News out of Chicago yesterday that will provide a great deal of data on a much debated topic in urban school reform: how effective, if at all, are efforts to transform schools by completely starting over in a school building with new teachers and new leadership? Chicago school officials, including Chief of Schools Arne Duncan, are proposing to fire the staffs of eight low-achieving schools and replace them altogether with new educators.

There is little evidence thus far to indicate whether such drastic steps will work. Even though sweeping school-wide restructuring including staff reconstitution is one of the proscribed punishments in the federal No Child Left Behind Act, few schools have yet produced enough student learning data to show whether the turn-arounds actually work.

Some experts who support the plan argue that the only way to bring about wholesale change in chronically under-performing school is to scrap existing cultures of failure and to replace them with new leaders, new teams of teachers, and fresh outlooks. Opponents of the plan point out that identifying and building these kinds of high quality, highly-motivated teaching teams is itself unlikely due to a sub-par urban education job market. Students are likely to get more of the same, but at a steep price in restructuring costs under the turn-around plans according to these detractors.

From my vantage point, I believe that the turning around these schools in such dramatic fashion can be an opportunity for great progress, but nothing is guaranteed. On-lookers are right to note that teacher and principal quality is the most important variable, and that if the newly hired teachers are no better than the old ones, reconstituting the staff will have been all form and little substance. With this in mind, many parents are right to point out that any existing teachers who are on staff and who have proven to increase student achievement on a consistent basis should be retained--there's no reason to throw out the good with the bad.

Let the experiences in my first-year charter school, however, serve as a caution. There is actually much to be learned about traditional public school turnarounds from the experience of newly opened charter schools, since both enterprises have similar opportunities for student benefits: newly hired teaching staff, new curriculum goals, new leadership, new culture. But all too many first year charter schools struggle out of the gate, and a large part of the reason why is that schools are frequently rushed to get ready for the start of the school year. If these Chicago schools slated for turnarounds are not able to attract the best and most dedicated staff, and if they are hurried in the hiring, planning, and preparation processes, I'm afraid that all of the trouble will have been for very little value.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 10:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A small policy change adopted today in Florida has the potential to unleash significant changes in early elementary classrooms and school budgets all across the country. Florida's state legislature today decided to approve FreeReading.Net, the nation's first open-source, free, and on-line textbook materials provider. The website's resources will be approved for a limited number of Florida students next year, as a supplemental reading program for grades K-3.

While it is a comparatively small development from the perspective of the number of students affected, the willingness of the state legislature to break free of a textbook publisher dominated system of classroom materials production signals possibly profound changes in the years to come. Experts estimate that schools spend between $5 billion and $8 billion a year on textbooks and materials, money which could be well-used in other instructional capacities such as teacher quality enhancement.

The challenges faced particularly by low-income urban and rural school districts in purchasing enough up-to-date textbooks is well chronicled in America. One South Carolina school built in the 1890s that was featured in the powerful movie, the Corridor of Shame, had textbooks which boasted that man might, at some point, even be able to fly to the moon. To be able to free up much needed resources for these schools to spend on teachers and capital enhancements instead of on textbooks could be very helpful. Moreover, the benefit of open-source texts is that they are continually renewing and improving, eliminating the need of buying updated editions of books.

The schools that could, in the future, benefit most from a switch to online, open-source texts are the new schools that are just being built and opened. For these schools, the initial capital investment needed to purchase books for students can be overwhemling. My school in St. Louis, for instance, had to purchase reading, writing, science, math, and social studies books for 300 students. At a cost of $150 per book (plus supplemental resources), the total price tag would have exceeded $200,000 dollars out of an annual school budget of less than $2 million in state funding. The school decided instead to purchase just a class set of each book, which has caused parent and student critiques of its own.

What are the possible weaknesses of a move towards open-source and online texts? Probably the major one is that it might exacerbate the existing digital divide between students who have the internet at home and those who do not. Between one quarter and one half of my students do not have internet access at home, so to ask all students to access their textbooks online would cause them some problems. This isn't a deal-breaker for the open source text as a whole, though--since it's no different than having only a class set of textbooks as we do now anyway. Another drawback would be one of a political nature -- textbook publishers are not likely to approve of the change since they are the big losers in the end. But let me offer a "visionary" idea to any textbook publishing execs out there: instead of fighting something that seems to be good for kids, why not use your existing knowledge and resource competitive advantage to transition your current and future materials to the web, and change your profit engine to online advertising??

Posted by Aaron Tang at 05:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By most accounts, there are seven major players left in this exciting presidential primary season who might conceivably win their party's nomination. Of the seven, not a single one has made a public statement in their campaign speeches, literature, or on their website in support of the No Child Left Behind Act, which provides federal funding to school districts in exchange for holding those schools accountable for student learning. While some have expressed cautious acknowledgement of certain elements of the law, the overarching theme from the candidates is that the law needs radical changes or even needs to be scrapped.

What makes all of this surprising is the fact that pro-NCLB statements and op-eds like this one, a joint piece from the National Urban League and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and this one, published by the US Chamber of Commerce are published all the time. If the candidates aren't trying to woo Latino voters, African-American voters, and the votes of big business, who exactly are they trying to persuade?

When Senator Obama chides that NCLB "left the money behind" and that "the law has failed"; when Senator Edwards promises to "radically overhaul" the law, and when Senator Clinton promises to "end the unfunded mandate known as No Child Left Behind," one must wonder what minority voters, businesses, and other pro-NCLB groups are thinking. Maybe voters just don't care about the education issue in this presidential election.

