RTTT fears founded?

*Dramatization of teacher union official blocking the path of a noble education reform crusader.

Teacher union and stakeholder support is worth 70 out of 500 points in Obama's "Race to the Top" application. A lack of support from the local teachers union in Florida cost the state enough points to place second - and win hundreds of millions of dollars.

Education reformers feared that RTTT scoring gave a lot of veto power to local unions that would result in watered down - if not meaningless - reforms. Those fears may be founded as Indiana and Kansas have dropped from the race - citing a lack of local union support (they now join Alaska and Texas which refused to participate in Round 1).

The teachers union in Massachusetts withdrew its support of the state's RTTT application citing disagreements over how to turn around low performing schools. Pending Legislation in Colorado will change how the state evaluates teachers, but this has caused the teacher unions in Colorado to withdraw support from the state's application as well. Additionally, the teachers union in Florida pressured the Governor into vetoing legislation that would have tied teacher evaluations to student test scores - before this, Florida had the support of less than 10 percent of the unions in their RTTT application.

Union support isn’t the only factor for winning RTTT – but it is an important one.

Democrats for Education Reform

Whitney Tilson from Democrats for Education Reform has produced a 240-page presentation outlining the problems with public education and some sensible solutions to improve quality and help students achieve.

So what's going on?

1) We spend a lot of money.
2) We don't get a good return on our education investment.
3) Education results have stagnated for decades.
4) We are falling further behind our global competitors.
5) Our racial achievement gap is widening.
6) Public education is unaccountable, inflexible and uncompetitive.
7) Wealthy, entrenched special interests defend the status quo out of self-interest and self-preservation, not to help the children.

Read "A Right Denied: The Critical Need for Genuine School Reform."

Ivory Tower fails

Stanford University's sponsored charter school is being shut down for consistently poor performance. Not surprising, since Stanford’s ed school hates standardized testing and is more concerned about students feeling good. It's nice to see the Ivory Tower actually test theories in the real world. Of course, to many in the education establishment, falling on your face is always someone else’s fault.

Maybe Nevada's universities should be required to run, sponsor or partner with a charter school to prove or disprove their own theories?

Arbitrary and unfair

Are CCSD rules and regulations regarding student participating in sports arbitrary and unfair? Karen Gray, an education researcher thinks so. CCSD initially denied a girl who was enrolled in an alternative school the right to participate in sports at her locally zoned high school - despite the fact that CCSD had allowed other kids from the school to participate in sports in the past.

Karen writes,

"...under Silver State regulations, all [students] can participate in high school sports. In fact, even homeschooled students can participate in high school sports programs at their neighborhood school.

The one exception, apparently, has been any student solely attending the Clark County School District's alternative school, the Academy for Individualized Study, during the reign of Clark County School District Athletic Director Ray Mathis, who is also the president of the NIAA control board.

The Academy is a diploma-granting alternative school approved by the Nevada Department of Education. It complies with the same education, testing and graduation standards as every other school in the state. Moreover, in 2004 the NIAA officially adopted state regulations to allow alternative-school students to participate in high school athletics.

Yet, Alexandra Katz, who attended the Academy last semester, was denied athletic eligibility when she sought to join her neighborhood school's bowling team.

Read "Nevada athletics regulators throw a gutterball: Star bowler’s college dreams dashed thanks to old-guard bias" at NPRI's website.

Stand and Deliver

Jaime Escalante, the public school teacher immortalized in the 1988 film Stand and Deliver, died last week at the age of 79.

Andrew Coulson at the Cato Institute wrote an excellent article in the Wall Street Journal about Escalante's life and struggles as a teacher. The highlight of the article is the realization that the status quo stands in the way of great teachers like Jaime Escalante, effectively preventing them from teaching students.

Coulson writes:

With the help of a few dedicated colleagues at Garfield High in East Los Angeles, he shattered the myth that poor inner-city kids couldn't handle advanced math. At the peak of its success, Garfield produced more students who passed Advanced Placement calculus than Beverly Hills High.

