Schools of Thought

I hope everyone has an enjoyable end to 2005. There's plenty to talk about as we start the new year, but I'm going to leave this post short and simply quote a thought-provoking lead editorial from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (which clearly reads EdWahoo).

The poor showing on the national literacy assessment even among college grads ought to generate discussion at both state and federal levels about whether test-driven reform is creating better test-takers rather than better readers. As schools concentrate more resources on teaching kids how to bubble in the correct answers on standardized tests, less time is available to develop critical thinking skills.

Happy new year!

When perusing the Education Evolving site (linked to by Eduwonk), I came across the text of some 2001 remarks by Joe Graba, a senior policy fellow at Hamline University and former deputy education commissioner in Minnesota. His comments about the difficulties of fundamental innovation in our current school system are worth quoting at length:

Folks, if we want to get the kind of learning that will do this job successfully, we will need some schools that are very different. And I am convinced that we cannot get these different schools by changing the ones we have. We will have to create the different schools new. A lot of people have observed and commented on the difficulty of changing organizations. Few have been able to explain why it is so hard. But two books recently have helped. One is The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Clayton Christensen at the Harvard Business School. The other is Creative Destruction, by Richard Foster of McKinsey. Most organizations, Christensen says, are able to improve incrementally what they do. Radical – as opposed to incremental – change comes only through the creation of new organizations.

What he calls ‘sustaining’ innovations improve existing methods. But occasionally there are innovations that, if adopted, would disrupt existing methods, would require fundamental changes in the way the organization operates. Almost no organization, Christensen finds, is able to adopt the disruptive innovations. These innovations find a niche market somewhere else. And they improve. And then move up market. And threaten the established firms. We see examples of this all the time. The airlines disrupted the railroads; took the passengers away. I never heard of “Great Northern Airlines”. We got “Northwest Airlines’, a new organization. Why can’t the existing organizations change? Foster talks about every organization having a culture that becomes its “invisible architecture” and that is almost impossible to change. This is truly startling. It says that what are assets at the peak of an organization’s performance become liabilities when disruptive change occurs. The process that helped the organization do well in the earlier period constrain it from responding when it needs to respond.

Christensen also points to the influence of the mainline customers of the organization. They do not want it to change. He studied the disk-drive industry, in which no firm that was dominant at one stage made it successfully to the next stage. And this is not hard to understand. The customers who had invested in 14” disk drives wanted better 14” drives: They were not interested in 8” drives. Also, when they first appear, the new products seem lower in quality as well as different.

What does this mean for schools? Well, suppose you were a superintendent. A new idea for school is proposed. It would conflict with the culture of your existing organization, so nobody inside likes it. Nor do your mainline customers want it. What would you do? I have to say candidly: All of us here are a part of the problem. We are products of the mainline system. The traditional schools served us well. Most of us would prefer that the existing schools just get better. We would resist changing what we knew and liked. So the country ends up spending billions and we still have the schools we knew. Trying to change existing schools forces us into incremental change. The mainline customers and the forces inside resist radical change. I’ve seen this: As a legislator and later as an administrator I helped start and run the Minnesota’s Council on Quality Education, which underwrote innovative efforts in districts. We could innovate, but we found the innovations did not spread and that they were not sustained when the financing ended ... In education, too, we need to set up new operations outside the existing culture. The schools we have serve many students well; and these should continue. Note that Dayton’s didn’t close its department stores. They set up a new operation and let the customers choose.

Some of the leadership in public education sees this. Paul Houston, who heads the American Association of School Administrators, tells people not to confuse the church with the faith. Public education is a faith; a set of principles. The existing districts and their schools are ‘the church’; the institutional form. If we keep the faith, in that sense, it is OK to change the church, Houston says. The church is not the faith.

I think this is an incredibly important idea, and from what I've both read and experienced myself on all levels of The Cavalier Daily's culture, it seems about right. The problem is, American education doesn't have the ability to spin off Target from Dayton's -- we can't up and create entirely new organizations. Graba points to the charter movement as a partial solution, and I'm on board with that, except there are 100,000 schools in the U.S. and 40 million students to educate, and charters are likely never going to become mass institutions.

So the question in my mind shifts to one of how we perform fundamental, radical change when creating new organizations isn't a viable option. As I muse, I think that it's going to take a holistic effort: a deep understanding on part of every actor (teacher, parent, administrator, legislator, bureaucrat, voter, community, etc.) that such change is utterly necessary. That at some fundamental levels, Our. System. Is. Broken. And then on top of that there is going to have to be a generalizable, scalable alternative that is unimpeachably superior to the status quo. Then, with some fervered willpower and a little luck... well, who knows, maybe you can conquer the curse of incremental change.

