August 27, 2014--Off the Hook

At the heart of Barack Obama's education reform initiative, Race to the Top, are various ways to hold school districts, administrators, and especially teachers accountable for student learning. This approach is actually an extension of George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind.

From day one, back in Bush's day, teachers unions offered lip service support for these efforts, feeling that though their main agenda is protecting teachers' jobs, even incompetent ones, they could not publicly oppose approaches designed to enhance student learning, especially those that address the achievement gap that separates minority students from more affluence white students.

But first with NCLB and more recently with Race, the unions quietly and increasingly more openly have been chipping away at the accountability provisions of both programs.

Most recently they have criticized the results of high-stakes academic achievement testing as the primary way to measure teacher performance, claiming that with the introduction of the new Common Core curriculum in nearly 40 states, a product of the National Governors Association, there has not been enough time for teachers to be orientated to carrying it out effectively.

Until just recently the Obama administration, led by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, has been holding the line, saying there in fact has been enough time for states and school districts to help teachers master the new content and the use of testing would continue to be used when evaluating individual schools and individual teachers.

This is quite a big deal because not only can there be consequences for low-performing teachers (they might not get tenure or, rare, even be let go) but also federal education dollars to states and districts are largely contingent on how schools and districts perform.

Under considerable pressure from teachers unions that historically have provided significant support for Democratic candidates, and because in June Duncan stepped into the current teacher tenure debate, offering his strong endorsement for a judge's decision to dramatically limit tenure in California, Duncan last week said that the DoE would allow another year to pass before using student test scores when evaluating teachers.

He said, "I believe testing issues are sucking the oxygen out of the room in a lot of schools" and thus teachers needed more time to adapt to the new standards and the tests pegged to those standards.

What he might have said is that oxygen is being sucked out of schools because students in unacceptable numbers are not learning and teachers and school administrators must be held accountable for that. Not in another year, but now.

March 25, 2014--Chem Lab

In an analysis of the nation's 97,000 public schools, the Department of Education last week issued a report about the unequal deployment of resources among schools that enroll predominantly white students and those that serve children of color.

In every way it is disturbing.

Racial minorities are much more likely than white students to be suspended; they have access to fewer math and science courses; their teachers are lower paid and less experienced; and the schools in which they are enrolled are older and less well maintained.

Black students are three times as likely to be suspended or expelled as white students; a quarter of schools with the highest percentage of Hispanic students do not offer any math courses beyond Introductory Algebra; and a full third of them do not have any chemistry courses.

And when it comes to the availability of advanced placement courses--important for college admissions and success--schools with African-Ameircan and Hispanic students fare as poorly.

It is no wonder then that the academic achievement gap between the races is so pronounced and persistent.

This inequality of resources gives the lie to the claim of many conservatives that the opportunities are there equally for everyone and if certain people do not succeed (and we know what that is code for), it is their own or their parents' fault.

Some years ago I was working with the lowest-performing school district in New York State--Roosevelt, Long Island, a wedge of poverty squeezed between communities of great wealth.

The high school had the lowest graduation rate in the state and as a result the smallest percentage of students going on to college. The Ford Foundation was looking to work with all the schools in the district, offering to bring to them approaches to teaching and learning that had been shown to work in other impoverished school districts.

On my first tour of the high school, the principal pointed proudly to a gleaming chemistry lab. It was during school hours but there were no classes being held in the lab. When I expressed curiosity about that, the principal said, "Oh, we don't actually use the lab."

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because there's no gas for the Bunsen burners and no running water."

I was incredulous. "So no one takes chemistry lab? Isn't it a state requirement that to earn an academic diploma students need to take two to three years of lab science?" She acknowledged that was true.

"So what do you do?" I asked.

"We arrange field trips to Great Neck High School," she told me proudly, "and they allow our students to watch their students do lab work."

"They watch them? Doesn't that rub it in your students' faces that Roosevelt is, well, less than second-rate?"

For this she had no reply.

Nor, I suspect, do the thousands of principals and teachers who labor in under-financed and resourced public schools across the nation.