Alright, I'll admit it, I'm a geek. I love playing with numbers, watching patterns develop, seeing if data can help us predict the future in everything from baseball to student achievement. I'm also as much a fan of new technology as the next person, so when you give me a new toy that blends numbers, imagery, and cool tech, well I'm pretty much in heaven.

So all of this makes Colorado's amazing new toy something that I've grown a bit addicted to in the last few hours. What is the toy, you ask? Click the link and have a see for yourself (but don't worry, I'll give some more info as well). If you've decided to click on the link, don't worry about watching either the introduction or tutorial video, instead click "select by name" and start playing right away by clicking on different cities and seeing how the schools there stack up.

If you'd rather just read what this whole thing is about, I'll start here: the toy is called the "Colorado Growth Model Public View" and it's pretty much the most important public data system concerning school quality that's every been released. Here's the long and short of what it does:

1.) First, it does something run-of-the-mill that plenty of other public data sets on school quality do (such as greatschools.net, schoolmatters.com and others): it tells you how well a given school's students do on standardized tests. Take Trailblazer Elementary School in Colorado Springs, for example. Of the 328 students enrolled in the school, 82% of the students are proficient or better on the math portion of Colorado's Student Assessment Program. Pretty good, right? Compare that to Bruce Randolph High School in Denver, where of the 680 students, only a paltry 5% were at or above proficient in math. Not as good a school, right? If all you had was some of these other websites or the data available in any other state, you'd quickly draw the conclusion that Trailblazer must be a good school and Bruce Randolph must be a bad one. But not so fast...

2.) The second thing Colorado's Growth Model does is show something that no other public website shows: how much a given school's students have actually learned over time. Here, suddenly Trailblazer Elementary School doesn't look so good: it's only in the 24th percentile of student growth, meaning that three out of every four schools in the state are improving their students' learning ability more than Trailblazer! Turns out the parents who are excited to be sending their kids there are getting a bum deal: their kids may start out at a high achievement level but they'll regress towards an average level by the time they finish elementary school--or worse. And what about Randolph High School? Turns out it is in the 70th percentile for improving student achievement, meaning that it may be getting a bunch of students who start out below grade level in the 9th grade but the school seems to be doing a pretty darn good job at bringing those students up to speed.

So what kind of school did you go to? Unless you grew up in Colorado, it may be some time before you find out for sure. But ask yourself two questions:
1.) Did most of the students at my school have a good chance at passing the standardized tests?
2.) Did most of the students learn a lot every year, regardless of whether they would pass the tests or not?

You might think the two questions are asking the same thing, but they're not. The first question often gets to background characteristics of the kinds of students attending a school and not the school itself--in other words, even a pretty crumby school would have a hard time taking Bill Gates's 9 year old daughter and educating her so poorly that she would fail the 3rd grade math proficiency test. But the second question is arguably more important: how much are the students learning each year? A school in a tough neighborhood may be teaching a lot to its students without much success on the first question (i.e. Bruce Randolph School), and a school in a great neighborhood might be failing its students by failing to push them to do much more than be proficient.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, Bruce Randolph School was found to be such a miracle case that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan visited it earlier in April to tout the power and potential of school reform. Quite simply, the numbers don't lie.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 09:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Three quick-hits from the world of education reform that share a common theme:

1.) Cuts in President Obama's proposed 2010 budget
Fresh off a $100 billion victory in the form of increased federal school spending in the stimulus package, some school reformers are now upset that the President has proposed to eliminate eleven "ineffective" programs altogether from the department of education's portfolio and reduce or re-fashion several other programs.

Although the department of education's overall outlays would increase $1.3 billion, or 2.8 percent, to a new total of $46.7 billion (not including the stimulus spending), some advocates had been hoping for a larger increase. Included in the programs to be cut are: the $295 million Safe and Drug-Free Schools State Grants; $133 million in abstinence education; $66 million in college access challenge grants, and others such as a $7.5 million gifted and talented program, $33.5 character education program, and more (full list here). Most of the programs were cut after internal review found the programs to lack evidentiary support of their effectiveness, and the abstinence education program was replaced with a teenage pregnancy prevention program.

