The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on April 11 that “science is gaining momentum in American schools.” It attributes this “new found respect” to “prodding by industry, business and government leaders.” (So far no mention of educators.)

The article lauds the “upgrade” in science education and offers some verbal snapshots of classroom hands-on and minds-on activities and lab experiments, noting that officials in many area schools are “adding class time and squeezing dollars out of tight budgets” in pursuit of the goal “to boost student achievement to match math and science powerhouses in Asia and Europe.”

The piece repeats a reference to the concerns of “corporate, industry and government observers” and their “push to gain public support for better science and math instruction.”

The implication that the quality of the instruction itself is weak does not appear elsewhere in the piece and is not developed. More »

The mayor has announced that he is expanding his plan for ending social promotion. The problem with that plan isn’t the goal, but rather the means by which to reach it: by relying (can you guess?) on how well the student does on state exams. Over-reliance on test scores for high stakes decisions is never a good idea, but relying on them for decisions about social promotion seems especially ill-advised. Students must attain a Level 2 to be promoted, but as the Daily News pointed out students can reach that standard just by guessing. And, on Thursday, Diane Ravitch had this to say: More »

Both white and black students raised their math and reading achievement levels from 1992 to 2007, according to a new federal report, but New York was not among the states that narrowed the achievement gap between the races. In fact, few states narrowed their black-white test gaps in either grade or subject, despite the long years of No Child Left Behind.

“Scores have been increasing for both black and white students for the most part, but we do not see a lot of progress in closing the achievement gap,” Stuart Kerachsky, Acting Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, told reporters at the National Press Club on July 14.

In fourth-grade math, 15 states narrowed the gap, including many of the largest — California, Florida, New Jersey, Massachusetts and and Texas. But that was the highpoint. In eighth-grade math only four states closed that gap from 1990 to 2007; just three states narrowed the gap in fourth-grade reading; and no states at all showed any statistically significant improvement in the eighth-grade reading gap over the last two decades. More »

On Monday the city learned that its on-time graduation rate rose to 66 percent, its highest level in at least 20 years. By the more stringent state counting method. the city graduated 56.4 percent of its Class of 2008 on time, a 10-year high at least. Either way, it’s pretty significant.

By now, the good news bandwagon has actually gotten a little repetitive.  (And the Mayor’s use of test score and graduation rate gains to flay opponents of mayoral control has gotten a little much.)  But the graduation rates are based on four years of coursework as well as five exit exams, so those gains should truly be celebrated. More »

For the first time since 1997, the federal education department has assessed U.S. students in the arts. There are no individual or even state results, but there are some important findings. Again, the feds tested a nationally-representative sample of 8th graders. And, while the results are depressing in some ways, the fact that the government goes to the trouble of testing for basic student literacy in music and visual art, and has ways to test for that, is encouraging enough, especially in our math- and ELA-centric world.

How do they actually test a national sample of children for musical ability? Students aren’t asked to compose symphonies, or even play an instrument. But they are asked to listed to music and answer questions, and they are asked to write some basic rhythmic annotation. More »

I have not been posting on Edwize at all this year — chalk it up to laziness — but I just couldn’t resist this howler in Joel Klein’s weekly letter to principals on April 29.

First, the background: a lot of teachers are concerned that — paperworked and micromanaged to death — they are not permitted to teach reading, and instead wind up teaching to the test. The results of all that micromanagement show up in the city’s national scores (NAEP/TUDA), where our students’ proficiency levels lag behind their proficiency levels on the state exams. With increasing dissatisfaction with his tenure coming from Albany, Mr. Klein has been scrambling to justify the difference.

Says Mr. Klein:

…neither our school system nor our students are held accountable for the NAEP results.

More »

Every four years the National Assessment of Academic Progress (NAEP) gives essentially the same test it has given since 1971, to representative samples of U.S. 9-, 13-, and 17-year-olds. The results say a lot about whether U.S. students are making real progress. This morning, the 2008 “long-term NAEP” results came out, and there’s good news and bad news.

The good news is that U.S. 9-year-olds have improved in both reading and math, in some cases very substantially. Their average scale scores rose 4 points in both reading and math from 2004, and they gained much more — 12 points in reading and 24 points in math — since the tests were first given in the early 1970s. More »

[Editor's note: This post originally appeared at Crow Man Blues.]

