Recently a committe of the Legislature was informed that the cost to taxpayers of each young person confined in a juvenile institution amounts to approximately $115,000 per year of incarceration. It also turns out that about 90% of the young people who commit crimes requiring sentencing to juvenile institutions are school dropouts. There is obviously a strong connection between crime and failure in school. The cost to taxpayers for students who drop out or flunk out of school and then turn to crime is at least ten times the cost per pupil for students who remain in school. There is also a major cost to taxpayers for those dropouts or flunk outs who somehow resist the temptation to do crime. Most of these young people have no job skills and end up on the welfare rolls where they are supported by the taxpayers instead of becoming productive citizens. It turns out therefore that Louisiana taxpayers have a major stake in keeping more students in school and insuring that they are prepared with marketable work skills.
This problem belongs to all of us whether we want to face it or not. We must either find a way to educate all children or be prepared to support them in prison or on the welfare roles. Its pay now or pay later.
So why do we continue to allow fully 40% of our children to leave school without an education? The cost to our state of such a tragedy makes the cost of the gulf oil spill look like peanuts. The failure of our education system of almost half of our students is the elephant in the room dragging down the economy of our state, yet it is barely noticed by our policy makers.
Newspaper accounts of higher salaries this year for new positions in our Department of Education while most local school systems are reducing teacher ranks and increasing class size are amazing! It reminds me of the bonuses paid to Wall Street bankers after their extremely poor job performance bankrupted their companies and forced a bailout by taxpayers. Louisiana taxpayers are also funding a public school “Recovery District” which pays generous salaries to top administrators while hiring inexpensive two-year “teach for America” instructors. This state takeover school system continues to produce the lowest graduation rate in the state.
Unfortunately Louisiana's next round of “reform” which consists of implementing the new National Curriculum Standards will likely result in more dropouts. That's because all the emphasis is being placed on implementation of a college prep curriculum for all. No one has figured out how to convince the thousands of students who are disengaging from our education system as they reach middle school and high school to actually buy into these new and improved standards. One of the most ridiculous statements I saw coming from the Obama administration recently was a comment that “many students are doing poorly in school in our country because the curriculum is not challenging enough!" I don't know about the other states, but in Louisiana, the issue with our students is not whether the curriculum is challenging, but much more whether it is relevant to their lives. A subject is not challenging to a student if he has no interest or motivation to learn the material. The problem is that few of our education policy makers or highly paid Education Department heads have made the effort to make school relevant to our huge underclass of "at risk" students. The educational system cannot succeed by attempting to apply middle class values and goals to students who come from a different world.
The so called high stakes testing system is a failure. High standards and high minded rhetoric does not educate students if there is no practical plan for getting students to buy into the system. Our educational system must connect with these students where they are, not where we think they should be. We need to find ways for these students to succeed, instead of adding to the barriers to their success. Programs that have been shown to connect with at risk students such as Jobs for America's Graduates and career development programs, which include job shadowing and mentoring beginning at the middle school level must be implemented on a statewide basis if we are to see results. The cost of career coaches in critical schools would be more than paid for by savings from Louisiana's Corrections budget. Every student has strengths that the school system should constantly strive to identify and nurture rather than focus only on his/her failures.
Maybe if tackling Louisiana's continuing dropout problem were viewed purely as a way of saving taxpayer dollars, we would have a better chance of getting action on a crisis much bigger than the BP oil spill.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Monday, July 12, 2010
Education Department Reorganization
I know I'm repeating myself, but someone needs to constantly remind educators and the general public in Louisiana that education in our state is headed in the wrong direction. Recently, BESE approved a reorganization plan proposed by Superintendent Pastorek that continues to ignore the real problems in Louisiana elementary and secondary schools. Pastorek was quoted as saying the new Department “will be the envy of the country” (which shows that he continues to have delusions of grandeur) The new plan continues the trend of hiring highly paid department heads that seem to have little experience in Louisiana elementary/secondary education with the notable exception of St Tammany Supt. Gayle Sloan. The plan continues to require all school systems in the state to offer a “one size fits all” plan of education to an extremely diverse population of students. I just can't help but cringe when I see statements in the reorganization plan like “ all students will perform at or above grade level in English and Math by grade 8”. To a naive non-educator such a statement may sound good, but it is an unrealistic goal that can only lead to greater frustration with public education.