They're certainly not looking to the Republicans to defend the law that actually holds schools accountable when they fail to improve the achievement of low-income and minority students year-after-year, instead of just turning a blind eye as our nation did for the better part of two centuries. Governor Huckabee talks about the reclaiming power of states in education, undercutting the accountability measures of NCLB. Mayor Giuliani says he opposes NCLB because it doesn't give parents nearly enough choice (a convenient ideological position, but one which is entirely unsupportable when you talk to many of the parents at my school--one parent actually enrolled her child in the wrong grade level at the start of the school year). Only Governor Romney and Senator McCain have offered responses that seem closer to support for the law, though they both criticize it (Romney on the states rights front, McCain on a more general it-needs-tweaking front, which is probably most accurate).

It remains to be seen, of course, which two candidates will emerge out of the primary process and whether their positions on NCLB will be changed by the time the general election comes around. Several of the candidates such as Obama, for instance, have avoided putting up detailed plans on educations on their campaign websites so far, possibly to avoid the pitfalls of being on record too soon. But the politicking can only last so long before parents, educators, and other concerned citizens must demand honest answers about how to move forward with the law, and not just clever sound bites.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 05:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The federal government has failed to provide states with clear enough notice as to who must pay for the costs of complying with the No Child Left Behind Act, or so says the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled Monday against the Bush Administration and the law which has caused much debate since its inception in 2002.

At stake in the lawsuit, which was filed by a collection of local school districts and teachers unions and which is being paid for the by the nation's largest teachers union, is a serious issue: whether states must comply with a law that some have charged to be an underfunded mandate. To be sure, NCLB does require states to test their students annually in core subjects to determine whether they are making sufficient progress. These tests and the costs of design and administration have been a burden on states and districts, but it has been a burden towards an important goal according to one of the bipartisan law's co-authors, MA senator Ted Kennedy.

Kennedy wrote in a Washington Post editorial defense of NCLB that the law has certainly had weaknesses that need to be corrected. But it also has many important positive impacts as well:
"On the plus side, the law demands that all children must benefit -- black or white, immigrant or native-born, rich or poor, disabled or not. Before its enactment, only a handful of states monitored the achievement of every group of students in their schools. Today, all 50 states must do that... All schools now measure performance based not on the achievement of their average and above-average students but on their progress in helping below-average students reach high standards as well."

From my vantage point, the debate over NCLB is likely to see two stages over the next year and a half. The first stage will be set by the presidential election, which, unfortunately, will probably squander any real dialogue about needed improvements and changes. Democrats and Republicans alike have been guilty of using NCLB as a political football on the campaign trail, making sweeping statements against the law in its entirety rather than getting specific as to what has been effective and what needs changing. Until the election is over, real discourse over the big questions on the use of value added measurements of student progress, teacher quality improvement, and the possibility of national standards will not take place. But they will almost assuredly be a very early conversation in the new president's administration, which will be stage two of the debate.

It is a debate that could not be more important, or urgent. A report released a couple years ago but that I just came across underscores the urgency: the expulsion rate of preschoolers across America is so high that it is actually three times higher expulsion rates for K-12 students!

Posted by Aaron Tang at 06:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The New Year gets off to a fast start with the Iowa Caucus on January 3rd and the New Hampshire primary just 5 days later. As I've been discussing with my 8th graders, these first 8 days of the year will offer a strong hint as to who might be our next President of the United States.

What could the new year and all of the election cycle buzz bring for our students from an education policy perspective? There is room for hope on one front, as a major news media source gave significant attention to the efforts of some very brave and committed students in Los Angeles who continue to fight an uphill battle to ensure that LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa listens to their voices as he works to bring reform to their schools.

As you'll see in the article, though, the Mayor appears to be treating the student organizations--who are campaigning for some pretty common-sense improvements like finding permanent teachers rather than long-term substitutes for math and science classrooms, better staffed guidance offices, and more college counselors--with a grain of salt. At one point during a recent evening meeting with the mayor and over 700 community members, a student asked the mayor whether his high school diploma would have any value given the lack of rigor or college track classes in his school. The mayor dodged the students question and instead replied, "Look at this young man. He's in a suit. He's ready. He's intelligent. This is what we want in our school. . . . A diploma should signify that you're prepared." Just like it is with national student organizing, it sounds like it will take more numbers, more visible approaches, and more pressure before the LA students have the voice they deserve in local reform discussions.

On a second front, it looks as though there might not be too much progress for serious education policy discussions at least during the contentious early primary season. While both Senators Clinton and Obama signalled an open-mindedness towards controversial reforms like paying teachers on a merit basis several months ago, they've all steered clear of possible negative buzz lately. One thing that is grabbing headlines is that GOP candidate Mike Huckabee, who leads polls in Iowa as of the day before the caucus, appears to be as supportive (or "submissive to"), if not more supportive of the teachers unions than perhaps any other candidate--including all of the democrats! See for yourself if you think this diagnosis is accurate based on a speech he gave to the NEA this past summer. The fact that he even appeared at the NEA convention has been seen as anathema to some die-hard conservatives, some of whom object to the idea of a US Department of Education--let alone a strong role for unions in what they view as a local issue:

Posted by Aaron Tang at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)