Brentwood summer school approached Eisner to say that Bonilla, whom Eisner had sent there, would be a great addition to the high school, Eisner agreed to pay for his tuition. He began finding slots at top high schools for students graduating from Lennox. And Young Eisner Scholars was born.
- "Eisner describes himself as a third parent. This is education on a human level, not a theoretical one."
Today, YES serves students from the third grade through graduate school, though Eisner focuses on the pivotal upper-middle-school years: The kids are old enough for him to reliably evaluate their work ethic and their hunger for knowledge, but young enough that their minds are still growing rapidly. As in the past, he counsels the students, gauges their self-motivation and stability-a child who has a resilient personality and is willing to speak up, he's quick to point out, is more likely to succeed-and gets to know their parents. If it seems like a good fit, he helps find a place for the student in an L.A. high school-usually private, but not always.
In the majority of cases, the high schools themselves provide scholarships; today, schools that work with YES pay a small fee in order to meet the scholars and recruit them. (The organization helps pay for college once the scholars leave high school.) Eisner raises all the money for the YES budget in an ad hoc way: "sharpening his teeth" when someone asks him what he does at the kind of cocktail parties he used to dread.
To private schools hungry for greater diversity, Eisner's program is a gift: It screens the students beforehand and, once they're admitted, offers additional support and counseling far beyond the school's resources. The path from the barrio to Beverly Hills is not without its bumps. Roughly 60 percent of the YES kids live below the poverty line, and all kinds of unpredictable problems arise as they transition from Lennox or Buford to Brentwood and Harvard-Westlake. It's not just culture shock, which the kids say is real, yet not as daunting as they had imagined, but also pragmatic issues: Their parents may not have the resources to get them to and from school, or understand how to apply for financial aid.
Eisner, who grew up in Manhattan, the child of left-leaning parents who hosted fundraisers for Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (one of his earliest memories is of Paul Robeson singing) was never the smartest kid in the room, but he always wanted to get As and spent a lot of time studying how the smart kids learned. Today, he describes himself as "tough" and not the most "empathetic" person, but his bluntness is appealingly open and he speaks eloquently (and concretely) about strategies for learning.
The students clearly respond to him and appreciate his straight shooting. On the afternoon I visit Eisner in the YES offices, Andrew, a skinny, reserved eighth grader, sits with us. Andrew had recently been accepted to The Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, making this the first year YES will enroll students at boarding schools. As Eisner speaks, Andrew corrects him, or adds salient details, demonstrating a key trait Eisner looks for: a mind obsessed with accuracy. When I ask Andrew what the best thing about YES is, he pauses, then says, "I learned how to learn."
Eisner believes the students need to learn what he calls "literate thinking."
In Los Angeles, the middle-school curriculum is pegged to tests. Kids are expected to memorize material, but often don't fully understand the broader concepts behind what they're studying. As Andrew puts it, for two problems in a math class at Lennox, he would get a paragraph of notes; for one problem with Eisner, he gets several pages. Eisner tells me he thinks the fact that he wasn't himself a "brainiac" made him more attentive to the question of how to learn; this is what he drives home in his meetings with the kids. Many of the YES students I meet with describe the process as "intimidating" and "scary," but also express their respect for Eisner. His high standards have taken them further than they ever imagined. "You couldn't just give the answer," one student says, trying to explain what was so different about Eisner's teaching. "You had to say why the answer was the way it was."
Though Eisner has no background in education, and not much of a formal philosophy, he understands that students in Bel-Air are taught how to internalize literate thinking-the ability to effectively communicate and bargain, and to extrapolate from particulars to universals-from an early age. In southwest L.A., the education system is turning out kids who are silent memorizers; as hungry as they may be for knowledge, there's not much room for them to learn broad principles, let alone the social skills that are crucial to making one's way in our entrepreneurial culture. In theory, the literate-thinking methodology isn't all that different from an SAT prep course, which also teaches kids how to fathom the basic principles underlying all sorts of word problems. In practice, the difference lies in Eisner's passion. This is education on a human level, not a theoretical one.