“Frames are the mental structures that allow human beings to understand reality — sometimes to create what we take to be reality.”
— George Lakoff

Do you believe that the American business model applied to schools will produce better teachers and more qualified students? Then your thought process about public schools is probably mired in the myths fostered by the 1980s report, A Nation at Risk, which claimed that the failure of our public schools would eventually lead to our economic decline and inability to compete in the world market. Those findings were driven by a right wing ideology from the likes of CEO’s and business leaders who posed the idea that we can only keep our competitive position in the world by improving our schools. More »

If you haven’t already, read the New York Times editorial on Obama’s education plans. A snippet:

Mr. Obama spoke in terms that everyone could understand when he noted that only a third of 13- and 14-year-olds read as well as they should and that this country’s curriculum for eighth graders is two full years behind other top-performing nations. Part of the problem, he said, is that this nation’s schools have recently been engaged in “a race to the bottom” — most states have adopted abysmally low standards and weak tests so that students who are performing poorly in objective terms can look like high achievers come test time.

Related: Last month, Randi Weingarten made the case for national standards.

[Editor's note: This piece originally appeared in the Washington Post on Feb. 16.]

Rebuilding our economy for the long haul — not just to meet today’s needs — requires investing in education. President Obama rightly has called for immediate investments to build the classrooms, laboratories and libraries our children require to meet 21st-century challenges and to increase funding for crucial educational programs. But to address the challenges and seize the opportunities of this new century, we must do even more. More »

To read the tabloid press and the right wing edu-blogosphere these days, one would think that the decision of the KIPP AMP teachers to organize with the UFT was something akin to the four horsemen of the Apocalypse riding into town.

Anti-unionist image of teachers organizing

What is extraordinary is the violent tone and tenor of much of this commentary, and the violence done to the most simple and straightforward of facts.

The Fordham Foundation’s Flypaper blog announced that the teachers at KIPP AMP had decided NOT to organize, in the latest iteration of its well-established practice of mangling story after story about teacher unions beyond recognition. This was followed by the usual mealy-mouthed update announcing that the truth was, well, the opposite of what it had just reported. More »

The AP looks at a report by Education Trust on NCLB and graduation rates:

“The U.S. is stagnating while other industrialized countries are surpassing us,” said Anna Habash, author of the report by Education Trust, which advocates on behalf of minority and poor children. “And that is going to have a dramatic impact on our ability to compete,” she said.

In fact, the United States is now the only industrialized country where young people are less likely than their parents to earn a diploma, the report said, citing data compiled by the international Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Recently at the Quick and the Ed, Kevin Carey resurrected for criticism a late summer Edwize post on the case of Dr. Art Siebens, who was removed from his position at Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington, D.C., despite a remarkable 18 year record of success as a teacher of Botany, Anatomy, Physiology and Advanced Placement Biology.

Carey faulted our argument — and later arguments by Eduwonkette’s Jennifer Jennings and Sherman Dorn — that the Siebens case demonstrated how Washington School Superintendent Michelle Rhee would abuse her power, if she was able to eliminate tenure and treat Washington, D.C. public school teachers as at will employees. More »

[Editor’s note: Peter Goodman blogs at Ed in the Apple, where this post originally appeared.]

“Every farmer knows you don’t fatten a pig by weighing it.”
-aphorism

No Child Left Behind has dominated the national education scene for years. A bipartisan law that was hailed as a major step forward is increasingly assailed by virtually all.

The law relies on states to establish goals, Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), and sets increasingly severe penalties for schools that fail to reach AYP. Not surprisingly, schools have moved to “drill and kill” curricula to achieve AYP, to the detriment of the subjects not tested.

The NEA and the AFT have increasingly criticized the law; in fact, supporters of the law continue to shrink. More »

In his Aug. 5 Village Voice column, Nat Hentoff calls for more—and better—statistics on dropouts. After reiterating his support for Randi Weingarten’s vision of “community schools,” Hentoff says that the city’s lack of reliable measures of graduation rates and its failure to keep track of students who drop out are “immediate problems that must be confronted now.”

No Child Left Behind created a state-by-state statistics free-for-all by neglecting to set federal guidelines on calculating school completion rates. Now we have states cooking the books and “disappearing” dropouts, as the Times reported in March. More »