I think charters (along with some fashion of school choice) can serve as important catalysts for this project, because they can act as laboratories to show that there's a better way. But they aren't the solution in and of themselves; in our unique challenge, the fundamental change is going to have to happen with the pre-existing institutions and their pre-existing cultures. Without acknowledging that obstacle and addressing it, no widespread reform is going to be successful.

Thoughts?

In a comment to my post on the NAAL results, HeatherB brings up an important argument which I've heard time and again. In her words:

[I]f your students aren't performing on the bottom portions of the taxonomy at a level to satisfy a stupid test, even if that's all you're focusing on, how do you expect them to perform at the higher levels?

The answer lies in expectations. If you're expecting students to learn at the higher levels of critical thinking and you have assessment aligned to that goal, then pedagogy can and will be oriented to teaching those skills. Instead, we're focusing on low-level skills with low-level assessment and what we seem to be finding is that the low-level pedagogy that goes along with that isn't very good at imparting even that level of knowledge. Put another way, as Lauren Resnick notes with regards to reading,

Cognitive theory ... suggests that processes traditionally reserved for advanced students -- that is, for a minority who have developed skill and taste for interpretive mental work -- might be taught to all readers, including young children and, perhaps especially, those who learn with difficulty. Cognitive research suggests that these processes are what we mean by reading comprehension. Not to teach them is to ignore the most important aspects of reading. (emphasis hers)

Moreover, we know from individual schools that you can teach a more high-level critical thinking approach and get great results (see for just one example H-B Woodlawn in Arlington, Va.). So, counterintuitive as it may seem, students' inability to succeed on low-level assessments isn't a sign that they are unable to grasp high-level concepts, but merely an indictment of the current assessment-pedagogy system. Certainly you can't critically read if you can't pass a 4-paragraph reading comprehension multiple choice passage, but then it's time to ask, what is wrong with our system that so many kids are ending up unable to perform that simple task?

I submit that one significant factor is that we upper bound our goals at passing that test (since that's what the accountability systems stem from) and so set our expectations relative to that standard. So, instead of getting more complex as we move our students through the grades, the curriculum simply gets more difficult. Again, use the tests as a reflection of learning expectations: Our system doesn't shift from basic "can you read" tests in elementary school to "can you critically read" tests in high school; no, the 12th grade tests are still overwhelmingly reading comprehension multiple choice passages, albiet longer and with bigger words. The argument of "let's teach students the basics first and then move onto the higher-level skills" falls apart because we a) never end up teaching many kids the so-called basic skills and b) never do move onto the higher-level skills. At that point, it's worth considering a paradigm shift.

Teaching towards the "basics" actually hinders learning of both the basics and the advanced because of everything that flows from that framework. If we held deep critical thinking skills as our sole standard and aligned our curriculum, assessments, pedagogy and auxillary structures to meet that goal, then we'd be getting somewhere.

New Carnival of Education is up over at the Education Wonks; worth checking out!

Eduwonk pretty much says all that needs to be said on this subject.

In another indicator of the flagging education system, the recent release of the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy results shows that high-level comprehension skills are down among college graduates. As the Washington Post notes,

The test measures how well adults comprehend basic instructions and tasks through reading -- such as computing costs per ounce of food items, comparing viewpoints on two editorials and reading prescription labels. Only 41 percent of graduate students tested in 2003 could be classified as "proficient" in prose -- reading and understanding information in short texts -- down 10 percentage points since 1992. Of college graduates, only 31 percent were classified as proficient -- compared with 40 percent in 1992. Schneider said the results do not separate recent graduates from those who have been out of school several years or more.