Eisner describes himself as a third parent, and his influence in the students' lives reflects this. Having been told that one boy, Sebastian, wasn't participating at recess, he met with him and noticed that his shoes were too big and the soles had worn away. So YES helped him buy new tennis shoes, and the boy started playing at recess again. Eisner has found himself buying eyeglasses for students whose parents couldn't afford them. After getting reports that one scholar wasn't doing his homework, he called the boy himself to find out what was going on, acting, as he puts it, "like a marine sergeant, blind to the nuances: 'Why are you being negligent about your homework?' " It turned out that the boy had been nervously focused on an upcoming dance recital-he had not one but two solos. After seeing the boy dance-"Next to the other boys, he was Nureyev. And the joy!"-Eisner was reminded that measuring success in young students is always complex.
While it could be argued that the program robs the public school system of its most talented students, the Lennox Middle School administration has been extremely supportive of Eisner's mission, acknowledging that they do not always have the resources to serve their brightest kids. And it would take a stony heart not to be inspired by all that Eisner has managed to accomplish with just a five-person staff (including himself).
One of these success stories is Diana Orozco, who graduated from the Brentwood School this year and was admitted to Yale. At the YES office, she explains that she'd been raised by a single mother with four kids-she is the oldest-who works as a cashier in a burger place. Her mother, who has been taking night classes and will graduate from high school herself this year, "is very excited about Yale," she says.
Although Eisner's model may not, at first glance, appear scaleable, his success reminds us that innovation on a grass-roots level can be as important as revolutions in pedagogy. Eisner's model is artisanal rather than commercial (in his 12 years running YES, he has worked with just 211 students), but it might be just what's needed to inject schools with a hopeful, cooperative spirit-the kind of can-do attitude that leads to greater change. Next spring, in partnership with Columbia University, YES is planning to bring the program to New York City.
On a Friday afternoon, Eisner and I have lunch at the Bel-Air Country Club with his assistant, Alina. As we eat, overlooking the golf course he once imagined playing on every day, Eisner speaks about some of the kids in the program and the many obstacles they've over- come. Now, YES helps its scholars find jobs, continuing to level the playing fields-one had just completed an internship at Morgan Stanley . "It's a fascinating world when you get involved with all these kids," Eisner muses. "It's like they're plants: You have to see where they're growing, what they need."
Before getting up to leave the table (he and Alina are going to Brentwood to watch Diana and three other YES scholars graduate), he gestures at the vista before him, as if to invoke the distance between his own life and those of his students. Thanks to YES, perhaps that distance won't always be so large.
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Washington DC/ INTERVIEW: Jonathan Kozol on Keeping Faith with the Kids
By Michael Busch [Lecturer, Departments of Political Science and International Studies, The City College of New York]
Huffington Post
October 25, 2012
For nearly 50 years, Jonathan Kozol has documented the landscape of impoverished America. Since the appearance of his landmark memoir Death at an Early Age, which detailed his experiences as a teacher in the Boston public school system, Kozol has produced perhaps the most influential body of work illustrating the links between broken schools and the perpetuation of socioeconomic injustice for the poor in America.
At the heart of this campaign are a series of books looking at life in the South Bronx. The portrait Kozol paints is as harrowing in its descriptions of institutional failure and structural violence as it is hopeful in its stories of the resilient children that populate New York City's streets, schools, and churches.
Fire in the Ashes, Kozol's latest effort, returns to the lives of the children featured in previous books, and traces the trajectory of their journeys from little kids to young adults. Some have survived and are thriving. Others are dead. Yet whether celebrating their successes or mourning their loss, Fire in the Ashes underscores the moral necessity of educational opportunity for all children, and makes a persuasive case that the future of our nation's democracy depends on it.
I recently talked with Kozol about his new book, the privatization of public schools in the United States, the education policies of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, and the lives of his closest friends in the world - the children of Fire in the Ashes.
- What motivated you to write Fire in the Ashes, and why now?
