Imagine going to a high school where it is actually unusual for students to graduate and get a diploma. A school where students who enter the ninth grade expect to see fewer than 60% of their classmates still attending in three years. A school where has changed over the past few decades.

What you are imagining now has a new name: a high school dropout factory, a term created by Johns Hopkins professor Bob Balfanz. And more than one out of every ten high schools in the country is a dropout factory, or about 1,700 schools that are most heavily concentrated in high poverty rural and large urban areas.

Why are there so many schools that produce so many dropouts? Part of the problem may have to do with a culture of low expectations in the areas where the dropout factories are most common. Said Jim Foster, a spokesperson for the South Carolina department of education, “Part of the problem we’ve had here is, we live in a state that culturally and traditionally has not valued a high school education.”

Another part of the problem has to do with state and federal education laws, which have mostly focused on elementary and middle grades, and not as much at the high school level. For instance, the No Child Left Behind Act requires testing to measure student progress in every grade from 3-8, but only once in the entirety of high school. Recent proposals in the Congress have been made to increase accountability at the high school level, including tightening up the ways that schools can measure graduation rates as part of their annual yearly progress.

And frankly, a major part of the problem is that the students in these schools simply aren't being inspired to continue on in their education. I recently asked my students to do a homework assignment where they were to interview a person they knew who had dropped out of high school to see how that person felt about the decision years later. Almost universally every interviewee testified that it was a mistake to dropout. Many said they dropped out in the first place because they just found school to be irrelevant to thier lives, they were ready to work and make money, or because they had their own children while in school.

But how do we make school seem more important, more relevant, more necessary to these students? Many of their parents have never finished high school either, much less gone to college, and therefore have little experience from which to push their children to do the same. If parents, older siblings, and community members aren't pushing children towards high school diplomas, it seems like the answer to fixing dropout factories has to be from within the factories themselves. And the only silver bullet answer I can see is to make schools more inspiring places where students are interested in learning. Engaging curriculum, more hands on learning, more classes on relevant subjects (perhaps vocational courses such as fashion design, etc.) - all of these things sound great in theory. But in the end I think the greatest motivator to get a child to school is a compelling teacher in every classroom.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 08:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a New York minute, everything can change
In a New York minute, things get pretty strange

Recorded in 1989 by the lead singer of the Eagles, Don Henley, these words have new meaning 18 years later as new details are unveiled about the big apple's pay-for-performance bonus plan for teachers.

I first wrote about the plan and its announcement last week in generally positive terms, as few details had been released about it at the time. But the NY Times came through with this article on Thursday and this article Friday, with each write-up shedding new light on the plan, its details, its potential impact on students.

The first thing to observe is that those reformers looking for an inevitable sea change in the inner-city teacher labor market are bound for disappointment. The size of the bonuses that will be handed out in the 200 voluntarily participating schools will average out at $3,000, with individual bonuses unlikely to exceed five figures for even the most outstanding individual performers. The reason for this is that the plan gives in heavily to the teachers unions, which sought to create a bonus system that awards collaborative teaching and school-wide success as opposed to individual excellence. As such, individual compensation committees (in which half the members will be teachers) at the school will choose to divide up the money as they see fit--either evenly among the whole school, or giving slightly more to higher performers. My guess is that the vast majority of these committees decide to give most teachers in their school a very similar sized bonus. As human beings we don't like stepping on toes (especially when money is involved), and a people-based decision system for doling out the bonuses is likely to prize workplace morale over any real notion of meritocracy.

As a teacher, I have seen first-hand how important it is to recognize the collaborative element to teaching. If one member of my 8th grade teaching team fails to carry his weight, the rest of the team does suffer to a degree. So a second observation is that if an entire team of teachers stands to gain or lose a bonus because of the one struggling teacher, perhaps this reform may encourage teachers to turn on their less-than-stellar colleagues. In a field where too many of us are less than adequate at our jobs, this may be a good thing after all.

But the bottom line is this: if we want to use teacher pay as a way to encourage more and better teachers to relocate to the schools serving children in greatest need, a $3,000 bonus is unlikely to inspire a dramatic shift. My 11th grade English teacher once mentioned to me that "when you praise all, you praise none." Giving all of the teachers in a low-performing inner-city school a small bonus may get them to work harder... or it may just pay them more for doing the same work. But this much is for sure: until it pays the top 5% or 3% of the city's teachers a sizable amount more--on the order of five figures--New York's reform won't be powerful enough to change everything in a minute.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 06:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Two potentially ground-breaking changes took place on the teacher quality front this week in two of America's most maligned public school systems: New York and Washington, DC. It would have been nice if both had taken place together in the same city, since the two reforms could function together as book ends to dramatically improve student achievement in urban school settings. But school reformers have nonetheless heaped praise on both ideas as they have been released.

The first change was announced yesterday in New York City, by a united front of Mayor Bloomberg, New York CIty Chancellor of Schools Joel Klein, and United Federation of Teachers head Randi Weingarten. Starting next year, as many as 200 schools will be eligible to receive privately financed bonuses that would be divided up among the schools' most outstanding teachers by individual committees created at each school. The decisions must be based on student performance (and not on teacher seniority, as existing union contracts do), and the size of the bonuses available may be as much as $3,000 per teacher.

