A Policy to Promote Parental Involvement

In 2008 Presidential Candidate Barack Obama stated that parents have to step up. Parents have to turn off the television and make sure the home work is done. He challenged African American parents to value education for their children. He has done little to if anything to create policy that would move parents in this direction.

Below is a plan to do just what President Obama called for, create involved parents.
Individual College Account Plans (ICAs) will treat all families the same regardless of zip codes. It rewards those who achieve by helping pay for college. It treats all families equally, but those who most need funding for college benefit the most. ICAs return taxpayer money to taxpayers and benefit all of society.

Here is how ICAs work. When a child is born, $5000 is placed one time into an Individual College Account (ICA) in the child’s name. The ICA matures as a 401K or 403 B would. When the child enters first grade, assuming the child is reading ready, the parents receive $2000. If the child is not reading ready, the $2000 goes right to the district the child is enrolled in to help pay for the extra costs associated with enabling this child to be at grade level reading by grade 3.
The remaining money in the account continues to mature until the child enters college or technical training school. At that time, a percentage of the matured funds based on grades, behavior, and parental involvement, are sent to the college or trade school the child will be attending.

ICAs reward taxpayers. According to national statistics, a high school graduate earns $392,000 more than a non-high school graduate. Children who read at grade level are more likely than those who do not read at grade level to finish high school. Assuming a 40 year working career at a conservative 20% income tax rate, the high school graduate will pay more than $75,000 in taxes to the federal government than a non-high school graduate. The payback to society from this investment in our public well-being is huge.
The difference in earnings between a college graduate and a non-college graduate nationwide is approximately $1.1 million. Assuming the same conservative tax rate a college grad pays more than $135,000 in taxes over the course of a career than a non-college grad.

Clearly ICAs pay for themselves!
And with a high school drop rate in many cities approaching 50% and greater, the returns from the ICA program between a college graduate and a high school graduate are even greater. This is just looking at the numbers without counting the reduction in crime and the increase in family stability which strongly correlate to high quality early education.
This program is win win for all involved. At the beginning levels of education incentives are offered to improve the raw materials. Parents are rewarded for doing their job as parents, and college becomes more affordable as the matured amount of money available is likely to be between 10 and $15,000.
Schools will be serving their clients: families and students, the people for whom school exists. Families and children will be rewarded according to their own success. Employers will have a greater selection of qualified employees. Neighborhoods will benefit from reduced crime. The family unit will be cherished, encouraged, and promoted.
Recently, Kalamazoo Mi. introduced a program similar to ICAs. An anonymous donor made a contribution promising all students who qualify a free college education. What happened after just two years is so promising the Governor of Michigan is trying to spread the program statewide.

In two years enrollment in Kalamazoo Public Schools increased by 900 students. Property values rose by 7% and 10% increasing city revenues.

No doubt these were already interested, concerned, effective parents taking advantage of an opportunity. A similar program years back in an inner city school in Philadelphia known as the Belmont 112 did not produce similar results. The challenge in education is to create interested, effective parents. It takes more than money: It takes educating parents as to how to educate their

ICAs require no experimental or expensive charter schools. ICAs eliminate the controversy involved with unproven, indeterminable concepts such as merit pay for teachers.

While standardized tests can be part of determining the percentage of the ICA sent to the college or trade school of the child’s choice, grades, behavior, and effort can be taken into account to obtain a more accurate and complete picture of the child. The ICA is all carrot and no stick. It eliminates the fraud so prevalent in Charter Schools, Voucher Programs, Merit Pay for Teachers, and with Educational Management Organizations.

We can create parental involvement with policies that demonstrate government can be effective in solving complex problems. Individual College Accounts nurture families, something politicians of both parties can stand behind. Let’s hope it gets done.

 

Good Parenting Leaves No Child Behind

It is a given that the academic achievement gap begins before children reach school. It’s been documented so often that only those who don’t believe in public education would argue that the home environment makes no difference in a child’s education. Only the profiteers like many Charter School operators would argue that schools can educate any child effectively regardless of the home or neighborhood environment they come from. Fortunately researchers like Lareau, Duncan, Steinberg, and of course Coleman demonstrate how foolish they are.