It is completely appropriate to place maximum emphasis in our elementary/secondary school system on basic skills such as reading, language arts and math. What is wrong about the Department plan and extremely frustrating to experienced educators is to expect all students to perform at the same levels in these critical subjects. To expect all students to perform at or above grade level is something called the “Lake Wobegon effect”. (Lake Wobegon is a mythical community created by radio celebrity Garrison Keeler who describes his imagined home town as a place where "all women are strong, all men are good looking, and all children are above average". Its a joke!) This is a cute idea for a radio skit but why would our Education Department decide to actually adopt it as a goal for all schools in our state?
Grade level achievement has its origin in the results of standardized testing (not criterion referenced testing), where the test results of a national representative sample of students are distributed along a bell curve, and analysts carve out a swath of scores on both sides of the median score and decree this group as achieving at grade level. The students testing below and above this section of the bell curve are deemed to be performing below and above grade level. There is nothing educationally significant about grade level achievement except that is is near the average for our national student population. Different populations of students depending mostly on their socioeconomic background will produce results skewed somewhat below or above the national results. Our goal in Louisiana education should be to constantly improve our student's performance in the basic skills, not to have them achieve an unrealistic goal of being “average or above” like the kids from Lake Wobegon. That's why a value added approach makes much more sense than such an unrealistic goal as a measure of educational progress. Yet our state department continues to hold up totally arbitrary and unrealistic goals as measures that the public will eventually expect our schools to achieve. Goals like "by the year 2015, all schools will achieve a school performance score of 120"!
Something else is wrong with our one size fits all education plan. When all students are expected to achieve at or above grade level in certain subjects, the system misses the opportunity to focus on the strengths of individual students. For example, by 8th grade, a particular student may be found to be two grade levels behind in reading. This is a perfectly natural result based on the wide variation in student aptitude and home environments. It does not mean that the student is defective, or that his/her teachers were negligent or incompetent. Yet our system is now set up to penalize both the student and the teacher for this perfectly natural result. This same student may possess several exceptional talents in other areas such as artistic ability, mechanical dexterity, or social abilities that would qualify the student for a valuable career. Unfortunately our system of education makes no effort to identify and capitalize on individual students strengths and interests. Many students would love to have career training starting as early as middle school. If the school system were oriented to the interests, needs and abilities of the student, much could be done to develop a plan of education for each student that would truly engage the student in preparing for his career.
Our Education Department just doesn't get it. We keep trying to force feed the same diet to all students when all have different nutritional needs. We have raised the mandatory attendance age to 18, the legislature has set a goal of 80% graduation rate, yet students and their parents continue to evade the system. Fully 40% of our students avoid public education like a toxic oil spill. Now kids are registering for home schooling in large numbers to escape mandatory attendance, and in urban areas like East Baton Rouge and New Orleans, students are simply transferring from school to the streets in such large numbers that they cannot possibly be rounded up by authorities. In a country that claims to have invented the free market system, where customers can choose from an infinite variety of products, our public school students are treated like the citizens of communist era Russia. The present system, even as reorganized will continue to lose support among all stakeholders.
It is completely appropriate to place maximum emphasis in our elementary/secondary school system on basic skills such as reading, language arts and math. What is wrong about the Department plan and extremely frustrating to experienced educators is to expect all students to perform at the same levels in these critical subjects. To expect all students to perform at or above grade level is something called the “Lake Wobegon effect”. (Lake Wobegon is a mythical community created by radio celebrity Garrison Keeler who describes his imagined home town as a place where "all women are strong, all men are good looking, and all children are above average". Its a joke!) This is a cute idea for a radio skit but why would our Education Department decide to actually adopt it as a goal for all schools in our state?