I first got to know a bunch of kids in Mott Haven in the early 1990s. Mott Haven, as you might know, was then and is still today the poorest neighborhood in all of the South Bronx, which remains the poorest congressional district in the nation. These were extremely poor children. I met most of them when they were six or seven years old. I didn't go to the South Bronx as an interviewer. I never write books in that way.
I went there because teachers invited me to visit their schools and I got to know the children - I would see them at school, at their afterschool program, at their church. The children would invite me to meet their moms and their dads, their grandmothers, and we became deep friends. I wrote three books about them over the next ten years. A few years passed, and people started asking me, "What happened to those kids? Did you keep in touch with them? How many survived and how many didn't?" So, I thought it was time to write Fire in the Ashes in order to keep faith with those kids.
It wasn't difficult. They kept in touch when they became teenagers and young adults. They would call me, I'd keep coming back to visit with them, as they got into their twenties some of them would come up to Cambridge to visit with me for a weekend, and they persistently kept texting me, which was a whole new world. I had to learn how to decode the abbreviations in their charming little messages to me. And some of them, I am sad to say, did not survive. Three (it's interesting to note that they were all boys) had had a very rough time in their elementary schools and in their early teenage years. They'd gone to some of the most deeply segregated, unequal and dysfunctional schools I have ever seen in the United States. All three of those of those boys ultimately killed themselves.
But there were other kids - a far larger number - who managed to rise above the odds, partly because of their own grit and guts, but also because of the well-timed intervention of grownups, particularly some of the teachers in the schools of the South Bronx who recognized their gifts. By the way, it should be said that most of these kids did terribly on their standardized exams. They hated that whole test-prep regiment that started when they were in elementary school. But partly because of well-timed intervention these kids were able to win some really triumphant victories.
- Philanthropic intervention, about which you seem ambivalent and at times uncomfortable, seems to be one of the two interrelated determinants in the lives of the children you profile in the book. Can you speak more about this?
One child who dominates the book to a degree is a little girl named Pineapple. I met her when she was in kindergarten at P.S. 65 in the South Bronx. At that time the school was not only grossly underfunded but also in terrible physical disrepair with very large class sizes. Pineapple had thirty-six classmates in her classes for a couple years in a row. Teachers kept quitting in despair. They'd leave in the middle of the year - at one point in her schooling, Pineapple had seven teachers in the course of two years. The city tried to compensate for huge classes and teachers disappearing by a rigid uniformity in methods of instruction and constant grilling for exams.
This just preceded the enactment of No Child Left Behind, and was like a model of NCLB. It was very similar in its demands. And it didn't work, it didn't work for any of the kids. Instead of getting wonderful books to read in order to learn how to read - which is the way I learned how to read and how children in really good suburban schools learn how to read - they got these pit pat phonics readers which had no plot, no pictures, no stories but were better than Ambien at putting people to sleep. By the time Pineapple was in fifth grade, I sat down with her and discovered to my horror that this bright little girl whose conversational skills were terrific couldn't read or write a sentence longer than four or five words. She had been artificially retarded by the drill and kill agenda that had been foisted on her school. I was just heartsick.
With the help of an Episcopal priest in the neighborhood who also knew Pineapple very well, we -the priest and I - did something that really went against our values because we both profoundly believe in public education. The priest did everything she could to encourage the teachers - she gave them tremendous moral support. But when we discovered that Pineapple was still at second grade level in the fifth grade, she did what any rich parent would have done - she pulled Pineapple out and put her in a terrific and very expensive prep school for rich children, not one of these self-promoting and bombastic charter schools with names like "Academy for Leadership and Law" - they all seem to be named for marketing purposes, not accuracy. Schools in the suburbs would never be given these sorts of names! It would be considered embarrassing and cheap. And besides, the rich suburban schools don't need to advertise success in this way. They have small class sizes, well-treated teachers and enough room for innovation. They know their kids are going to succeed. They don't need to play these games.
Suddenly Pineapple had fifteen kids in her class instead of thirty-six and teachers who weren't working under the sword of test-driven, scripted curricula but who were allowed to develop really exciting curricula and had time to actually listen, to encourage Pineapple to ask questions, to think critically. They were able to entice her to learn for its own sake. And all of a sudden, her love of learning came alive. In tenth grade, she said to me, "That was my breakthrough year. From that point on, I knew I could do it, that I could go to college." No one in her family had gone to college, nor had anyone else she knew in her neighborhood. Certainly not a four-year college.