But the most powerful modern documentation that parenting matters comes from a Charter School. Look at the Harlem Children’s Zone.  Their secret isn’t in the curriculum or the teaching; it’s in the neighborhood outreach. Geoffrey Canada’s schools are successful because of the parenting program he put in place. It’s run by parents from the neighborhood that he trained to educate others in the neighborhood on how to successfully raise children.

Parenting is the most important job in the world. Most parents learn how to do it from on the job training or from their own parents, who most likely learned on the job or from their parents etc. We know how important good parenting is. Isn’t it about time that high school children learned how to be good parents? Isn’t it about time that parenting 101 became part of the curriculum? Isn’t this the real test and meaning for No Child Left Behind?

Common Core Math Dilemma

Well, big surprise: President Obama’s dramatic announcement that No Child Left Behind would be, well, left behind has made little impact on the day-to-day realities in classrooms.

What I really mean by this is that we are still saddled with high-stakes testing. I don’t teach a tested subject, but I can see the heavy hearts of those teachers in my school who do.

Here’s a conundrum about it all:

Our state, along with many others, has adopted the Common Core Curriculum. It is fantastic! Just take a look at the great content in the common core. The math core is absolutely wonderful, because it teaches thinking skills, not just memorization of formulas and facts. Our junior-high math teachers are excited to take this on.

But get this: the end-of-year tests still evaluate the content in the standard pre-algebra, algebra, geometry curriculum and are not linked to the common core at all, despite the fact that most of the United States has adopted it.

One of my school’s math teachers, Scott, told us all about this at our recent faculty meeting. He explained that test designers feel that they cannot produce a usable test in time for the end of year tests.

A year, my friends! We teachers are expected to skillfully adopt a whole new curriculum (and we love it), but nobody could pull together a group of teachers, administrators, writers, what have you, to produce a viable test within the school year.

What does this mean? It means that at the end of the year, those teachers who have heartfully adopted the common core curriculum will no doubt be penalized because their students aren’t being “taught to the test” and therefore may not possess all the particular skills tested in the end-of-year tests.

Two choices: take the higher road and teach the common core and maybe not pass the tests, or ignore the state directive to teach the common core and teach to the test and achieve competitive scores.

I am proud to say that our math teachers are going to take the higher road and just live with the high-stakes consequences. But really! Two roads are diverging in a dark and difficult wood (high-stakes end of year testing). Why not just make a pleasing clearing in the woods and get rid of the testing? Everyone knows that as we approach 2012, when all students will all achieve 100% in all subject areas, nobody will eventually make AYP. There never can be 100%.

 

The teacher bashing table is turning

When I first read Mike Schmoker’s book Results Now, I said to myself more teacher bashing. I’m reading it again for the second time and it’s not teacher bashing. It’s administration and principal bashing. He cites the bad policies in place and compliments the teachers for their honesty. What he does do is advocate for policies that will improve schools, policies such as Professional Learning Communities and collaborative teaching. He explains authentic literacy as analyzing information, pushes for writing where reason is required, and supports the theory that argument in class and the skills it requires are critical to real education.

Principals and administrators should take note. Schmoker has the passion many of us do, that I do, for improving educational outcomes. It’s no surprise that these policies work. When Ronald Edmonds began the effective schools movement back in the early 1980s he conducted an experiment the results of which were released after his death. It showed that schools producing the best improvements were ones in which principals were supportive and collegial relationships fostered.

Somehow the results of the effective schools movement got turned into No Child Left Behind and rigorous teaching to the test.

I hope Schmoker’s book becomes mandatory reading for every principal and administrator. I know he’s right because it’s how I taught. I hope this is an impetus to end the era of teacher bashing.

Four letter words

I avoid using those foul four letter words as a whole, lest they slip into my conversation while teaching. Yet the most foul of all four letter words is the secret to success in life. TIME. We seem never have enough of it, struggle to use it well, sometimes just sit and do nothing when we do have it.

Another dreaded four letter word is plan. When we plan, it’s because we are about to do something difficult. It won’t work out well unless we plan. To be a self-fulfilled person, proud of one’s accomplishments we must plan.

I truly hope all teachers plan to enjoy this summer. Keep in mind though what others are planning for you. Both parties are planning their presidential campaigns. This fall Arne Duncan congress have a plan under way to change education.  Their plans will affect your time. “No Child Left Behind” is bad and “Race to the Top” is worse.