Grade level achievement has its origin in the results of standardized testing (not criterion referenced testing), where the test results of a national representative sample of students are distributed along a bell curve, and analysts carve out a swath of scores on both sides of the median score and decree this group as achieving at grade level. The students testing below and above this section of the bell curve are deemed to be performing below and above grade level. There is nothing educationally significant about grade level achievement except that is is near the average for our national student population. Different populations of students depending mostly on their socioeconomic background will produce results skewed somewhat below or above the national results. Our goal in Louisiana education should be to constantly improve our student's performance in the basic skills, not to have them achieve an unrealistic goal of being “average or above” like the kids from Lake Wobegon. That's why a value added approach makes much more sense than such an unrealistic goal as a measure of educational progress. Yet our state department continues to hold up totally arbitrary and unrealistic goals as measures that the public will eventually expect our schools to achieve. Goals like "by the year 2015, all schools will achieve a school performance score of 120"!
Something else is wrong with our one size fits all education plan. When all students are expected to achieve at or above grade level in certain subjects, the system misses the opportunity to focus on the strengths of individual students. For example, by 8th grade, a particular student may be found to be two grade levels behind in reading. This is a perfectly natural result based on the wide variation in student aptitude and home environments. It does not mean that the student is defective, or that his/her teachers were negligent or incompetent. Yet our system is now set up to penalize both the student and the teacher for this perfectly natural result. This same student may possess several exceptional talents in other areas such as artistic ability, mechanical dexterity, or social abilities that would qualify the student for a valuable career. Unfortunately our system of education makes no effort to identify and capitalize on individual students strengths and interests. Many students would love to have career training starting as early as middle school. If the school system were oriented to the interests, needs and abilities of the student, much could be done to develop a plan of education for each student that would truly engage the student in preparing for his career.
Our Education Department just doesn't get it. We keep trying to force feed the same diet to all students when all have different nutritional needs. We have raised the mandatory attendance age to 18, the legislature has set a goal of 80% graduation rate, yet students and their parents continue to evade the system. Fully 40% of our students avoid public education like a toxic oil spill. Now kids are registering for home schooling in large numbers to escape mandatory attendance, and in urban areas like East Baton Rouge and New Orleans, students are simply transferring from school to the streets in such large numbers that they cannot possibly be rounded up by authorities. In a country that claims to have invented the free market system, where customers can choose from an infinite variety of products, our public school students are treated like the citizens of communist era Russia. The present system, even as reorganized will continue to lose support among all stakeholders.
Friday, July 2, 2010
Setting Louisiana Students Up for Failure
Recent LEAP testing results seemed somewhat disappointing to State Superintendent Pastorek as judged by the tone of the press release announcing the 2010 LEAP results. 2010 scores at some grades and in some subject areas such as 4th grade English Language Arts showed a decline from the results for 2009. This prompted Pastorek to vow to redouble efforts to intensify instruction in these key areas. But for thousands of Louisiana students, their personal results particularly for high stakes LEAP are downright disastrous. The students who have not met promotional standards at 4th, or 8th grade or on the high school Graduation Exit Exam are heading into a blind alley with little chance of escape from failure and poverty. That's because there is no viable alternative for students who fail LEAP. Its do or die, yet for many students who are far too immature to understand the devastating consequences of high stakes testing on the rest of their lives, failure becomes part of their destiny.
The Department of Education press release pointed to some minor improvements in some grades as bright spots but it was obvious that no amount of “spin” could cover up the fact that LEAP scores are not improving at the rate needed to improve the graduation rate and certainly not the level demanded by the Superintendent to create a “World Class Education System”. After all, his national reputation as a “school turnaround” leader is at stake. That's why we can expect more and more “spin” on the student testing data as time goes on without real progress.
For example, the official graduation rate calculated by the State Department for Louisiana students differs significantly from the Louisiana graduation rate calculated by Education Week magazine. (The Education Week calculation shows a much lower graduation rate) The Department press release on this issue goes to great lengths to explain that the Department method (the cohort method) is the official method approved by the National Governor's Association and therefore should be more credible. The only problem is that the cohort method has several opportunities for excluding students from the calculation that could artificially inflate the graduation rate. Without an independent evaluation of the parameters and algorithms used in the official calculation there is no way to know how much is spin and how much is fact.