This is a particularly instructive measure because it looks at down-the-road effects of K-12 education. First, it's worthwhile to go over the definitions of the NAAL achievement levels:

Adults at the Below Basic level range from being nonliterate in English to having the abilities listed below:
-locating easily identifiable information in short, commonplace prose texts
-locating easily identifiable information and following written instructions in simple documents (e.g., charts or forms)
-locating numbers and using them to perform simple quantitative operations (primarily addition) when the mathematical information is very concrete and familiar

Basic
-reading and understanding information in short, commonplace prose texts
-reading and understanding information in simple documents
-locating easily identifiable quantitative information and using it to solve simple, one-step problems when the arithmetic operation is specified or easily inferred

Intermediate
-reading and understanding moderately dense, less commonplace prose texts as well as summarizing, making simple inferences, determining cause and effect, and recognizing the author’s purpose
-locating information in dense, complex documents and making simple inferences about the information
-locating less familiar quantitative information and using it to solve problems when the arithmetic operation is not specified or easily inferred

Proficient
-reading lengthy, complex, abstract prose texts as well as synthesizing information and making complex inferences
-integrating, synthesizing, and analyzing multiple pieces of information located in complex documents
-locating more abstract quantitative information and using it to solve multistep problems when the arithmetic operations are not easily inferred and the problems are more complex

The high school graduate numbers (those who didn't proceed to higher ed.) are interesting in their own right -- over half of graduates are at a below basic or basic level with regards to prose, while 42% read documents at the lowest two levels. Less than 5% of high school graduates read at a proficient level. And all of these numbers are worse than they were a decade ago.

What to make of the decline? First, it's clear yet again that our K-12 education system is not providing an appropriate curriculum nor appropriate pedagogy if one in two students who successfully graduate high school do so at best able to perform tasks on the level of parsing through TV Guide (pg. 3). Maybe it has something to do with the fact that a third of them aren't reading novels in English class.

Secondly, while experts are falling over themselves trying to come up with an explanation for the drastic 10-year decline in college literacy skill, I'll offer a hypothesis of my own: Emphasis on fact-based standardized tests draws emphasis away from high-level critical thinking skills. This isn't a "standardized tests are the devil" rant (i've made my position on them clear many times), but rather an observation that I think most people would agree with; over the past decade, as the "Standards Movement" has become firmly entrenched, so has relatively low-level instruction.

End-of-course tests may be taken as a reasonable measure of learning expectations, and in almost all cases standardized tests are multiple-choice or constructed-response items that require what Bloom would call "knowledge" or "comprehension," the two lowest rungs on his taxonomy. Studies have consistently backed up that the higher-level skills -- analysis, synthesis, evaluation -- are exceptions rather than the rule. Yet these are exactly the skills that one needs to fit into the NAAL's "proficient" category, and to a lesser degree the "intermediate" group. So, if a byproduct of the push for accountability has been a reduction in the structural rigor of the curriculum and pedagogy, a loss in high-level reading skills is exactly what we would anticipate. It certainly synchs with the relative stagnation of long-term NAEP proficiency levels.

It's true that this malaise is not found in math performance, but I would submit that math pedagogy (and the Math Wars) is a different beast altogether, as math lends itself and was already largely targetted towards the one-right-answer standardized test mentality. In this case, the pressure to succeed and accountability had nowhere to push achievement but up.

I don't know how much more evidence needs to mount that our schools are not adequately teaching critical thinking skills. NAAL, NAEP, TIMSS, HSSSE, state assessments... I would love to hear an argument to the contrary. And, if we indeed aren't teaching critical thinking skills, then there are a whole series of new discussions that need to start, and they need to start soon.

Happy holidays, everyone!

One of the more interesting structural debates about high school (and one of particular interest to me as I prepare to enter the teaching force) surrounds the schedule. The question of how the school year and the school day should be designed is perfectly legitimate: the three main options are the traditional 6-period day every day, the "A/B" block schedule of 4 longer classes a day alternating with 4 different classes the off-day, and the "4x4" block schedule of 4 longer classes every day for a semester and then 4 different classes the next semester. What's chilling to me is when a shift in the schedule is considered not because of the schedule's effect on the students and their learning, but because of teacher workload. As the Washington Post reports:

Anne Arundel [Md.] school leaders are moving toward a fundamental shift in how high school courses are scheduled, in response to teacher complaints of excessive workloads under the current system of double-length "block schedule" classes.

After just one meeting last week, a school system task force already seems to have reached consensus that the current high school schedule should be scrapped.

[...]

[T]eachers have found their student loads vastly increased under block scheduling. Teachers typically went from teaching five classes a day to six classes across two days, and from serving about 150 students to 180 or more. The schedule emerged as the leading complaint among teachers leaving the system, cited by 71 percent of departing teachers in exit surveys.

[...]

The task force's sense of urgency stems from the disquieting rate of teacher turnover at the high school level, administrators say. Teacher resignations in Anne Arundel spiked from 295 in the 2001-02 academic year, before universal block scheduling, to 467 in 2004-05. Combined resignations and retirements at the secondary level, encompassing both middle and high schools, totaled 242 in 2004-05, or about 10 percent of teachers at that level. Resignations and retirements in elementary schools totaled 160, or about 7 percent of teachers at that level, according to Florie Bozzella, human resources director.

