education reform

Massachusetts is in line to get $50 million dollars from the federal government for specific early education initiatives.  That's a good thing.  The more we provide quality early education and care to our youngest children, addressing their social, emotional, cognitive and language development in the early years, the more ready our children are to embrace their future as life-long learners. [Governor's press release]

“This award will enable Massachusetts to accelerate the implementation of our plan that is designed to yield improvements in our early childhood system that significantly raises the level of quality opportunities and experiences for children and families,” said Department of Early Education and Care Commissioner Sherri Killins. “The Early Learning Challenge recognizes the importance of early learning in providing the foundation for children’s healthy growth and brain development and ensuring the collective future prosperity of our Commonwealth and our nation. Both educators and families alike will benefit from this award.”

The New York Times conducted research on virtual schools, focusing on K12, Inc.  What they found is not encouraging for us who care about quality education for our children and who are also concerned about the dwindling funds available for public education.

Here's some startling quotes about the funding:

“What we’re talking about here is the financialization of public education,” said Alex Molnar, a research professor at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education who is affiliated with the education policy center. “These folks are fundamentally trying to do to public education what the banks did with home mortgages.”

Here's less encouraging information about the performance of these virtual schools:

A Stanford University group, the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, tracked students in eight virtual schools in Pennsylvania, including Agora, comparing them with similar students in regular schools. The study found that “in every subgroup, with significant effects, cyber charter performance is lower.”

Devora Davis, the center’s research manager, said the group’s analysis of Pennsylvania online schools showed that students were slipping. “If they were paired with a traditional public schools student, the public school student kept their place in line, and the cyberstudent moved back five spots,” she said.

School choice and privatization are hot political issues.  But educational rights, equitable and quality education for all our children, is the 1964 civil rights movement of the 21st century.  We need to provide better education for all our children.  It's certainly not about profits for the corporations.

The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education determined that Lawrence was not providing quality and equitable public education to all its children, and therefore voted to place the school system in receivership.  As you can imagine, parents, students, and teachers had a lot of questions regarding that decision.  DESE Commissioner Mitchell Chester, was on hand at a three-hour meeting in Lawrence, to try to answer these questions. [Full Article: Eagle-Tribune]

"Some students are receiving an excellent education and outstanding instruction, but lots of our youngsters never make it through, they never make it to the finish line," Chester said. "Without receivership we had little chance of all students getting a strong education," he said.

Once a receiver is appointed, the board will hold a stakeholder's meeting made up of residents, School Committee members, teachers and business people to develop a turnaround plan. They will be finalized by winter and implemented by next fall.

Parents' concerns included what was going to happen to the schools after the problems were fixed and the receiver left....Other comments from parents and students were about teachers and what to do to reengage drop-outs.

Boston's City Councilor Charles Yancy just keeps on going -- working with parents fighting for the kids in his district (and mine) to have an Opportunity to Learn: Quality Education, Safe Buildings. 

From the Dorchester Reporter:

City Councilor Charles Yancey has a new tactic in his long-running battle to get a high school built in Mattapan: Blasting the city's plan - which he voted for - to spend $115 million moving BPS headquarters from Court Street downtown to the old Ferdinand building in Dudley Square, when nearly 4,000 high-school students attend classes in "substandard" buildings originally built for elementary students or as warehouses.

At a hearing tonight, Yancey asked for the city to borrow $110 million to build a high school on a college-like 15-acre campus on the grounds of the former Boston State Hospital. Students and their parents have waited long enough for a modern high school like the ones that have sprung up in surrounding suburbs, he said.

Natalie Hopkinson observes how school choice has adversely affected the educational opportunities for her son and other children in her community in Washington, DC.  Clearly school choice has winners and losers...and it comes down to economic and social justice.  Again an education policy has gained political traction and funding that is failing to provide quality educational opportunities, equally, all our children.

Such inequities are the perverse result of a “reform” process intended to bring choice and accountability to the school system. Instead, it has destroyed community-based education for working-class families, even as it has funneled resources toward a few better-off, exclusive, institutions.       

The idea was to introduce competition; good schools would survive; bad ones would disappear. It effectively created a second education system, which now enrolls nearly half the city’s public school students. The charters consistently perform worse than the traditional schools, yet they are rarely closed...Meanwhile, failing neighborhood schools, depleted of students, were shut down. Invariably, schools that served the poorest families got the ax — partly because those were the schools where students struggled the most, and partly because the parents of those students had the least power. [Full Opinion: The New York Times]

All kinds of questions are raised by Stephanie Ebbert's story in the Globe on the Mass Budget and Policy's report on the growing costs of special education and teacher's health insurance to school budgets.  Oh dear.   Let's hope that this report prompts some postitive response from the State to help local communities support every public education program from those for traditional special needs students to intellectually gifted students. And provide quality and affordable health care for our teachers at the same time.

Here's the full report from the Mass Budget and Policy Center.  

The state’s funding formula for public schools underestimates the rising cost of special education and teachers’ health care by more than $2 billion a year, forcing some schools to cut costs on regular education and creating inequities in a system designed to make funding fairer across communities, according to a new report.

The report, released today by the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center, found major gaps between the “foundation budget’’ — the state’s estimate of what each district needs to run its schools — and what the 328 districts actually spend.

The foundation budget is recalculated each year to reflect changing demographics, enrollment levels, cost increases, and regional wage levels. But the report highlights the limitations of a funding formula that is based on 18-year-old assumptions, and that has no built-in triggers for reassessment.

“If you take the whole health insurance issue, no one projected back in 1993, that the increases would be double-digit increases. No one predicted back in 1993 that special ed would grow at the rate that it has grown,’’ said Tom Scott, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents.

Although the total number of special education students has not changed much over time, their needs are more complicated, requiring costly services, the report said.

The public education system in Lawrence is not working for all its children, and that's a big problem.  The solution is also problemmatic because the proposed solution has not been previously tested in MA so we don't know if it will achieve the desired results.  Is it appropriate for our children to be a trial case for the MA Department of Elementary and Secondary Education proposal of takeover?

"My concern is not the label," Lantigua said after the meeting. "My concern is that we do what needs to be done to get it out of a (chronically underperforming) system."

Many board members were concerned that the state's legislation for allowing the takeover, An Act relative to the Achievement Gap, was passed in 2010 and has not yet been used before for a takeover.

[State Education Commissioner Mitchell] Chester told [school committee member Jennifer Ann] Cooper that there are no guarantees that the takeover will right the system.  [Full Article: Eagle-Tribune]

Massachusetts excels when it comes to starting education pilot programs.  The results are rather fuzzy when it comes to the follow through in measuring outcomes, achievement of goals, and program replication.  Perhaps that's why some of our education inequalities continue.  It's time for a more thoughtful and comprehensive vision and road map to lay out what it takes - aka, resources - to educate all of our children and to reduce the achievement and opportunity gaps.

... the state still has a stubborn achievement gap separating white and minority students. “Standards-based education reform continues to remind us of the gap between our aspirations and our performance,’’ says Reville. “And that gap is still too big.’’  (Editorial: The Boston Globe)

So what's the next step?  Start another pilot program or two!  Been there, done that.  With all the education research that's been conducted around the US and the world, there should be programs with proven results that could be implemented system-wide to address the third grade reading proficiency issues for non-native English speakers.  Why reinvent the wheel when we can implement a program with documented results?  We'll have done the cost-benefit analysis up front, and more children will participate, presumably benefitting.  Seems like a larger leap forward for education reform for public education in the Commonwealth...for more children...not just a chosen few.