News from Portland last week about the growth of the High School for Recording Arts network: the network, which started with a high school in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1996 and has since established schools in New York and Los Angeles (in 2007), has just been recommended for school board approval to open a new school in Portland, OR.

The basic mission behind the schools is to provide students with a learning experience that is applicable to their lives and that engages them in close relationships with faculty--with the end goal of preparing students to enter college or professional careers.

But the question is, do the so-called Hip Hop High Schools successfully accomplish this mission and help their students succeed in the work force, college, and life beyond high school?

The promo videos about the school paint a picture of an informal learning community centered on project-based learning instead of standard textbook type assignments, with music and hip hop at the core. No doubt the appeal of this approach is to attract students who might otherwise not find anything in school worth sticking around for, and to engage them in some form of educational enterprise--which surely must be better than dropping out.

It's a point of contention among educators whether this goal--just to keep kids in school at all--is important enough to justify curricular approaches that don't emphasize science, math, and reading as much as traditional schools.

There are respected educators who would argue that the bigger problem in middle and high school education these days is not how to keep those students engaged, but rather how to provide them with the cultural literacy and foundational academic preparation in core subject matters so that they can succeed in higher education and beyond.

From this perspective, a hip hop high school may be little better than allowing students to stay at home and watch MTV and BET if there is little formal academic education taking place. And it's questionable whether such education is occurring: in Minnesota's High School for Recording Arts (HSRA), only 24% of 10th graders passed the state's reading proficiency test and only 13% of 11th graders passed the state's math test.

But HSRA proponents would be right to respond that these figures are not measurably worse than comparable traditional high schools that supposedly adopt an academic mission--like nearby Humboldt High School, a comprehensive school that serves similar proportions of low-income students and students of color. At Humboldt, only 25% of 10th graders passed Minnesota's reading test in 2008, and only 7% of 11th graders passed the math test.

In other words, if Humboldt is the baseline for the kind of education St. Paul kids are getting, and HSRA isn't doing much worse, isn't it worthwhile that HSRA provides an option to area students that they can get excited about? These students may not end up going to college in droves, but that's true of Humboldt anyhow.

Bottom line, if HSRA inspires students to stay in school and earn a diploma at rates higher than counterpart schools, there has to be some value in that. Time will tell if the Hip Hop schools in New York, Los Angeles, and soon to be Portland do any better or worse.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 09:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Between 2005 and 2006, only 39% of African-American individuals who sought to teach in Massachusetts Public Schools passed the Communication and Literacy Skills portion of the state's test for educator licensing. In the same time period, the passage rate was 75.6% for white teacher candidates.

Gut-check: should that be grounds for a lawsuit?

What if I told you that three minority teachers--two African American and one Latino--who sued the state over the test under various discrimination laws, were fired in 2006 because they could not pass the test, which state law required all teachers to pass in order teach?

What if I told you those three teachers had been teaching in Boston public schools for several years prior to 2006, and that they had gotten satisfactory performance reviews from their principals?

And what if I added the fact that 76% of Boston's students are Black or Latino, but 62% of their teachers are white?

All of it sounds like a ripe set of facts for lawyers to jump into the fray, but for a variety of reasons, some technical and some grounded in well-settled legal principles, the minority teachers lost their lawsuit this past week (full opinion from the presiding judge here).

In short, the court found that there was no alleged evidence of the kind of intentional discrimination needed to justify some of the teachers' claims, and that the teachers waited too long to file their other kinds of claims through which evidence of the test's disparate racial impact might have been enough to prevail.

All of which goes to show the limitations of lawsuits and the judicial system in rectifying serious public policy concerns. The important news for folks who are concerned with the problem of under-represented minorities in the teaching force and it's downstream effects on minority students is that nothing about the legal outcome forecloses the possibility of policy change to bring more minorities into classrooms.

The bad news is, the policy path is a precarious one indeed. One the one hand, policy makers interested in hiring more African American and Latino teachers in Boston and similarly situated Massachusetts cities may have to lower the proficiency levels required on the Massachusetts Test for Educator Licensing in order to accomplish their goals. On the other hand, reducing our expectations for what teachers should know before being eligible into the classroom doesn't sound all that appetizing either.

The best solution, it would seem, would be to get rid of the teacher test as an all-or-nothing gate-keeping device into the teaching profession. To be sure, parents and the public should have access to information on how well educated classroom teachers are, but shouldn't we be willing to let anyone teach if they inspire students to learn, if they foster a safe learning environment, etc.?