There's not a single word or quote in the article by an educator or administrator suggesting that the A/B block schedule was having a negative effect on student achievement. That's not to say that it isn't; it's just that the students aren't playing much into the equation. The better solution, one might suggest, would be to hire more teachers.

There is quite a bit of research to suggest the benefits of block scheduling, and some to indicate the superiority of A/B scheduling over the 4x4. As a 2000 article in the Phi Delta Kappan noted generally,

In 1998 Donald Hackmann and David Waters found several positive outcomes as a result of block scheduling. They discovered that students were able to take a broader array of courses. In addition, schools reported fewer disciplinary referrals, improved class attendance, increased numbers of students completing Advanced Placement courses, advanced mastery of subject content, and improved course grades. Similarly, Sharon Skrobarcek and her colleagues reported that students received more individual attention from teachers in the block design.

So whether Anne Arundel high schools should operate on a A/B or 4x4 block schedule is a fine conversation to have, and there are arguments to be made on both sides. The problem is that the arguments this task force seems to be considering revolve around teacher workload instead of what's best for students, and that's tremendously askew. Certainly overworked teachers and high teacher turnover are going to have negative externalities with respect to student achievement, but teacher workload can be addressed in a plethora of other ways that are student-independent.

Unless all other options have been utterly exhausted, no educational change significantly affecting student learning should be made without the effects on student learning driving it.

Ideally, accountability holds people responsible for their actions and provides an impetus for improving them. Those laudable and egalitarian virtues undergird the accountability provisions of No Child Left Behind. But how can accountability exist -- a system that shows us where schools are failing to properly educate kids and a system that accurately diagnoses the problems to be addressed in coming grades -- when the sole metric of determining achievement is cripplingly flawed?

At this juncture, I speak of the faults of (predominantly multiple choice) standardized testing not solely in their inherently fact-based, low-level nature or their ease of manipulation -- two criticisms which certainly stand on their own merits -- but rather in their inability to reasonably act as arbiters of success and failure. Put another way, when students can pass a reading test without actually knowing how to read, it's time to reconsider the test.

Something that caught my eye about the recent EdTrust report on high-impact high schools was their finding that, "Roughly three in four students at high-impact schools report reading books in their English classes, while only 62.2 percent of students in average-impact schools reported doing so." These alarmingly low numbers are not realities isolated to seven high schools; according to data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, nationally in 2002, 15% of 12th grade students reported that they "never or hardly ever read other than textbook for English class" and another 22% only did so a "few times a year."

Stop for a moment and consider that 37% (the lost third?) of students in American high schools aren't reading books in English class. Right off the bat, that should tell you that our accountability system isn't working. I think most people would agree that it's hard to become a good reader -- much less a critical, deep reader -- when you don't read books. The short stories and poems found in the Elements of Literature textbooks simply cannot formulate the same level of skill as delving closely into novels. And, when a fifth of 12th graders do "little to no" pleasure reading, there are tens upon tens of thousands of students who are simply not getting exposure to books. Perhaps it's no wonder so many adults are turning out illiterate.

But this is more then a broad failure of accountability, it's a specific malaise found in how we're measuring, in this case, reading skill, but really any skill. In Idaho this year, 82% of eigth graders passed the Idaho Standards Achievement Test. In Idaho this year, a quarter of the kids "never or hardly ever read other than textbook for English class" and another quarter did so only a "few times a year." 50% barely reading books ... 82% passing the reading exam. The problem is, all anyone sees is the 82%, and so students who aren't actually good readers, and who especially aren't likely to be good critical readers, are advanced to 9th grade with teachers, parents, the district and the state all thinking both students and system are hunky-dory.

It isn't isolated. My own state of Virginia has three-quarters passing rate on the 8th grade reading Standards of Learning exam while 40% of students are in the few to no books category. Think it doesn't matter?

Average 8th grade reading NAEP scale score by frequency of reading outside the textbook in English class, 2005:

Never or hardly ever (20%) -- 250
Few times a year (22%) -- 260
Once or twice/month (27%) -- 267
At least once a week (28%) -- 266

Standardized tests don't pick up this subtlety. A 4-paragraph, boiled down, a/b/c/d reading comprehension passage doesn't tell you whether Johnny has been reading books in English class or whether he is is a deliberate, thoughtful reader. What we're holding people accountable for and what we (should) want to be holding people accountable for are wildly different things, and much of the discrepancy can be traced to the incredibly blunt instrument of standardized testing. And then we can start talking about how easy it is to manipulate the tests, a practice in which states regularly engage.

