Chicago’s experience suggests school turnarounds may not help students

Education Week reports:

A majority of Chicago students affected by school closings were sent to schools that were low-performing, just like those they left behind—moves that had no significant impact on performance for most students, a study released today…

“Certainly, when schools were closed for academic reasons, the idea was to try to change their educational prospects and what they might obtain. Unfortunately, we didn’t find that,” said Julia Gwynne, a senior research analyst with the consortium and the report’s co-author. “The main reason why that seems not to have occurred was because most students did not attend schools that were substantially better than the ones that were closed.”

 

US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has expressed strong support of school turnarounds – see this post from June 2009.

US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan rails against “mediocre” schools of education

Jay Mathews reports in the Washington Post:

Education Secretary Arne Duncan, in prepared remarks circulating in advance of a speech Thursday, accuses many of the nation’s schools of education of doing “a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st-century classroom.”

The full text of Duncan’s speech can be found here.

UPDATE: As expected, Sec. Duncan’s speech has elicited much reaction. Here are examples from Education Week, Inside Higher Ed, and Reuters.

Will national education standards lead to national standardized tests?

In this post last April, I described a new push by US governors and state educational commissioners to develop national education standards for K-12. Now, Education Week reports in this article that:

As 48 states charge ahead with plans to adopt common academic standards, the U.S. Department of Education will enlist experts and the public to help design a $350 million competition for the next step: the development of common tests.

In coming weeks, top Education Department officials will travel to Atlanta, Boston, and Denver for a series of meetings that will solicit testimony from testing experts, including those with research and technical know-how, as well as to hear from the public

Can the Amazon Kindle challenge paper textbooks?

In May of this year, Amazon announced a partnership with six universities and a number of textbook publishers. College students would be given Kindles with textbooks pre-loaded onto the devices. The goal of the project was to determine how students’ experiences using the ebook reader compared with traditional paper textbooks.

The AP (via USA Today) reports that students’ response to the Kindle have been, to quote the article, “lukewarm.”

See my previous post about efforts to replace textbooks with digital resources.

Fridays are no longer school days in Hawaii

The AP (via USA Today) reports:

[Hawaii] has created the nation’s shortest school year under a new union contract that closes schools on most Fridays for the remainder of the academic calendar.

The deal whacks 17 days from the school year for budget-cutting reasons and has education advocates incensed that Hawaii is drastically cutting the academic calendar at a time when it already ranks near the bottom in national educational achievement.

While many school districts have laid off or furloughed teachers, reduced pay and planning days and otherwise cut costs, Hawaii’s 171,000 public schools students now find themselves with only 163 instructional days, compared with 180 in most districts in the U.S.

US Secretary of Education to call for reform in upcoming speech

USA Today reports:

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan plans to challenge educators, civil rights groups and others to put aside “tired arguments” about education reform to help him craft a sweeping reauthorization of federal education legislation by early 2010.

Is the future of teacher professional development online?

Education Week has published a couple of articles that examine the future of teacher professional development.

In “The Changing Landscape of Teacher Learning,” reporter Anthony Rebora interviews Harvard professor Chris Dede, an expert on online PD. In “Online Professional Development Weighed as Cost-Saving Tactic,” Michelle R. Davis examines some schools’ efforts to streamline their teacher development efforts by offering online PD.

Denver teachers go from “crazy idea” to new school

CNN reports:

“I have a crazy idea”: Those five words changed a simple meeting of school officials into the realization of Kim Ursetta’s dream.

Ursetta, then president of a local teachers’ union, blurted out those words 18 months ago during a meeting in the office of Denver, Colorado’s, schools superintendent…

“I want to start a new kind of school,” she said, a union-sponsored public school led by teachers, not a principal.

“I started talking about 21st century skills and wanting to prepare our kids in math and science, especially our low-income and ethnic minority students,” Ursetta said. “We’ve been doing schools the same way in this nation for 150 years, so if we don’t step up, then nothing is going to change.”

Superintendent Michael Bennet — now the state’s freshman U.S. senator — did not say no to the idea, and Ursetta walked out the door “excited” and “shocked.”

She immediately started “pulling together a group of teachers to sit down with a blank sheet of paper and ask how you would do a school differently.”

Three weeks ago, Ursetta’s dream became a reality, as Mathematics and Science Leadership Academy opened its doors to 142 kindergartners and first- and second-grade students in Denver’s mostly low-income, largely Hispanic Athmar Park neighborhood.

Academically demanding colleges tend to have higher graduation rates, study finds

USA Today reports:

Researchers studying how to improve graduation rates at public colleges and universities have come up with a surprising and counter-intuitive finding: Many students may fail to complete a bachelor’s degree not because the work is too hard — but because they’re not challenged enough.

It’s well known that colleges with the most selective admissions criteria tend to have the highest graduation rates. But even when researchers compared groups of students who had similar academic qualifications, they consistently found that those attending schools with the more demanding academic requirements were more likely to graduate.

When colleges fail to graduate students…

I’ve purposely titled this post “When colleges fail to graduate students…” to prompt you to think about the notions underlying this wording, which we hear and read in the media often… Do colleges MAKE students graduate (or not graduate)? What role do students play in their own collegiate success or failure? There’s not easy answer to this question, but this article in the NY Times argues that colleges, like all organizations, have unique cultures, and sometimes, these cultures are more or less supportive of graduation:

[Under-matching] refers to students who choose not to attend the best college they can get into. They instead go to a less selective one, perhaps one that’s closer to home or, given the torturous financial aid process, less expensive.

About half of low-income students with a high school grade-point average of at least 3.5 and an SAT score of at least 1,200 do not attend the best college they could have. Many don’t even apply. Some apply but don’t enroll. “I was really astonished by the degree to which presumptively well-qualified students from poor families under-matched,” Mr. Bowen told me.

They could have been admitted to Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus (graduation rate: 88 percent, according to College Results Online) or Michigan State (74 percent), but they went, say, to Eastern Michigan (39 percent) or Western Michigan (54 percent). If they graduate, it would be hard to get upset about their choice. But large numbers do not…

In effect, well-off students — many of whom will graduate no matter where they go — attend the colleges that do the best job of producing graduates. These are the places where many students live on campus (which raises graduation rates) and graduation is the norm. Meanwhile, lower-income students — even when they are better qualified — often go to colleges that excel in producing dropouts.