In any other field, his methods would have been widely copied. Instead, Escalante's success was resented. And while the teachers union contract limited class sizes to 35, Escalante could not bring himself to turn students away, packing 50 or more into a room and still helping them to excel. This weakened the union's bargaining position, so it complained.

By 1990, Escalante was stripped of his chairmanship of the math department he'd painstakingly built up over a decade. Exasperated, he left in 1991, eventually returning to his native Bolivia. Garfield's math program went into a decline from which it has never recovered. The best tribute America can offer Jaime Escalante is to understand why our education system destroyed rather than amplified his success — and then fix it.

Read the full article, "Escalante Stood and Delivered," at the Cato Institute's website. Reason Magazine has another article that highlights Escalante's struggles with the education establishment. Read "Stand and Deliver Revisited" at Reason.com

Is Ravitch wrong?

Stuart Buck, over at Dr. Jay P. Greene's blog, takes on Diane Ravitch - an NYU professor who has turned against education assessments and school choice, which she supported previously, to become a darling of the far left, which opposes those reforms. Recently, Ravitch released a book (“The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education”) attacking charters, vouchers and testing. She has written numerous columns, and her opinons have been covered by the Las Vegas Sun and Vegas PBS.

But Stuart Buck gives five good reasons why Ravitch is wrong: She 1) ignores or selectively cites scholarly literature; 2) misinterprets the scholarly literature that she does cite; 3) caricatures her opponents by using strawman arguments, rather than taking the best arguments head-on; 4) tenders logical fallacies; and 5) engages in a double standard, such as holding a disfavored position to a high burden of proof while blithely accepting more problematic evidence that supports her own position (or not looking for evidence at all).

Read Buck's full blog post at jaypgreene.com. It looks like there will be more to say on this subject. Check back for more.

NPRI criticizes RTTT results

Round 1 of Race to the Top (RTTT) is over, and reform fan-favorite Florida has been bested by Delaware and Tennessee. Florida lost a significant amount of points because the state’s application lacked “stakeholder” support – especially among the teacher unions.

However, there is another element to the scoring – human bias. Some of the reviewers appear to have almost nit-picked Florida to death. One reviewer witheld points because Florida didn’t explain which of its MANY reforms produced the dramatic results. Points were also withheld because Florida failed to articulate how it would improve student achievement for Asian and Native American students (Florida’s application highlighted its proven ability to raise achievement levels for all students, plus Hispanic, black and low-income students in particular).

One reviewer docked points because the reviewer felt Florida planned to reduce the achievement gap by “holding the achievement of white students constant over the life of the grant.” For example, Florida promised to improve the level of its already high-achieving fourth-grade white students from 81 percent basic or better to 85 percent basic or better, while low-income and minority students were given a more ambitious goal. Another reviewer withheld points for a similar reason, stating, “[Florida] is closing its achievement gap, in part, by letting the top flounder.”

Flounder? Really? Florida not only manages to improve student achievement across the board, but it does so while also increasing the number of high-achieving students. And frankly, if Florida is letting the top “flounder,” what is the RTTT winner - Delaware - doing?

While Delaware has posted dramatic gains in student achievement on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, that state has been relativly stagnent over the last few years. Delaware may have an ambitious plan for improving achievement and closing achievement gaps, but it hasn't accomplished this in the last six years - at least not like Florida. Despite this, Delaware seems to earn just as many points as Florida on "demonstrating significant progress on improving student achievement," a category worth 30 of the 500 points in the RTTT application.

Compare for yourself with the charts below (click on the graph to bring up a larger image):

PERCENTAGE OF STUDENTS SCORING BASIC OR BETTER

FLORIDA

*Source: U.S. Department of Education. FRL = Free and Reduced Lunch. Students eligible for the Free and Reduced Lunch program are considered low-income students.

DELAWARE

PERCENTAGE OF STUDENTS SCORING PROFICIENT OR BETTER

FLORIDA


DELAWARE