I'm very proud to say that Pineapple did go to college. She's currently a senior at a very fine liberal arts college in New England. I never liked that she had to be pulled out and put in a prep school. The best news for me - this isn't in the book, she told me this recently after the book had gone to press - is that Pineapple has decided to stay an extra year in university and get certified to become a teacher in the public schools. She wants to go back to the South Bronx, as she put it when we talked a few months ago, to "help the ones I left behind." This isn't only an academic victory, but a deeply human one. A moral victory. Some kids that get the special opportunities that Pineapple received figure, "well, now I cash in. I can go into business, make a lot of money." Pineapple wants to go back and serve the children in her neighborhood. And that's true of five of the other kids in the book, as well, including one who didn't go to college but developed tremendous leadership skills on his own and is now back in the Bronx working with young people who had a tough time when they were children.
- The second factor, of course, is the quality of schooling the children receive. Critics of the book, like Wendy Kopp, have attacked you for not properly contextualizing to stories of these children within the broader scope of the educational reform movement of the last fifteen years or so, and have suggested that your arguments are outdated and unnecessarily pessimistic. How do you respond to this charge?
What I found infuriating was that she completely ignores the fact that 90 percent of the book has nothing to do with the education wars in which she's involved. It is written novelistically - most of the book is made up of the gripping stories that people tell me about real children, not abstractions. Wendy Kopp lives in the world of abstract policy. I live in the world of children who have itchy elbows. A teacher once told me, "You know, first graders are squirmy little people." My book is about those squirmy little people, and how they have forged a sense of contributive maturity as they've grown older.
I was very angry that she apparently didn't read the majority of the book. And also, I might say that her review is slyly deceptive. She went on for paragraph after paragraph saying all these wonderful things about me. Of course, when that happens, I'm thinking "Uh oh. There's a bomb about to be dropped." And at the end, she lambastes me for ignoring the entire privatizing movement with which she is intimately involved. I made clear in the book that I oppose that movement, but I didn't write about it because it wasn't of any interest to me. She is very closely involved with the whole agenda of getting tough on public school teachers with the most punitive methods of accountability, of measuring ever little thing a child learns with numbers, but ignoring that which can't be numbered.
And she's very close to what Diane Ravitch nicely calls the Billionaire Boys Club which would like nothing better than to dismantle the public education system altogether, or at least demoralize teachers to such an extent that the system itself will disintegrate. I think she's just upset that I fail to see this movement as a significant and positive trend in our society. I think it's very dangerous.
- Turning to current events, and the politics of the presidential election, I'm wondering what you make of the past four years? How would you rate the educational policy performance of the Obama administration, and the tenure of the Arne Duncan?
Let me start by saying that my criticism of Arne Duncan has been somewhat distorted by the press. What I said was that Arne Duncan has apparently accepted the fact of apartheid schooling in America and is trying very hard to create high-scoring separate-but-not-equal schools. One of Wendy Kopp's cohorts wrote something to the effect that I had accused him of creating segregated schools or something like that which missed the point entirely. It's not his fault that our country is so polarized and our schools are so segregated. All I was saying was that he doesn't pay attention to that issue.
President Obama's first term in office has been better for intentions than for actual changes in planning and policy. I do believe, and he has several things to this effect, that he would like to provide universal preschool or at least far more preschool for our children. He has made clear at intervals that he has doubts about this whole mania of teaching to the test, and he has periodically spoken respectfully of teachers, but his policies have not greatly changed the agenda of his predecessor, George Bush. President Obama still places far too much emphasis on relentless testing with standardized exams.
There are a number of things about his own signature piece of education policy, Race to the Top, that trouble me. One is that although it offers local districts waivers or exemptions from aspects of NCLB, it set up a number of rules whereby states that want to get a waiver have to put an even sharper sword over their teachers' heads - measuring their teaching ability by the test scores of the students which is the worst possible way understand the quality of a teacher. Any rigid, non-reflective but psychologically docile teacher can read from a test prep manual and pump the test scores by a couple of points, if that's the game.