The fact that the city's leaders and the teachers unions could come together on this idea--which has long been considered anathema to the two million-plus member teacher unions in America--is a major development in the union / school dynamic. A major reason why the teachers are ok with this particular bonus program is that all of the money is new money raised from private philanthropic and business sources. In other words, there are only teachers who win -- no teacher will lose money when it is discovered that she or he is not raising student achievement. Another positive aspect of this law is the voluntary element--schools can choose whether or not the free bonuses are preferable (although it is absolutely shocking to me that some school 's employees might decide that they don't want more money for doing the same job!).

The second change, which may represent the other book end to the teacher quality problem in my estimation, was suggested (though not finalized) in Washington DC earlier this week. There, Mayor Adrian Fenty and new DC Schools Chief Michelle Rhee announced that they would be seeking increased authority to fire low-performing teachers. The current process in DC allows a teacher to be fired after a 90-day review period, which some have suggested takes too long. However, it should be noted that some districts have even more onerous processes than DC's.

The teacher firing process has come under much scrutiny lately, since it would seem that there may be other factors at play than the Unions' protection of all employees (including the lousy teachers). For instance, often times principals are unwilling to make difficult decisions like firing people, or they may decide that the alternative to firing a teacher is no better since there is hardly a surplus of high quality replacements waiting on the sidelines. In my school here in Saint Louis, there is at least one teacher whose incompetence is so far into the unacceptable territory that our principal is virtually negligent in not firing him... except that the alternatives aren't much better: a permanent substitute teacher, a rotating system of subs, or a prayer that there is a good teacher out there who is willing to apply for the job. That said, the idea of more administrative discretion over teacher tenure is critically important in a profession where quality has been trumped by seniority.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 05:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It doesn't happen often, but the US Supreme Court issued a split 4-4 decision today in a case that had the potential to require public school districts to pay private school tuition for special education students the districts are unable to educate on their own. The split decision means that no national precedent is set, and the lower-court decision in New York stands.

The Court's indecision highlights an issue of growing importance in education circles: the responsiblity of public schools to educate all children. From personal experience, I can definitely testify that schools often times struggle to integrate special education services with general education. In our school, I would estimate that no fewer than 25% of our students ought to have IEP's, or Individualized Educational Programs, the federally required school response for a student with an educational or behavioral disability. However, only a handful of these students actually have an IEP, which means that the rest of them are not being served as well as they deserve. Instead of one-on-one instruction with a special education teacher, these students are being grouped in with classmates with much different ability levels--often times to the detriment of both groups.

Why do so many students not have the IEP's they need? One reason is that the process of evaluating students is very onerous. It can take as long as one year to figure out whether a child has a learning disability. Moreover, once a student gets an IEP it is the responsibity of the parent and the school to ensure that future teachers and schools have access to it--something that just hasn't happened in our school. There are also lots of perverse incentives for schools to put off evaluating students: the district has to foot the bill for all evaluation and resulting educating costs. Since special education students require lower student-teacher ratios, the impact of an evaluation finding a student with a severe learning disability can affect a school district's budget for years.

All of this points to some interesting questions about how NCLB and future iterations of the Individuals with Disabilites in Education Act will treat special ed and what level of government is financially responsible. One major source of debate is whether special education students should be included in evaluating a school as meeitng annual yearly progress under NCLB (or whether they should be expected to take the same kind of assessments). Many school officials argue that this is unfair to the school since special ed students typically make up only a small percentage of a school population. But special education advocates point out that if you take special ed students out of the accountability metrics the natural result will be an even worse under-servicing of these students.

The 4-4 New York case leaves even more ambiguity into the question of who is responsible when a school is not serving its special education students well enough. The lower court ruled that the school must indeed reimburse a parent for private school tuition if the school fails to educate the child itself. Now states will continue to have to make this decision on their own, without guidance from the federal court.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 07:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bob Herbert's latest NY Times op-ed lays out a compelling case for why the results of an impending showdown between the NEA and it's traditional democratic-party constituency are so important. In his article, Herbert discusses the sheer magnitude of the problem facing America's schools--a problem that one or two points worth of reading and math gains may not be sufficient to solve.

What is Herbert's case? It's a classic "incremental gains are not enough" argument. Even though student achievement in math and reading does appear to be on the rise according to recently released NAEP scores, Herbert suggests that the challenges of the 21st century, in which people will almost require a four-year college degree to sustain a middle-class standard of living, are so big that we must re-invent our schools if we want to prepare children to succeed. It's not a new argument (in fact, social commentators have likely made the same claim in every generation dating back to the 19th century), but that doesn't mean it is false. Indeed, as the pace of technological advancement quickens and other nations develop highly skilled workforces, there can be little doubt that our children will need to be smarter than we are if they want to keep up.

So what is the major solution that Herbert offers? The same idea we've talked about countless times in this space: improving teacher quality. As reseach evidence and all manner of conventional wisdom can confirm, good teachers can bring about some incredible student learning gains... just as bad teachers can have frighteningly negative effects on learning. An often-cited Tennessee study found that the difference between an elementary student who had three years in a row with an excellent teacher versus three years in a row with a poor teacher was as much as 50 percentile points!

All of which makes the inevitable showdown between the National Education Association, the country's most powerful teachers union, and a bevy of US legislators--all of them democrats--extremely important. As Education Week's David Hoff reports, the NEA is ready to call a number of proposed teacher quality reform ideas in NCLB v2.0 "deal-breakers". Many Democrats, including the chairman of the Education Committee in the House, George Milller, are ready to fight back against the NEA on this issue--and they're getting backup from prominent progressive think tanks like the Center for American Progress. Will the Dems buckle and continue to let teacher quality (and student learning) be trumped by teacher special interests? Only time will tell...

Posted by Aaron Tang at 07:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)