The bottom line? Overall good news in the next two years for school spending advocates, but not every school-related program survived the Obama team's scalpel.

2.) Three out of four aspiring elementary school teachers in Massachusetts failed the math section of the state's licensing exam
The headline here may be that 73% of new elementary school teacher candidates in Massachusetts can't do math, and that our teaching force is woefully inadequate. There will be inevitable back-fire from teachers unions and the like saying that the tests are inaccurate, that you can't judge how good a teacher is based on a math exam, and so on. But to me, the real headline is that Massachusetts is doing something important: shining a light on the teaching profession in a public way. Now, I'm not sure that this is the kind of data that drives a straight line to student achievement (it would be better to have public data on how much each teacher's students learned in any given year) but maybe it's a start.

3.) LA Students threaten a walk-out
350 students walked out of a pair of Los Angeles High Schools to protest imminent school spending cuts in LAUSD yesterday, and more walk-outs are threatened for today.

The students are apparently upset that as many as 2,500 teachers may be fired as a result of California's woeful budget crisis. As much as I am a staunch supporter of student activism, my question for the students is a simple one. If you, the students, had the power to control which teachers should be kept and which should be let go, could you identify those teachers who you don't think are doing a good job teaching you and who don't care about your academic progress? It certainly can't be the case that every LA teacher is an excellent one, and it certainly can't be the case that these students are saying so (in fact, the arguably more common student protest is not a protest to save a certain teacher from administrative action, but rather protests to encourage administration to do something about a persistently negligent teacher).

So if this assumption is correct--that the students could identify a number of teachers at each school who they would let go if they had the power--then the real problem that the students are protesting here is either: 1.) any budget cuts to schools whatsoever (which may be valid from a priority standpoint, but not when you look at the state's books), or 2.) the fact that the LAUSD powers -that-be and their teacher union counterparts will invariably agree to fire not the 2,500 worst teachers, but the 2,500 least tenured ones. That, as the students are arguing, would be a tragedy, but it's a tragedy better served by a protest sign reading, "Fire Mr. X because he just shows movies all year, not Mrs. Y who is a great first-year teacher" than a sign reading "Save Our Teachers." I've worked in a crumby public school before (in St. Louis), and the reality is sad but simple: not all our teachers deserve saving.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

LA Superior Court Judge James Chalfant handed down a decisive victory yesterday for Los Angeles Unified School District officials in the form of a court order enjoining LA's public school teachers from going on strike this Friday. The strike had been approved late last month by a majority of the members of the United Teachers of Los Angeles as a protest to massive cuts proposed in the city's 2009-2010 education budget which would have involved the termination of some 3,000 teachers.

Union leaders were predictably outraged by the decision, and there is some discussion of teachers defying the court order or at least engaging in civil disobedience before and after school hours. But neither a strike nor the court order preventing the strike will resolve the deep-rooted challenges that the economic crisis and years of inaction have brought about for the roughly 700,000 students in the district.

To begin with, the anger felt by LA's teachers is surely valid in that education is too-often a budget item of early resort chosen by cities and states when they have to slash spending, an item that is far more important than numerous other pet projects that somehow get saved from the chopping block. What is more, long-standing problems with financial mismanagement and decision-making at the district level that puts politics above student learning are still problematic (see this wiki link for an example), and it's easy to sympathize with teachers who are at risk of losing their jobs because of an economic crisis that was more the fault of Wall Street Tycoons than the fault of public school employees.

The thing is, just as a court order requiring business to resume as usual in LA's schools will do little to improve student learning opportunities, neither will a strike do much to address the underlying problems in LA's schools. The sad reality of an economic downturn is that reduced consumer spending leads to reduced tax receipts, and reduced tax receipts must be accompanied by reduced spending--either in the form of cuts we choose ex ante or cuts we can't choose when things get too late. And teachers unions shouldn't forget that they can be a part of the solution too: one alternative to seeing thousands of teachers laid off is to voluntarily reduce scheduled wage increases (perhaps teachers could negotiate wage freezes in exchange for increased autonomy from school district policies), and to cut some 160 teachers who are being paid $10 million a year to do absolutely nothing of educational value whatsoever.