A common response to this general position is that standardized tests aren't perfect, but there are better tests and worse tests. I posit as irreconcilable the disconnect between what standardized tests can assess at their highest bound and the rigor and detail with which we need to be assessing in order to achieve our accountability and diagnostic goals.

Accountability is good. Accountability is crucial. The problem is, the current system is doing a stunningly poor job of holding anyone accountable for anything meaningful.

Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that I've long been a quest to find reliable data on what's actually going on in the classroom. My hypothesis being that the Standard Operating Procedure is tremendously more traditional than we'd like to think -- a proposition which the TIMSS video study and NAEP teacher/student surveys seem to back up. Another wrinkle in the puzzle comes from the 2005 release of the High School Survey of Student Engagement, a rich databank of 200,000 student responses drawn together by a research team at the University of Indiana. It's a hugely informative source from the standpoint of determining both student behavior and student perceptions. And, thanks to the short nature of the survey and the fact that high schoolers correlate reliably with teacher responses on NAEP surveys (as opposed to the lower grades), the data can be reasonably taken as valid.

What emerges from parsing through the numbers is a picture of traditional, lecture-and-worksheet high schools which aren't particularly rigorous, don't engage students nearly enough and don't create an environment where students feel supported or see connections between their work and the real world.

Rigor

A third of high schoolers surveyed reported that they spent 0-3 hours per week preparing for school, and fully 80% said that they spent less than 3 hours per week reading assigned materials. Yet, the strong majority of respondants were getting primarily As and Bs, and 81% said they often or very often came to class with assignments completed. In other words, most high schools are assigning work that can be done quickly (read: worksheets) and are not holding students to a high standard of expectation.

Even students recognize this fact -- a mere half indicated that they were being challenged to do their best work.

Student interaction

Despite what those who think American classrooms are awash in constructivist paradise would have you believe, "42% of students said that they never or only sometimes worked on a paper or project using information from several sources, such as books, interviews, Internet, etc." Moreover, a third don't often or very often work with other students on projects or assignments during class, and only 57% said they frequently contribute to class discussions.

This, again, squares with the findings of both the TIMSS and NAEP studies; only about half of high school English teachers report doing group projects only once or twice a month, while in 8th grade math classes, the teacher talks on average 85% of the time. The fact is that all evidence points to traditional pedagogy continuing to dominate the classroom.

Student take-away

An often overlooked question is that of what students are walking away from the classroom with. Certainly social norms and context affect this data more than other items, but it simply cannot be discounted on those grounds alone. In fact, too many -- far too many -- students seem bewildered as to the point of school, a feeling that can't be advantageous for learning.

Only two-thirds of students indicate that they put a high value on learning (a scary stat if ever there was one) and never above two-thirds indicate that they thought their school experience contributed substantially to their skills. More specifically, only half said it contributed substantially in "learning work-related skills" and only 45% for "solving real-world problems." Which begs the question, if you're in the other half, what precisely is your incentive for working hard?

The lost third

I've noticed in my studies that one number keeps coming up -- 33%. There seems to be a third of students who simply can't buy in to the often bizarre system, and, not accidentally I think, that third comes awfully close to meeting the 70% national graduation rate. Take this, for example: 37% of students were neutral, disagreed or strongly disagreed that they "feel supported and respected by teachers," and the more negative responses to that question correlated with lower rates of taking pride in schoolwork, thinking what they learn is useful, feeling challenged, etc. Reiterating from above, a third of students don't put a high value on learning.

I'd be curious to know if any specific studies were done on this phenomenon of the lost third, because it certainly seems like there's a profile that students in this segment meet, and it's a profile whose natural conclusion is, alarmingly, dropping out of high school.

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Only meaningful school reform is going to bring about serious change in these numbers. Currently, the high school is seen as dysfunction across the board and across the aisle, and via studies like the HSSSE, we can draw a detailed blueprint of that broken institution. What comes next is not being satisfied with our picture and not being satisfied with tweaks or new programs; what comes next is identifying the functional parts of the current system, using them as a foundation (along with recent advances in accountability and infrastructure), and then raising a new high school, a new public school, from the ashes.

The story of the latter half of the 20th century was school reform, but not pedagogical reform. I've said it before, and I'll say it again -- time to put up the walls.