The Department press release also “spins” the small percentage increase in high school students passing the Graduation exit exam in 2010, and credits the efforts of the High School Redesign Commission with this supposedly improved result. It is quite possible however that this slight improvement could be due to students dropping out before taking these tests. For example in the New Orleans Recovery District, Dr. Barbara Ferguson,(click on this link to view the full study) an independent researcher for Research on Reforms.org, has found that a decreasing percentage of Orleans students are actually taking the 10th grade GEE compared to 5 years ago. Even so, in that school district, the GEE unsatisfactory rate is 38% and 44% for English/Language arts and Math respectively and equally poor for Science and Social Studies. (these unsatisfactory results combine to prevent graduation). But in addition to these extremely poor results, Dr Ferguson points out it is obvious that many students who started the school year never stayed to take the GEE. An alternative way of calculating the graduation rate is to take the average enrollment for the lower grades (in the N. O. Recovery District this was about 1745 students per grade in 2008) and compare that to the number actually graduating (728) to get an effective graduation rate of only 42%. This means that approximately 58% of the New Orleans Recovery District students are ending up on the streets with no diploma. As I have pointed out in previous blogs, this is the system I call College Prep or Jail prep.
At one time Pastorek speeches contained statements such as the following: “We believe that if we raise the bar our students will meet the challenge and perform better.” Also: “We want to insure that a high school diploma means something in Louisiana.” Those are the kind of statements that always got applause from the Chamber of Commerce or the Rotary Club crowd. Its very popular to “spin” education efforts in this way but it does absolutely nothing to help the kids that are doomed to failure by our one size fits all educational system.
Consider the following:
At one time Pastorek and his followers thought that the threat of failure at the 4th and 8th grade levels would force students to meet standards with a resulting improvement in their educational attainment. Even though thousands of students have been held back as a result of this policy and there has been some improvement in LEAP scores, the NAEP test which measures the same knowledge shows almost no change. Yet we have failed thousands of students to implement this flawed theory. In recent years, the Department has quietly encouraged BESE to modify the high stakes policy to allow students to move on past 4th and 8th grade without meeting the LEAP minimums. Yet the press releases still pretend that Louisiana has high stakes standards for promotion.
Now the problem has shifted over to the high schools. High school principals are complaining that the relaxation of the state promotion policy means that they are now receiving thousands of unprepared students at the high school level and are being forced to provide more and more remedial classes. The problem is the remedial classes make little difference. Over aged and discouraged students are dropping out in droves. Also some of the supervisors of child welfare are reporting that many parents of failing high school students are signing them up for home schooling to escape the mandatory attendance laws. It is assumed that almost none of these students are attaining a diploma or GED. But because the State Department does not follow these students, their graduation results are not available and they are not recorded as drop outs.
Meanwhile the State Department is in the process of phasing out the GED Options program, and continues to discourage the use of the Career Diploma as a means of addressing the needs of non-college bound students. Teachers complain that forcing all students to take college prep courses is resulting in a general watering down of the content of those courses. As far as I know, there is no evidence that High School Redesign is resulting in improved success for our students attending four year colleges.
This insanity in the governance of elementary/secondary education in Louisiana reminds me of the chaos that mortgage brokers and investment bankers created in recent years in the U. S. by developing the sub-prime mortgage system and the related deceptive financial instruments. It all looked good on the surface until the house of cards collapsed.
The question for Louisiana is how long can we continue to tolerate a 40 percent non-graduation rate and the accompanying affect on poverty and crime? Its like the BP oil spill. We are all paying for this one way or the other.
The Department of Education press release pointed to some minor improvements in some grades as bright spots but it was obvious that no amount of “spin” could cover up the fact that LEAP scores are not improving at the rate needed to improve the graduation rate and certainly not the level demanded by the Superintendent to create a “World Class Education System”. After all, his national reputation as a “school turnaround” leader is at stake. That's why we can expect more and more “spin” on the student testing data as time goes on without real progress.