But put yourself in Judge Chalfant's shoes for a moment. How would you have ruled on LAUSD's request to block the teachers from going on strike this Friday? As important as labor unions and the right to organize have been vital to our nation's progress over the past decades, is there a point at which the interests of school-children in an education free of disruption should trump that right to strike? What of the fact that the teachers unions explicitly agreed in their latest labor contract that they wouldn't go on strike? And what of the fact that a strike would have disrupted high school students taking AP tests and other classroom instruction?

The politics of teachers unions is complicated indeed, for it forces progressives to confront a conflict between two core principles: the right of workers to organize, and the rights of children to a quality education insofar as what is best for teachers unions is not always what is best for students. The decision yesterday in Los Angeles simply serves to highlight that tension in an increasingly uncomfortable way given the present day economic outlook. So if you were wearing the judge's robes and holding the gavel in that LA Superior court room at the end of the day, how would you have ruled?

Posted by Aaron Tang at 06:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Q#12) Which comes closer to your view?

A) The more students taking AP courses the better--even when they do poorly in the course, they benefit from the challenge and experience
B) Only students who can handle the material should take AP courses--otherwise it’s not fair to them, their classmates, their teachers, and the quality of the program.

<Question asked of 1,024 teachers on a recently published study from the Fordham Institute>

I'm always surprised about how people come down on this question. For every Jay Mathews out there, the Washington Post education reporter who writes feverishly in support of opening up access to AP courses for all high school students who are interested in them, regardless of their prior academic track record, there are many more who think that access to Advanced Placement classes should be a privilege reserved to the few students who have earned it.

The controversy exists for good reason. Almost everyone who's been to high school is familiar with the AP program (or its counterpart, the International Baccalaureate program), and more than 1.6 million high school students participated in 2007-2008--a sixty percent growth from just five years earlier. There's little question that the program is a net positive: it adds a much-needed dimension of academic rigor to high school curricula, offers rewards of college credit (and higher grade point averages in schools weighing AP classes on a 4.5 or 5.0 scale) to the students who participate, motivates many veteran teachers to hone their craft, and generally increases the outputs of our K-12 public school system.

The question is just who is the program supposed to benefit? The answer will differ depending on who you ask, but let's start with one pertinent stakeholder group: teachers themselves. 52% of the teachers who were asked the question above on Fordham's survey agreed with statement B compared to 38% who chose statement A. To drive things home further, 63% of teachers surveyed indicated that it would improve the AP program to screen students more heavily at the outset, limiting access to only those who are ready to do the work.

Do you agree with that viewpoint? One high school student who I've worked closely with over the past few years,who has taken numerous AP classes herself, and who I respect deeply, does agree with the majority of the teachers surveyed. As she explains it, opening up AP classes to just any student would water down the rigor of the program, make it hard on teachers, and do little justice to the students who are under-prepared.

My own view is quite different. I don't see 15 year-olds as static, take-them-as-they-come finished products. When a sophomore who has gotten C's and D's in her classes decides she wants to challenge herself and take AP classes in her junior year, I'm willing to give her a shot--although I, as some others have suggested, would require her along with any other student who wants to take AP or IB classes to sign a contract promising to do the required several hours of added homework per week. Kids change, and academic achievement is at least as much a product of hard work and effort as it is a function of the grades you got the year before.

To tell a student, either directly or passively through signaling mechanisms like honors track classes starting in middle school, that they aren't fit for AP-level classes is, in my opinion, only a few steps removed in logic from charging poll taxes to vote. You can articulate sensible reasons in support of both--both poll taxes and exclusive AP screening increase buy-in from participants, ensuring that those who participate do so thoughtfully--but in the end those reasons are trumped by much more important social goals: democratic solidarity and political and social equality.

So in the end, it comes down to what our priority for the AP program is. Is it to create an elite (and elitist) cadre of students who are thoroughly ready for college, a program that is a reward for young people who have already demonstrated success and a program will be measured by how successful each of its participants are? If so, your answer to question #12 on the survey is B. But if your goal is broader, to encourage college readiness among young people even if they haven't earned the opportunity through their prior work and even if it means that the best-of-the-best will share on their college applications something in common with the less "accomplished" students, bubble in the circle next to letter A.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)