I recently wrote about the sad state of education journalism, noting that, among other problems, most articles seem focused on anything but the actual classroom. Turns out, that's more than just anecdote. I did a little research and came across this report done by "Society's Watchdogs" of the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute. The authors of the report examined 403 education-related newspaper articles from four major Virginia papers over an eight-month period and found that:

65% of published articles related to topics of foremost interest to the public school industry, namely, public school funding, public school staffing, and public school wage and benefit proposals (261 of 403 articles).

Other topics of public interest received substantially less attention:
• 22% addressed student achievement/state Standards of Learning performance (88 articles);
• 7% discussed the federal No Child Left Behind Act (28 articles);
• 3% were related to miscellaneous matters such as school boundary proposals (14 articles);
and
• 3% addressed public education reforms and innovations such as charter schools, home
schooling, vouchers, and tuition tax credits (12 articles).

Assuming these results are reasonably generalizable, it's a striking picture. How can we expect parents, and moreover citizens who don't have kids, to become informed and engaged actors in the debate over education if they're getting their information from a source that two-thirds of the time doesn't write about anything directly meaningful? It's not that administravia isn't important or worthy of public notice; it's just that too few people seem to be noticing what's going on inside the schools, and I'd hazard the proposition that conveying information about the actual state and practice of education should be a higher priority.

The Intercepts blog has a great post about new explanations for the budget crunch many school districts are feeling:

Public education funding in the United States is largely a factor of enrollment. The more students there are in the public schools, the more money they receive from the taxpayers. Spending that money, however, is largely a factor of the size of the education labor force. About 82 cents of every dollar spent on K-12 public education goes toward the salaries and benefits of school employees, the majority of whom are teachers.

How those two factors mesh determines whether a school system runs on, over, or under budget. NEA's tables clearly indicate that the reason so many states are having education funding problems -- and why the average teacher salary is not higher -- is not because of NCLB, cheapskate taxpayers, stingy administrators, or any of the other usual targets. It's because as a percentage of the whole, we're hiring more teachers -- many more teachers -- than we're enrolling students to support them.

In 2004-05, America enrolled 297,101 more students than in 2003-04. But it employed 49,732 more teachers. That's 1 teacher for every additional 6 students.

The question is, where should we look for solutions? Most obviously, we could increase the number of new students (infeasible) or reduce the number of new students (undesirable). The third, more reasonable option would be to reform the way we finance public education. Start by eliminating the arcane use of property taxes which is inherently inequitable, and, as this data is demonstrating, design a system that doesn't rely overwhelmingly on per-pupil appropriations. More teachers -- and especially more good teachers, which is really the key -- can't be had on the cheap, no matter what Jay Greene would have you think.

It seems like school finance has fallen by the wayside in the contemporary debates about high-stakes testing, standards and the achievement gap, but funding is inextricably linked to each and every educational endeavor -- we're setting ourselves up for failure if we ignore this particular broken aspect of the system.

The Education Wonks recently noted this eyebrow-trampolining story out of Florida:

Struggling Miami-Dade high school students have bypassed the state's graduation exam by enrolling in a strip-mall private school that promises diplomas in as little as 48 hours, a Herald investigation has found.

Many of the students who attended American Academy High School Corp. were guided there by Miami-Dade school system employees, including the head football coach at Booker T. Washington Senior High and a state senator who runs the district's 5000 Role Models mentoring program.

Sen. Frederica Wilson, a former School Board member, said she has even paid the tuition for about 15 teenagers to get diplomas at American Academy. Wilson said the students, like many who have attended American, repeatedly had failed the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, which they must pass to earn a state-issued diploma.

With their American Academy diplomas, students have been able to land jobs, win athletic scholarships and enroll in colleges, including Miami Dade College and Florida International University.

Without those diplomas, Wilson said, many of them would have few options and could end up in prison.

''We can either let them get a diploma and get a job at UPS or the Omni hotel or as a security guard . . . or we can let them walk around, rob you and me, and sell drugs to our children,'' Wilson said.

[...]

Private schools are almost entirely unregulated under Florida law. They do not use the FCAT. They are not required to hire certified teachers. They do not need to follow state standards for textbooks or curriculum.

The whole thing's really worth a read, if for nothing more than the sheer gawking value. Yet, while our initial reactions are likely to be umbrage if not outrage, the situation in Florida underscores an important point: Currently, the only two options available to teenagers are getting a high school diploma (at any cost) or being relegated to a life with few options outside of the seedy.