For example, the official graduation rate calculated by the State Department for Louisiana students differs significantly from the Louisiana graduation rate calculated by Education Week magazine. (The Education Week calculation shows a much lower graduation rate) The Department press release on this issue goes to great lengths to explain that the Department method (the cohort method) is the official method approved by the National Governor's Association and therefore should be more credible. The only problem is that the cohort method has several opportunities for excluding students from the calculation that could artificially inflate the graduation rate. Without an independent evaluation of the parameters and algorithms used in the official calculation there is no way to know how much is spin and how much is fact.
The Department press release also “spins” the small percentage increase in high school students passing the Graduation exit exam in 2010, and credits the efforts of the High School Redesign Commission with this supposedly improved result. It is quite possible however that this slight improvement could be due to students dropping out before taking these tests. For example in the New Orleans Recovery District, Dr. Barbara Ferguson,(click on this link to view the full study) an independent researcher for Research on Reforms.org, has found that a decreasing percentage of Orleans students are actually taking the 10th grade GEE compared to 5 years ago. Even so, in that school district, the GEE unsatisfactory rate is 38% and 44% for English/Language arts and Math respectively and equally poor for Science and Social Studies. (these unsatisfactory results combine to prevent graduation). But in addition to these extremely poor results, Dr Ferguson points out it is obvious that many students who started the school year never stayed to take the GEE. An alternative way of calculating the graduation rate is to take the average enrollment for the lower grades (in the N. O. Recovery District this was about 1745 students per grade in 2008) and compare that to the number actually graduating (728) to get an effective graduation rate of only 42%. This means that approximately 58% of the New Orleans Recovery District students are ending up on the streets with no diploma. As I have pointed out in previous blogs, this is the system I call College Prep or Jail prep.
At one time Pastorek speeches contained statements such as the following: “We believe that if we raise the bar our students will meet the challenge and perform better.” Also: “We want to insure that a high school diploma means something in Louisiana.” Those are the kind of statements that always got applause from the Chamber of Commerce or the Rotary Club crowd. Its very popular to “spin” education efforts in this way but it does absolutely nothing to help the kids that are doomed to failure by our one size fits all educational system.
Consider the following:
At one time Pastorek and his followers thought that the threat of failure at the 4th and 8th grade levels would force students to meet standards with a resulting improvement in their educational attainment. Even though thousands of students have been held back as a result of this policy and there has been some improvement in LEAP scores, the NAEP test which measures the same knowledge shows almost no change. Yet we have failed thousands of students to implement this flawed theory. In recent years, the Department has quietly encouraged BESE to modify the high stakes policy to allow students to move on past 4th and 8th grade without meeting the LEAP minimums. Yet the press releases still pretend that Louisiana has high stakes standards for promotion.
Now the problem has shifted over to the high schools. High school principals are complaining that the relaxation of the state promotion policy means that they are now receiving thousands of unprepared students at the high school level and are being forced to provide more and more remedial classes. The problem is the remedial classes make little difference. Over aged and discouraged students are dropping out in droves. Also some of the supervisors of child welfare are reporting that many parents of failing high school students are signing them up for home schooling to escape the mandatory attendance laws. It is assumed that almost none of these students are attaining a diploma or GED. But because the State Department does not follow these students, their graduation results are not available and they are not recorded as drop outs.
Meanwhile the State Department is in the process of phasing out the GED Options program, and continues to discourage the use of the Career Diploma as a means of addressing the needs of non-college bound students. Teachers complain that forcing all students to take college prep courses is resulting in a general watering down of the content of those courses. As far as I know, there is no evidence that High School Redesign is resulting in improved success for our students attending four year colleges.
This insanity in the governance of elementary/secondary education in Louisiana reminds me of the chaos that mortgage brokers and investment bankers created in recent years in the U. S. by developing the sub-prime mortgage system and the related deceptive financial instruments. It all looked good on the surface until the house of cards collapsed.
The question for Louisiana is how long can we continue to tolerate a 40 percent non-graduation rate and the accompanying affect on poverty and crime? Its like the BP oil spill. We are all paying for this one way or the other.
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