|
|
|
Welcome to EdSpeak.org!
EdSpeak.org was created to collect, study, and exchange information on how to improve PreK-12 public schools. Visitors to this site can look at school reform models, ideas about assessment, the results of our partnership work, portable classrooms (EduCrate), a new theory for teaching and learning (VIA), and a visual gallery of student work. EdSpeak.org is the public website of The SchoolWorks Lab, Inc., a non-profit organization founded by educator Rob Southworth. We help schools, districts and education organizations make sense of school reform. Please enjoy your time here on the site!
|
Home
|
No State has Taken Over a Failing School |
|
|
|
|
Written by Robert A. Southworth Jr.
|
|
Tuesday, 16 October 2007 |
The New York Times reports today that under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the 2001 education law that is up for reconsideration this year, no school that has been labeled as "failing" has been taken over by the state, as the current law stipulates.
The Bush administration is pushing for narrow sanctions agaisnt schools who are labeled failing. The problem is compounded by the fact that poor schools seem to be targeted with no solutions except to close. For example, California has 6000 poor schools out of a total of 9000. Closing schools might be a good idea if there was some alternative. In New York City, the alternative is to close large failing high schools, and restructure them into groups of smaller high schools who share the original high school's facility.
No state has taken over a failing school because the alternatives to
closing a failing school are few and far between. If you choose to
label a school a failure as determined by testing you are ignoring lots
of other data. If you choose to restructure that failing school, you
then need to come up with four or more new schools, four or more new
teachers, and four or more new ways of doing business. I cannot stress
enough, however, that the government under NCLB is implementing a
failing Policy when it labels schools as "failures."
NCLB labels schools as failures by means of standardized testing. The underlying causes for a school's failure are not addressed. Any solution that ignores the wealth of unexamined data will perish in its own time. The crisis is not at the school level, rather, it is at the national level. We need to redisgn the system to be responsive to the Versatile Intelligence and Assessment, VIA (Southworth, 2006) of every child.
Educators all over the country share their frustrations with the NCLB law and its narrow use of standardized test data. In my mind, the continued use of limited data, in this case one test score from students on one standardized test, is ignoring the vast amount of data on student thinking, ability to make adequate yearly progress, and the variety of versatility of student intelligence on a wide range of academic tasks that are ignored when making these high stakes decisions.
|
|
|
Radical Change: NYC Schools Decentralize |
|
|
|
|
Written by Robert A. Southworth Jr.
|
|
Wednesday, 05 September 2007 |
Chancellor Klein may well turn out to be the longest running head of
NYC schools in many years. He has worked hard to eliminate traditional
superintendents offices, consolidating power in the central office, and
launching an urban school reform that may be the largest experiment in
American education today. This year's reform finds 1500 schools and
their principals experiencing the reverse of centralization—the most
radical decentralizing school reform in NYC history—as they are
released from regulations, allowed to make local decisions, and
accountable for showing adequate yearly progress on standardized test
scores.
Diane Ravitch, who has worked 40 years on historical research in this
city, thinks this is the most radical reform in school history and the
Chancellor thinks the change is profound. Other big city systems are
coming to look into the work here, but the rub is twofold: how well are
schools really improving and what role is there for parents in a
centralized/decentralized system?
In seven years, school scores seem to be moving forward, more in math than reading, and
graduation rates are up in new schools but flat across the system. No radical change in scores accompanies the change in school policies. The Chancellor's style of leadership is one of breaking the teacher unions, breaking
the trust of parents, and breaking up bad schools into smaller schools, or even breaking how schools work by allowing more and more Charter Schools.
Not all of this is bad, but the Policy strategy is to break the old
connections, and this indeed may be what was needed. In breaking the
ties with parents, in particular the stranglehold of mostly upper
middle class white parents, he may have broken the old New York adage that if
you are a savvy parent, you can navigate your way through the system by
being an advocate for your child's education, and by implication, somehow squndering other children's chances for a good education.
I personally know that some schools on the upper west side are
responding by placing their best teachers in general education
classrooms so that test scores will go up. I know principals are very worried about their first report cards. I also know some parents who
thought they had their child's class placement wired and yet when they
arrived this year, their kids were switched into other classrooms. The
outcome for some of them will be to yank their kid to the suburbs and
for others, it may mean the beginning of real equity of opportunity for
learning, real report cards for how schools perform, and real
accountability for all kids to learn well. I can only hope.
|
|
|
Summer Seminar in 11th year |
|
|
|
|
Written by Robert A. Southworth Jr.
|
|
Wednesday, 11 July 2007 |
|
I am just about to go off for the week as a faculty member at Summer Seminar. Summer Seminar is an intensive, weeklong retreat held annually
for a wide range of participants, including school-based
practitioners and administrators, teaching artists
and cultural administrators.
The retreat is sponsored by Empire State
Partnerships (ESP) and provides dedicated planning time,
access to ESP faculty made up of nationally renowned
Arts and Education consultants, intensive study of
Performance Assessment, Reflective Practice techniques,
Integrated Curriculum strategies and partnership strengthening
techniques. The seminar is open to non-ESP arts-in-education practitioners and annually attracts participants from across the nation.
http://www.espartsed.org/index.php
The Mission
of ESP: Empire State
Partnerships (ESP) is dedicated to identifying, supporting
and developing promising practices in collaborations
between cultural organizations and schools.
The focus of the project is on the achievement
of the New York State Learning Standards and contributing
to the improvement of teaching and learning in New York
Schools.
The History
of ESP: The
project was launched in 1996 as a joint initiative
of the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA)
and the New York State Education Department (NYSED).