As it is, the high school diploma is starting to lose value compared to a bachelor's or postsecondary degree, and already those with just a high school diploma are twice as likely to be unemployed as those with higher degrees, not to mention likely to earn about half as much annually. Still, the high school diploma is the most fundamental unit of employment currency -- of potenital-reaching currency -- and its importance as a baseline should not be underestimated.

So then we come again to what I termed the "graduation conundrum," which I stated as this: "We have to choose between lowering graduation standards and letting everyone graduate even if they don't have a full set of basic skills, or raising graduation standards and ensuring that everyone who graduates is properly armed but shut out a multitude of students who have done nothing wrong."

While the ultimate solution is to fix K-12 education such that no student reaches 12th grade unable to pass a shockingly easy exit exam, I'm becoming more convinced that there needs to be a short-term stopgap measure as well. As an aside, I don't blame the exit exam itself; there is inconclusive evidence, but it seems that exit exams have at worst a minor impact on dropout rates.

For instance -- and this is just off the top of my head -- what about setting up public, school system-run "halfway houses" for the relatively small numbers of students who reach the end of high school unable to either meet their diploma requirements or pass their exit exam. These could be intensive programs focusing specifically on the skills in which students are deficient and which would in the latter case lead to an extra chance to retest. (Something like this may already exist that I'm just not aware of -- anyone?) As we've seen, the lure of a diploma is an extreme motivator. Alternatively, there's the 5th year of high school option that some Washington, D.C. schools have begun implementing. I'm sure there are any number of other ideas.

All I know is that the utter desparation that leads kids -- and even educators! -- to seek asylum in these private diploma mills that are the educational equivalent of slums is not born of laziness but rather fear. Fear of a life in which your resume might get you into a McDonalds interview but more likely is going to get you on the streets, and fear of dreams which dissapate on the wind. There are no good options here for the teenagers stuck in this vice, and while the constant goal must be to obliterate the entire contraption, until then we should be finding ways to alleviate the ungodly pressure.

Suggesting that the state of education journalism is weak is, among us aspiring wonks, as uncontroversial as suggesting that the Earth revolves around the Sun. However, this piece by Lori Aratani in today's Washington Post caught my eye because it is just so gut-wrenchingly poor, and indicitative of how the Fourth Estate (of which I am currently a card-carrying member) is too often failing the public with regards to education news.

It's still eight months before Clarksburg High School opens its doors to students, but already there is much drama surrounding the debut of Montgomery County's newest campus.

Lori Martin said she and other families want their kids to go to the newly renovated, state-of-the-art, 175,000-plus-square-foot Clarksburg.

At the same time other parents like Tammy Hertel, whose children are slated to go to Clarksburg, are hoping to keep their children out of the new school and on their current campuses.

Set aside for a moment the stilted writing style (more on that in a second), but: What drama? A new school is opening, and some parents want their kids to go while others don't. Far as I know, that's standard operating procedure. Moreover, there's a good point right there in the first sentence -- it's December! Without relevance or timelineness, why in the world is this story being written? Of course, here comes the whopper:

How the dispute will end remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: Change is never easy, especially when it involves Clarksburg. And when change involves school boundaries, potential college scholarships and the academic futures of thousands of children, it can get downright ugly.

Ok, first of all, now it's fair to say this looks like it was written for a high school journalism class, not one of the most respected and widely read newspapers in America. Secondly, why "especially when it involves Clarksburg"? Is there something special about Clarksburg that makes this any different than an article that could have been written about dozens of new schools opening around the nation or just in the area? Do any of those schools not have issues involving boundaries, scholarships and the academic futures of thousands of children?

The rest of the article is more of the same, but my overarching point here is not to skewer Aratani for writing a cruddy piece. Having been immersed in the journalist's world, I know it's entirely possible this was a second- or third-option space-filler story handed off at the last minute. My overarching point is that education journalism tends to be the space-fillers, and education journalists tend to be the ones who drew the short straw.

There are two veins in which the paucity of quality education reporters shows itself most clearly -- story selection and the more technical aspects of depth and conveyance of information. The latter needs little elaboration, and story selection can be summed up in one point: The Post decided to write about the Sept. 2006 opening of Clarksburg H.S., a non-story on its own merits, in December. The majority of education stories seem to be (just anecdotally speaking) focused around school administravia and school board meetings. It is the exception rather than the rule to find an article that is actually about the classroom; about actual pedagogy; about actual teachers; about the effects of policies on the ground, on the readers' kids. This, in turn, seriously hinders the publics' ability to comprehend the practical problems in education or the actual impact of policy debates -- and that lack of understanding helps no one.