Lets  not let these fools decide how our time should be spent.

If not NCLB, Then What?

What did people hate most about NCLB?

It was once-yearly, high-stakes, standardized testing.

When President Obama announced the end of NCLB, everyone cheered! But our joy was tempered with this question: what now? Will the unhealthy emphasis on high-stakes testing finally end?

It doesn’t look like it in our state, Utah. Instead, our brilliant legislature added a new component: grades for schools. Based on test scores, and a few other unimportant items, our schools will get A-F. Our legislators got this idea from Florida, which also grades its schools and teachers. However, in Florida, class sizes are kept small by law, and here in Utah, we have the largest class sizes in the nation. There will be no law to make them smaller.

If legislators really want to help teachers, they will abolish the undue emphasis on once-yearly high-stakes standardized tests. Sure, we can measure student progress, but only as a way to focus our instruction to help them learn. High-stakes testing doesn’t do that. It assumes that everyone will remember everything from the beginning of the year, even though recent brain research reveals that we humans do not retain information that way.

Who gets the final say in this? Is it possible for policy-makers to look past the easy answer of standardized testing to a more useful and humane solution?

NCLB: Does it Hinder Cross-Curricular Instruction?

Just about everybody agrees that cross-curricular instruction (using  a variety of subjects and approaches to teach any given subject) is a fabulous idea. Here are some good reasons, and here are some more. I love it because it helps students see that what they’re learning is real. It gives great opportunity for practicing concepts (for example, say a student might make a painting and write a few paragraphs about a science concept like the water cycle), because you have to review the concepts several times and in various ways in order to render them. No, there’s no particularly good argument against cross-curricular instruction….

….except….if you get an administrator who is a stickler for NCLB Highly-Qualified requirements. In this case, a social-studies teacher might be censured for including science concepts in his/her lessons, even though a study of the Industrial Revolution, as a possible example, might just beg for some work in science.

Think this is ridiculous speculation? At least in my limited experience, I have heard of secondary teachers being told to “stick to Language Arts,” and so on, rather than venturing out into other disciplines to support instruction. I imagine that adminstrators are worried that some Regulator-in-the-Sky will swoop down and censure the school for having teachers teach stuff that they aren’t HQ to teach.

How outrageous is this reasoning! It is as silly as limiting electives in order to “cram” for the once-a-year high-stakes test that will make-or-break a school’s standing and funding.

Isn’t it time that intelligent thought prevail in education once more? Repeal NCLB and allow teachers to do what they do best, including the brilliant practice of Cross-Curricular Instruction

Republican Congress? Repeal No Child Left Behind!

The people have spoken, and the power has turned from the Democrats to the Republicans. There is more than enough disgruntlement to go around, but if the Republicans want to solidify their voter base, they should consider the huge population of teachers, parents, and newly-graduated youth now qualified to vote.

We have one thing in common: We detest No Child Left Behind.  If you, our new legislators out to retain your voter base, want to know why, here’s a bare outline:

• This law requires that all children pass all tests by 2012. This will never happen. Educators and politicians know this is true, because every year, teachers must teach a new group of children who come to them with various skills and aptitudes. It is impossible to reach 100%. This truth diminishes nobody, but puts students, teachers and schools at risk.
• Schools failing to show adequate progress are punished, but as years pass and scores rise, it becomes more and more difficult, eventually impossible, to show “adequate yearly progress.”
• Sanctions required for this “failure” include firing teachers and closing schools, which means busing “failing” students to schools farther away, lengthening the school day and ensuring worse performance for at-risk kids.
• High-stakes testing traumatizes kids.
• High-stakes testing almost certainly results in “teaching to the test,” which often limits a complete and broad education.
• A single assessment can never demonstrate a student’s learning, especially because research shows that humans recall a very small percentage of things they learn.
• Second-language and the poor will always score less than English speakers and those financially better off.
• No Child Left Behind effectively shrinks the curriculum to Math, English and Science, the tested subjects. Some schools even eliminate or greatly reduce the arts or other electives to accomodate the pressures of preparing for the tests.
•  NCLB sometimes compels schools to hire private-sector contractors, a misuse of public funds.
• NCLB “Highly-Qualified” requirements work against teachers in small schools or other circumstances, often driving teachers from the profession. One example is a social studies teacher, in the last year of her service, forced to move to another school because she wasn’t HQ in geography, needed at the small school where she taught (another teacher had to be hired).
• NCLB puts test scores ahead of the emotional, physical and social growth and well-being of students.