These
agencies united with the goal of raising standards for students and
integrating and reinstating the arts into classrooms throughout New
York State. ESP is a program of the New York State Council on the Arts
(NYSCA) and is fiscally supported by the Metropolitan Opera Guild.
|
|
|
Written by Robert A. Southworth Jr.
|
|
Thursday, 10 May 2007 |
A new and simpler funding formula for 1400 NYC Schools was announced by Chancellor Klein on May 8, 2007. The basis for the forumula is to give more money to schools that serve low-achieving students, children from
low-income families and those who speak limited English:
http://schools.nyc.gov/Offices/ChildrenFirst/FairStudentFunding/CitywideBudgetData/default.htm.
The New York TImes points out that the new system would yield new funding weightings such as:
For instance, a general student in kindergarten through fifth grade
has a weight of 1.0, worth $3,788, while sixth through eighth graders
have a weight of 1.08, worth $4,091, and high school students have a
weight of 1.03, worth $3,902.
The system assigns additional weights for students with limited
English ability, those from low-income families and those who are
struggling academically. For example, an English learner in middle
school would get an extra 0.5 weight, worth $1,894. Special Education
students were assigned weights intended to maintain the level of
services they currently receive, which are mostly mandated by law. (May 9, 2007).
This represents a bold choice, a head-on attack on arcane and complex funding and a move for improved instruction for typically under-served children. I applaud this effort, although many parent groups of good schools, such as the school my kids go to (see below) are against this effort, because they fear that funding for their school will suffer. For example, our school's parents are worried that there would be no extra funding for gifted and talented schoolchildren (my kids are not in G&T). Additionally, political cover for re-allocation of funds is being provided by the Campaign For Fiscal equity case decsision for the schools who might lose out on this weighting system for the next two years. Then the real pain of re-allocation of funds will be felt, and we will be better able to judge the fairness embedded in the titlle of this plan.
|
|
|
Healing Together, We are Virginia Tech |
|
|
|
|
Written by Robert A. Southworth Jr.
|
|
Wednesday, 18 April 2007 |
|
I am so saddened by the loss of so many teachers and students at Virginia Tech. I know that we cannot control these kinds of rampages and a young student's pain that drives this destruction, but we can do something by rallying together, coping with our loss, and moving forward. University Distinguished Professor Nikki Giovanni, an amazing poet, closed the memorial convocation yesterday with—
We are sad today and we will be sad for
quite a while. We are not moving on. We are embracing our mourning. We
are Virginia Tech. We are strong enough to stand tall fearlessly, we
are brave enough to bend and cry, and sad enough to know we must laugh
again," Giovanni told the audience. "We will prevail! We will prevail!
We will prevail! We are Virginia Tech!
We will likely never forget this day. It is the worst mass shooting in American history. Part of the questioning we are now doing revolves around the exposure of students to trouble in an academic setting. An open university depends on free movement. The common exchange of ideas is fundamental to a free society. And, yet, even I have not been able to write about this until today. I am a little scared, confused, taken aback, sad, and most importantly beginning to think new thoughts.
And now I, Rob Southworth, am rejoining the conversation with all of you. We are Virginia Tech. I want to heal with you and I want to move forward. We are Virginia Tech. I want to make sure we do all we can to protect humans as they struggle to make sense of their world, and we are Virginia Tech. As education leaders, we must protect the teaching and learning environment, so that the confluence of ideas will yield more than the sum of their opinions—the outcome of teaching and learning must be a better society. We are Virginia Tech. Together, we will prevail. We are Virginia Tech. Peace.
|
|
|
Oppose the DOE ‘Fair Funding’ Proposal |
|
|
|
|
Written by Robert A. Southworth Jr.
|
|
Monday, 26 March 2007 |
|
My two children go to PS 166 and at the most recent PTA meeting this proposal was passed with every hand in favor...really quite remarkable. There were probably more than 50 or 60 parents in attendance for a school of 600 children, K-5.
Unanimous RESOLUTION of the
PTA of Public School 166
To Oppose the DOE ‘Fair Funding’ Proposal
26 March 2007
Whereas Chancellor Klein has proposed a Restructuring of the school system of
New York City called Fair Funding (FF), and whereas, after consideration and
deliberation, we have determined that FF is inequitable due to the weighting factors and use of average salaries; will de-motivate and drive principals from the
system due to inconsistent rules; has the probability of degrading substantially the
largest school system in the nation; and, has never before been tried, except on a small Scale; and whereas, having observed what we consider the Chancellor’s lack
of accountability due to:
|
|
|
NYC Council Questions City Schools Official on Principal Autonomy |
|
|
|
|
Written by Robert A. Southworth Jr.
|
|
Thursday, 08 March 2007 |
|
Eric Nadelstern, the city's chief executive of the empowerment initiative, was questioned by the New York City Council on why the evidence for success showed little or no progress.
City lawmakers yesterday
harshly criticized the Bloomberg administration’s plans to give many
more public school principals wider autonomy in September, telling a
top city schools official that there was not enough evidence of success
among 322 principals who received additional authority this academic
year to justify expanding the program. (New York Times, March 6, 2007).
I have worked with Eric and found him to be an excellent advocate for schools. He is the famous principal of International high school who took that school right to the top as a model for how to handle hundreds of students with different languages and support their success. Under that initiative, principals who agree to meet student performance
targets are largely freed from the oversight of superintendents.
“We’re still looking for results,” said Councilman John Liu, a
Queens Democrat, demanding that Mr. Nadelstern provide data supporting
his claims of improved attendance and graduation rates in the
empowerment schools. “You keep touting the success, and we don’t see
the success.” (New York Times, March 6, 2007).
|
|
| << Start < Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 Next > End >>
| | Results 8 - 14 of 42 |
|