The media's position is at least understandable: Education as it's traditionally covered, while consistently considered a national priority, is not a particularly good read. Except in the case of scandal, people don't dash to the nearest newstand to read about last night's school board meeting. That seeming contradiction -- readers being interested in education but not interested in reading about it -- suggests to me that there's a large flaw with the coverage.

At some point soon, then, there needs to be a significant revolution in education journalism. It's just one piece of a much larger puzzle, and far from the first item on the agenda, but any serious reform is going to have to slog that much harder through the mud if the media continues to give education such short shrift.

My pals at the EdTrust have come out with another excellent study, this one entitled "Gaining Traction, Gaining Ground," comparing characteristics of high-impact high schools serving disadvantaged populations versus average-impact high schools. I've long held that disadvantaged schools are not inherently consigned to be bad, so what's more interesting to me is a tangential question -- namely, where even the high-impact schools (and it should be noted that high-impact is a qualified, relative term) fall short.

The report focused on 7 public high schools and found that, with regards to instruction:

While methods of instruction were similar across all schools – we observed very traditional lectures in most classes – we found significant differences in the content of assignments given to students.

An analysis of math assignments shows that the math skills taught and required in high-impact schools were on grade level about 74 percent ofthe time, while in average-impact schools this was true only 50 percent of the time. Similarly, the math content in math courses at high-impact schools was on grade level about 57 percent of the time, but only 23 percent of the time for average-impact schools. We defined math skills as the knowledge of algorithms and math content as the application of algorithms to model real-world situations.

Another big difference is in attention to reading. Roughly three in four students at high-impact schools report reading books in their English classes, while only 62.2 percent of students in average-impact schools reported doing so. We also found that below-grade level students in high-impact schools spent more instructional time in reading-heavy courses. Surveys of the teachers themselves showed a similar pattern. Nearly 71 percent of English teachers at high-impact high schools reported that they assigned students to read every day. That compares to roughly 59 percent of English teachers at average-impact schools.

The extent of classroom discussion as an instructional tool also differed. Nearly three in four students surveyed at high-impact high schools say they participate in class discussions, compared to about half of students in average-impact schools...

What raises my eyebrows are the high bounds numbers. Less than 60% of students in the high-impact schools being taught application of math skills on grade level. No more than 75% reading books in English class, and the same number participating in class discussions.

There is a reason why most of our students are sputtering out the door of high school; a reason why our graduation rates are so abysmally low; a reason why a third of college freshman have to take at least one remedial course, and why we lose nearly a half of every overall college freshman class. Truly, if the best instruction is this skewed, what hope do the multitude of students in mediocre and poor schools have?

It's incredibly hard to get an honest picture of what's actually going on in classrooms across the country. The EdTrust findings back up the TIMSS video study and NAEP teacher/student surveys with regards to how far we are from universally rigorous, engaging, mastery-oriented instruction. I know all the excuses -- it's hard, the kids can't do it, the teachers aren't good enough -- but those are simply excuses, challenges to be overcome. If strategies can move high-impact schools from the 50 and 60 percent range to the 70 to 80 percent range, surely better strategies can move us into the 90s, and surely better strategies can improve the efficacy of that instruction.

We talk and talk and talk about maintaining high standards and aligning our curricula to them. I'd like to see us take as our charge the standard of producing a generation of thinkers, and I'd like to see us align our curricula to that.

The continued dominance of traditional lectures, less than half of English classes regularly using group discussions and a fourth in some of our best schools not regularly assigning books, a fourth of students not even speaking when those rare discussions occur, more than half of our average 8th grade math classes spent reviewing, a majority of 17-year-olds unable to answer a simple constructed response question on irregular rectangles, 50% of minority students graduating, low-income students with a 9% chance of getting a bachelor's by age 25.... in truth, the raging debate over standardized testing is like arguing about a traffic ticket while a meteor comes crashing down on your house.

It's time to look up.

One of my friends, a fellow Wahoo, fellow EdTrust intern and a Teach For America corps member in the Mississippi Delta, is trying to raise enough money to bring his 6th grade class to Washington, D.C. for an educational field trip over their spring break. This would be an incredible opportunity for these underprivileged kids, many of whom have never been out of the state, and I encourage you all to check out the website and seriously consider contributing:


Delta to DC

How many times do students actually know why they're being taught something? [comic from Frazz]