In other words, this is a case where relying on inputs like teacher tests doesn't only prevent minorities from entering the profession--it keeps policy makers and principals from focusing on what is most important: how much students learn from a given teacher.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 01:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“Many out there will be surprised to learn these proposals come from teacher unions, which are not afraid to take risks and share the responsibility for student success.”
- AFT President Randi Weingarten.

Count me among the surprised. This Newsweek article caught the story right at its outset, and laid out the basic--and stunning--lede:

Not only is the AFT, the nation's second largest teachers union, apparently dropping its long-standing opposition to compensation systems that would reward teachers who actually help their students learn, the union is affirmatively incentivizing its local affiliates to develop pay-for-performance plans through a $3.3. million innovation fund.

Count me among the new cheerleaders for the AFT, as this announcement marks, by my count, a third bold move on the part of unions in the right direction (move #1 here and #2 here).

This latest bold move comes as an analog to President Obama's already much publicized "Race To The Top Fund" to reward states that are innovating in terms of improving student achievement. One of the major criterion for fund eligibility is that states allow a linkage between student achievement data and teacher compensation. At the time, the unions opposed the idea.

No news yet on whether the AFT's innovation fund marks a shift in policy on the RTTT Fund's criteria, but either way $3.3. million to fund local union affiliate performance pay systems is nothing to sneer at. Who knows if it is the unions trying to rehab their image or if it is basic real politic: change is a-coming and perhaps Ms. Weingarten sees that it's better to be a part of the reform than to be on the outside looking in.

The upshot for kids is, eight school districts will now be taught by teachers who work under local union structures that are experimenting with new teacher evaluation systems, teacher pay systems, and other innovative ideas. It remains to be seen how effective any of the plans are, but at minimum we're seeing just more evidence of a shifting political consensus on what used to be a taboo concept: that teachers get paid based on how much students learn.

It's a promising development that could have profound implications for the human capital pipeline in teaching (i.e., would you be more interested in starting a career in teaching if you could make $60,000 in year three because your kids are learning a lot, or $40,000 regardless of whether they're learning anything at all?)... Eyes turn now towards the NEA, the largest teachers union in the country, to see if they'll come up with a similar innovation fund.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 06:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Debates about integration and diversity in American schools have evolved a great deal since the early 1950s when it was still legal to segregate schools by race. In the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, school districts instituted a variety of measures to integrate schools racially: forced busing across towns, the creation of magnet schools to draw children voluntarily into different schools, and redrawn district lines to name a few.

As close observers of the interplay between race and public education know, the trends towards increased diversity and integration of American public schools came to a halt in the 1980s, and school segregation is again on the rise. This time, of course, segregation is not by law but rather by the natural private ordering of things where white families have tended to leave city environments leaving behind high concentrations of minorities.

Just two years ago, the US Supreme Court struck down effors by two cities, Seattle and Louisville, to stem the rising tide of segregation in their school districts by taking race into consideration in assigning children to schools.

Which brings us today, where election results in Wake County, North Carolina mark yet another slide for proponents of diversity in schools. Ever since 2000, Wake County Schools have been a bell-weather district for the use of socioeconomic status instead of race in assigning children to school. The wealth-based school assignment system is aimed at ensuring that low-income students have access to the same kinds of schools and school resources as their wealthier counterparts by actually placing them in those schools.

Has it worked? A recent report produced by SAS, a leading research company engaged in value-added analysis of school achievement data, seems to indicate that it hasn't. (The full report is described and linked to in sub-sections here). The report found that the higher the concentration of low-income students in a Wake County school, the poorer the school performed in terms of assisting students in making academic progress.

And the report, for better or for worse, was a driving force in Tuesday's school board election results, which witnessed the election of four anti-SES assignment candidates to the board, with one candidate declaring, "forced busing is dead." With a majority of seats now in hand, the opponents of Wake's current diversity plan will push instead to return children to their neighborhood schools, without regard for the racial makeup of those schools.

So that brings us to the ultimate question. If you were designing a school district from scratch, knowing the reality in virtually all large population centers today that affluent, white citizens tend to concentrate in certain areas leaving poorer minority populations to concentrate in others, how would you assign kids to schools?

Would you emphasize the value of neighborhood, and send children to the schools nearest their homes--even if it means traditionally voiceless families and families with less access to the political process will find their children clustered together?

Or would you prefer the alternative, forcing children to get on buses that send them all the proverbial way across town (or across the county)? And what if it turns out, as the SAS report indicates, that the busing doesn't necessarily help low-income after all?

It's a thorny question, and no doubt one that will continue to raise blood pressures in Wake County and elsewhere. But for now, the people of Wake County appear to have spoken: neighborhood schools have triumphed over school assignments that attempt to further socioeconomic diversity.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 11:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)