Who dislikes (or detests, more truthfully) No Child Left Behind? Add together public-school teachers, college instructors, parents, and youth, and you have a powerful population that craves the banishment of this law so we can get back to educating the “whole child.”

At the very least, this is a powerful voting sector that you newly elected officials may want to serve.

Merit Pay Debunked!

No spin: merit pay doesn’t work.

A five-year study in Tennesse (with BIG incentives, up to $15,000 per teacher per year!) shows that merit pay doesn’t bring up test scores.

According to the study, ”The Project on Incentives in Teaching, called the POINT Experiment, took place over the 2007 – 2009 school years with participation by mathematics teachers in grades 5 through 8 in Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools. Nearly 300 teachers, approximately 70 percent of all middle-school math teachers in Nashville’s public schools, volunteered to participate. The complete study, including setup and analysis, began in 2005 and ended in 2010.

“POINT tested no other types of incentives or systems of support for the teachers, such as professional development or guidance on instructional practices – many of which have evolved over the five years since POINT began.”

So topples one of the great pillars of the badly-conceived Race to the Top.

There is one great positive to be learned from this study: teachers are generally well-intentioned, hard-working folks who would do a great job whether given incentives or not.

There is also one problem pointed up by this study: No Child Left Behind is so structured that as we get closer to 2012, where theoretically all students will score 100% (teachers will have to stop reading here so they can control their hysterical laughter), it becomes harder and harder to achieve AYP. This is because there will always  students who don’t pass the test, no matter what pedagogical calisthenics we engage in.

We only wish that Congress would remove No Child Left Behind. Then our well-trained, well-intentioned teachers can get back to their excellent instruction instead of being forced, compelled, coerced, and bribed (all to no avail) to teach to the test.

Summer Soliloquy

Like a sailboat with fresh wind in its sails I am returning to Philadelphia to renew my teaching endeavors. It would be wonderful if that were true, but it is not.

By staying in Maine about one week longer than usual, we’ve made this summer last as long as we could. For both of us, teaching in our schools is not the place of joy and satisfaction it once was. We’ve begun the commitment of not saying goodbye to summer. Not that we will travel the globe in search of the season, but that we will travel our souls in search of fulfillment, the fulfillment we know exists because we have experienced it.

We did many great things this summer, like staying at a hotel which had a T.V. but you couldn’t see it from the bed, like visiting Presque Isle Maine and touring the beautiful local campus of the University of Maine, where they clearly do a great job of teaching science; a subject drastically shortchanged in the world of standardized testing.

We at a road stop restaurant in Quebec province where only we spoke English, yet we managed to have great food enjoyed with many smiles all around. We traveled the state and visited the sites most tourists don’t. We experienced local flavor of a culture that actually puts people first and doesn’t just use it as a catchy slogan to gain political support for advancing someone else’s agenda.

We also began the restoration of a sailboat. A rudderless boat floats, turns with the tides, and moves with the wind. With the right captain, the boat can move in prescribed ways to reach a specific destination.

Schools are like boats. Ill winds and a rudderless direction heeling to test scores and not the overall well being of children are throwing this nation up against the rocks. Voices across the country are rising, but these voices are not being heard in the present political storm where radical broadcasters, would rather see a country fail than acknowledge a change was and still is needed. One of these broadcasters is a former drug user now addicted to a conservatism our forefathers would not recognize. The other preaches values as he starts his fourth marriage

The fall is usually a time of optimism. This year it is not.

This summer began by not being victorious in a campaign to become state representative. The exhausting campaign, made more difficult by not receiving a leave of absence from my employer was a fight worth undertaking. The issue I campaigned on was education and its status requires focus by not only the Philadelphia area, but this nation. Education needs a fresh wind in its sails and that won’t be found in a “Race to the Top” which only parallels the Titanic in the disaster it is headed for. We need to put children first, their entire soul, and not just their test score.

My voice will remain as active and as loud as ever. Only teachers have the power to change the direction the wind is blowing in. We must be heard over the storm.