But really great teachers, and there are an awful lot of them in New York City, I might add - wonderfully creative and interesting teachers - these sorts of teachers were not educated in that manner. They were educated in the full scenario of culture. They were educated in classrooms where there is exists a continuity between the individual items you study as opposed to classrooms where cognition is broken up into tiny little packages that can be numbered. This creates, in my mind, a balkanized form of learning. I hate it.
Race to the Top unfortunately encourages the perpetuation of that ethos. The second thing is the name itself - it is highly revelatory. "Race to the Top" suggests a reversion to the same idea that George Bush was advancing, essentially the idea that education is a race in which each school, each child, each teacher is in competition with one another. A race to the top suggests that inevitably a lot of schools will be left at the bottom. I regret that. I also happen to think that the jargon of public education is terribly important. Jargon is not neutral; it also contains a bias of some sort. And I think the very name, Race to the Top, implies the very opposite of what should constitute the aims of education.
The president, with his very fine intelligence, still believes, I think, that public education is a sacred legacy that should be preserved. That's where the great difference comes between the two candidates. Governor Romney, if he's successful, is likely to reduce school funding considerably further debilitating the public sector at a time when low-income districts everywhere are already cutting programs because of funding shortages. He has made it clear, or at least implied, would love a voucher system that represents the gradual dismantling of public education.
I also think he is likely to intensify the assault upon the dignity of teachers. That last part is the most disturbing of all. That is my reading of what is implicit in much of his talk, and his close alliance with major corporations who are donors to his campaign seems to me to increase the likelihood that he will encourage the invasion of public schools by the privatizing sector. Governor Romney has said nothing about preschool. I think that giving the poorest kids in America wonderful preschool, and three years of it, starting when they are two-and-a-half, is absolutely crucial.
If President Obama were ever to ask me how to close the race gap in this country, I would say "take all those billions of dollars that you are giving to the corporations and pour that money into ensuring three years of rich developmental preschool for very poor children, and put the rest into cutting class sizes in half at the elementary school level, and offering really strong, intelligent support to teachers instead of scaring the daylights out of them." That's what I'll tell him when he invites me to the White House.
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Washington DC/ OPINION: Middle School-The Worst Years of Our Lives
Everyone hates middle school. But this crucial, oft-ignored part of your children's education is getting a makeover.
By Joshua Glenn and Elizabeth Foy Larsen
Slate [online magazine of Washington Post]
October 26, 2012
Every morning, the sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-graders at Paul Cuffee Middle School in Providence, R.I. join together in what's called a Circle of Power and Respect. In this "CPR," they discuss anything from an upcoming science project to how to get boys to stop purposefully clogging the toilets. Last spring, when a beloved teacher left the school, one classroom used their CPR time to process the change. "He said he's leaving because this is good for his family," a seventh-grade boy reassured his classmates. "It doesn't have anything to do with us."
If this kind of frank, organized discussion of feelings sounds odd for middle schoolers, it is. But, experts say, if middle schools can give as much attention to emotions and values as they give to academics, the double focus pays off in surprising ways.
Unfortunately, when it comes to our national conversation about what makes great schools, middle schools (which can serve any configuration of grades five through nine) and junior highs (usually grades seven, eight, and nine) are often like the overlooked middle child. Elementary school is crucial, the reasoning goes, because its students learn basic skills and are introduced to the rigors and challenges of a school environment. As the gateway to either college or dropping out, high school is obviously high-stakes.
But there's another reason we don't look very closely at how we educate our tweens and young teens. "Adults don't like to look back on those years," says Deborah Kasak, the executive director of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform. We know what she means. Elizabeth is mortified to remember that she became a mean girl who egged on a friend to put glue in an unpopular classmate's hair. Josh was a prime target for bullies; he has sent his own sons to K-six and seven-12 schools, thus avoiding the middle school experience as much as possible.
