This week, people in districts throughout California were left wondering why some schools escaped the state’s “persistently lowest-achieving” list, while others — some of them, with higher scores and greater gains — were deemed failing.
It all boils down to size. If a school reported fewer than 100 test scores in any of the last three years, it was taken off the list, regardless of its scores. I’m not sure why, though it would seem the state wants to target larger, more traditional schools rather than alternative schools, which tend to be smaller (and, often, to have lower test scores).
Without this small-school rule, Oakland would have more schools on the list, according to another long list of low-performing schools Read the rest of this entry »
Today, when the state education department released its lists of “persistently lowest-performing schools,” I zeroed in on the five it identified from Oakland. They’re all middle schools: Alliance Academy, Elmhurst Community Prep, Explore Middle School, ROOTS International and United for Success Academy.
My first thought was that most of those schools are less than four years old; how could they be persistently anything? (I did just turn a year older last month; maybe time is just advancing more quickly as I age.)
Check out this report released today on California’s education mandates. The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office says many of these activities are costly and don’t help kids or teachers.
Currently, the state requires K-12 and community college districts to perform hundreds of mandated activities, the majority of which provide little benefit to students or teachers. Since the state does not pay for K-14 mandates on a regular basis, the result is billions in outstanding costs the state must eventually pay. In this report, we recommend comprehensively reforming K–14 mandates. If a mandate serves a purpose fundamental to the education system, such as protecting student health or providing essential assessment and oversight data, it should be funded. If not, the mandate should be eliminated.
“In a lot of ways, we are leading the race.” — Oakland Superintendent Tony Smith to Phil Matier in reference to the competitive Race to the Top grants.
Yes, OUSD applied for the federal funds (which it only stands to receive if California gets any money in the first place), though teachers union President Betty Olson-Jones says she will not endorse any program that uses a single test score to evaluate teachers or that lifts the state’s cap on independently run, publicly funded charter schools. “It’s one more quick fix that isn’t a fix,” she said about Race to the Top.
Soon, the McClymonds high school campus will have just one small high school, instead of two.
District staff is recommending that BEST High School close in June — a year earlier than planned, Chief Academic Officer Brad Stam told a crowd gathered at the McClymonds cafeteria tonight.
Stam said it would be unfair to BEST students and too costly for the school district to keep it open next year with just a few dozen students, and that this year’s juniors (the youngest class at BEST) will likely attend EXCEL, the other high school, next fall. This year, the school district is providing a subsidy of about $330,000, Stam said.
EXCEL’s enrollment has dwindled to less than 250, and just 65 juniors and seniors attend BEST, according to a recent districtwide data report. In 2004-05, the year before McClymonds split into two schools as part of the Gates-funded small schools reform, 761 kids went to the West Oakland high school, according to data from the California Department of Education. Read the rest of this entry »
A survey of Oakland principals by a local advocacy group found support for the district’s unorthodox, largely decentralized school budgeting system, known as RBB; it also found that one-third of the principals surveyed didn’t feel prepared or equipped to run their entire school budget, as they’re expected to do.
A memo to the superintendent and school board, which contains the survey results and recommendations, was led by Think College Now Principal David Silver and Esperanza (at Stonehurst) Principal Sondra Aguilera. It was staffed by Great Oakland Public Schools, a coalition that supports greater school autonomy, so I would have been surprised if the survey found that principals disliked the model. About half of the OUSD principals completed the survey.
Ben Chavis, former director of Oakland’s high-performing American Indian Public Charter School, surfaces again to promote his educational philosophy (and new book) — this time on CNN.com.
“I believe all the money in the world would not be enough to improve schools run by incompetent public school administrators,” he wrote in a commentary published this week. (Last month, he called to ask what OUSD’s total budget was. I gave him the figure I reported in June, a fact he attributed directly to me in the piece.)
An interesting assertion to make, especially at a time when schools are making such deep cuts, with more to come. In your view, is there any truth to his argument?
During a press conference this morning that veered suddenly into a Q & A about prison reform (and never really went back), the governor announced he was lining up with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and President Obama — and that the state planned “to go all out” to make California eligible for competitive federal stimulus funding.
Schwarzenegger said he was calling a special legislative session to do away with laws that might make California ineligible. He has asked state Legislators to present him with a package by early October that would lift the state’s charter school cap and allow teacher evaluations to be linked to student test scores.
“The Obama administration has pointed to California and said we have no way to distinguish good teachers from bad teachers, and I happen to agree with that,” Schwarzenegger said. ”They call it a firewall and I say, `Let’s tear down that wall.”‘ Read the rest of this entry »
It’s not only teacher evaluations that education reformers are hoping to infuse with data.
Emily Alpert of Voice of San Diego.org writes about a new proposal in San Diego that would use attendance, test scores and dropout rates in the evaluation of school principals. You can find her story here.
Speaking of test scores: I learned a new term today on Ed Week’s Teacher Beat blog: DRIP (Data Rich, Information Poor) Syndrome.
In an interview with the Washington Post about his education agenda, Obama cited a controversial Chicago policy as an example of how his administration would raise standards.
In the 1990s, Chicago Public Schools stopped promoting students to the next grade — or graduating them from high school – just because they were a certain age. Obama said it is now ”obvious” that so-called social promotion is a “disservice to students” and their parents.