Our reluctance to put serious thought into middle school can also be a reflection of our changing relationship with our own young teenagers. "We're sad that they're not cute anymore," says Robert Balfanz of the School of Education at Johns Hopkins. A friend of Elizabeth's put it more succinctly when he bemusedly referred to his eighth-grade son-whom, it should be noted, he loves dearly- as "a complete asshole."
Whatever the reason, Balfanz says that giving the middle grades short shrift is a serious mistake. "Middle School is when kids make a decision if school is for them or is something to be endured," he says. In fact, his research of high-poverty schools shows that a sixth-grader who either chronically skips school, fails math or English, or receives a poor final behavior grade has a 75 percent chance of dropping out of high school unless the school steps in to help. On the flip side, ninth-graders who don't get in trouble, have strong attendance, and at least a B average make up the ranks of our state university systems.
What makes a great middle school? The National Forum's Schools to Watch Initiative identifies four key traits: academic excellence; an awareness of and sensitivity toward the unique developmental needs of early adolescents; a shared vision; and they capitalize on early adolescents' obsession with fairness by being a trustworthy and democratic community where every student feels a connection to at least one adult in the building.
Paul Cuffee Middle School puts these recommendations into action with a program called Developmental Designs, a social and emotional framework that was created to help early adolescents monitor themselves and make wise decisions regardless of who's watching. At the start of every year, Paul Cuffee students come together to create and write the school's social contract, which is a set of guiding principles to keep the school safe and running smoothly.
Here's this year's version:
1. Respect the environment, yourself, and the community.
2. Cooperate: Teamwork makes the dream work.
3. Support each other even when the odds are against us.
4. Be yourself, do what you love, and try!
5. Be resilient: Fall 7 times, stand up 8.
When students do something-clogging a toilet, perhaps?-that falls outside these principles, middle school principal Nancy Cresser sits down with them and asks which one they think they've transgressed. "They know exactly which ones they've violated and they figure out how to fix it," she says. Instead of storming off or pouting about the unfairness of the rules, Cresser says that Paul Cuffee students are OK with being held accountable. They're the ones who created the rules, after all. So the students in question come up with a plan to fix what happened. The school encourages positive behavior by offering "chicken points" to any student who is caught doing a random act of kindness without the thought of being rewarded. The classroom with the most chicken points after a month or two gets a prize that they determine-throwing a pizza party or not having to wear their uniforms for a day.
While all this emphasis on students' feelings and responsibility might feel like yet another education gimmick, a growing number of experts agree that prioritizing middle schoolers' sometimes volatile and often mysterious emotional needs is at the heart of how we can best educate our 11- to 14-year-olds. A literature review published this year by The University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research finds that while middle schoolers are developmentally ready to do challenging work, they can't always do so unless schools also build up their sense of what they think is possible for themselves.
At Paul Cuffee, it works. In 2010, 70 percent of Paul Cuffee's middle school students-mostly from low-income families-were proficient in the New England Common Assessment System (NECAP) reading test. Fifty-nine percent of students were proficient in math. Across town on the wealthier east side near Brown University, the Nathan Bishop Middle School's scores were 42 percent proficiency in reading and 32 percent proficiency in math.
While a highly selective teacher hiring process, slightly longer school days, and Saturday classes for students who need extra help all play their part in this success, principal Nancy Cresser says that it's the social and emotional support that the school offers throughout the day that make the difference. "I don't think you can offer a high-level curriculum without making sure students feel safe," she says. "If you raise your hand and make a mistake, that's risky for a middle school kid."
Creating these kinds of schools can be a challenge, according to Balfanz, not only because very few teachers go into the profession wanting to specialize in middle school. Training for programs such as Developmental Designs that create a culture like the Paul Cuffee School is extensive and expensive and requires a school's entire staff to participate and change their attitude to truly believe that intrinsic motivation is more effective than extrinsic punishment-otherwise known as old school.
Experts say it's a shift worth making. "Middle school is a time that if used well can be rich and full of intellectual development," says Balfanz. "It should be better than just doing time until college."
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