Dr. Mary Byrne discusses the background, development and implementation of Common Core State Standards at a recent event in Wichita. View below, or click here to view in HD at YouTube.
Category: Education
Wichita has school choice, they say
Writing in the Sunday Wichita Eagle, USD 259 (Wichita public school district) superintendent John Allison told Wichitans something they probably didn’t know: Parents of Wichita schoolchildren benefit from the district’s school choice program:First, investment in the Wichita public schools allows for remarkable parental choice. Much has been discussed recently about the choice we must give families in order to meet the needs of their children. In Wichita, we are proud that for more than 20 years, families have been offered choice through our district’s magnet school program.
Nearly 30 percent of our schools have a unique magnet focus, enabling students from across our community to consider robust options ranging from science to art, public service to environmental stewardship. Thousands of parents make the decision every year to become part of this rich magnet school tradition, which has helped the Wichita public schools remain a vibrant and diverse school district that has grown by more than 1,500 students in the last 10 years.
I don’t see how Allison believes that magnet schools are equivalent to “remarkable parental choice.” Generally, school choice refers to actual choice programs where parents might choose the regular public school, or perhaps a charter school, or perhaps a private school with its cost paid fully or partially through vouchers or tax credit scholarships. Sometimes school choice programs allow students to enroll in public schools in neighboring school districts.
Wichita and Kansas have none of these programs. (Actually, Kansas does have charter schools, but the law is so weak that there are very few of these schools.) Wichita’s magnet schools are part of the government school system. This means they benefit from taxpayer funding, which is over $12,500 per student per year.
But it also means that these schools suffer all the pathologies that afflict the public school system. That’s not much of a choice.
Kansas teachers union: No competition for us
Kansas National Education Association (KNEA), our state’s teachers union, is an effective force that denies Kansas parents the choice as to where to send their children to school. The union also works hard to deny teachers choice in representation.In Bullying Teachers: How Teachers Unions Secretly Push Teachers and Competitors Around, Joy Pullmann states the problem: “In routine tracking of education-related legislation, The Heartland Institute’s School Reform News has uncovered evidence that teachers unions across the country routinely inhibit teachers from joining or speaking out about competing, nonunion teachers associations.”
Pullmann explains legislation from 2011 when Garry Sigle, who is Executive Director at Kansas Association of American Educators, supported equal access to teachers.
In 2011, House Bill 2229 would have given the state an equal access law regarding teacher associations. It stalled in the Senate and found no sponsors this year. In the meantime, public school principals in Kansas have refused to let Garry Sigle, executive director of the state’s AAE affiliate, even enter their schools because the local union affiliate would file a labor grievance against the schools if they did. Similar and repeated instances in the state are documented below.
The legislative page for this bill is Substitute HB 2229 by Committee on Federal and State Affairs — Teachers; professional employees association; equal access act. The last notation on the calendar is “Died in Senate Committee.” The bill would do these things, according to the supplemental note prepared by Kansas Legislative Research:
To give equal access for all professional employees’ associations to the professional employees physical or electronic school mailboxes;
To allow equal access for all professional employees’ associations to attend new teacher or employee school orientations and other meetings; and
To not designate any day or breaks in a school year by naming or referring to the name of any professional employees’ association.KNEA opposed this legislation. The committee in which it died was chaired by Pete Brungardt. Brungardt’s campaign was supported by KNEA, but he was defeated in the August 2012 primary election.
Reporting more about Kansas, Pullmann writes:
Many superintendents and principals in Kansas will not even let Garry Sigle give teachers information about his nonunion teacher organization. One superintendent told Sigle, “Why would I want to [let you talk to teachers in my district] if I knew that would create an issue between me and a union I have to negotiate with?” Sigle said. He asked the superintendent how many of his district’s teachers were in the NEA. Thirty or 40 percent, the superintendent said. So Sigle asked to speak to the others. The superintendent wouldn’t allow Sigle to speak to even nonunionized teachers. In one school, Sigle had an appointment to speak at a teacher in-service. “When the local NEA found out, they raised such a ruckus that [the principal] had to call and cancel me.”
Sigle’s alma mater, Fort Hays State University, would not let him speak to students in their teaching program “because they have a student NEA group and just can’t seem to find time in their schedule.” Smith also highlighted access difficulties with student teacher programs in Utah. “I don’t think, as a school of higher education, it’s your job to limit the information your students get,” Sigle said. “It baffles me that a school would do that.”
A principal has told Sigle if he stepped foot into her school she would have to report him or the school’s NEA chapter would file a contract grievance against her. “She said, ‘I can’t even let you come into the building,’” Sigle said in astonishment.
Sigle’s op-ed in the Topeka Capital-Journal explained the problem in a different way, opening with:
As employees in a right-to-work state, teachers in Kansas have a choice about which employee association, if any, they wish to join. However, current state law does not treat all employee associations the same way.
In fact, the Kansas National Education Association has an unfair advantage, having state-sanctioned monopoly access to public school employees.
Kansas schools are lacking choice: none for students, little for teachers, topped off with coercion for taxpayers.
The machine is not for the kids
America’s public education system is failing. We’re spending more money on education but not getting better results for our children.
That’s because the machine that runs the K-12 education system isn’t designed to produce better schools. It’s designed to produce more money for unions and more donations for politicians.
But for defenders of this machine — the public school spending establishment — it’s all about the kids, they say.
U.S. public schools seen as threat to national security
The Council on Foreign Relations, described by the Wall Street Journal as “the clubhouse of America’s establishment” is now in favor of something very un-establishment: school choice. The data is so grim, writes the Journal, that the poor performance of American public schools is now a national security issue.
Some statistics from the article: “Only a third of elementary and middle-school students are competent in reading, math and science.” … “The military can’t tap the 25% of American kids who drop out of high school, and 30% of those who graduate can’t pass the Armed Forces Vocational Aptitude Battery.” … “Even excluding teacher pensions and other benefits, per-pupil spending today is more than three times what it was in 1960 (in 2008 dollars).” (School Reform’s Establishment Turn: The Council on Foreign Relations endorses choice and competition. subscription required)
The CFR reports calls for applying to education the same factors that have lead to success in other areas of human endeavor: “U.S. elementary and secondary schools are not organized to promote competition, choice, and innovation — the factors that catalyze success in other U.S. sectors.”
The CFR report is U.S. Education Reform and National Security. The overview is blunt: “The United States’ failure to educate its students leaves them unprepared to compete and threatens the country’s ability to thrive in a global economy and maintain its leadership role.”
In an interview with Joel Klein, former chancellor of the New York City Department of Education and co-chair of the task force that wrote the report, Klein said:
Probably the major finding that is sort of well known but not fully digested is that U.S. outcomes are essentially flat at the high school level, despite the fact the country has continued — over the last thirty to forty years — to invest significantly in K-12 public education. And while we’re making the investments and not getting the results, the rest of the globe is getting very different results.
If you [compare] the educational performance of the United States, for example, with that of China, or Finland, or Singapore, there are dramatic differences. The U.S. performance is much more akin to countries that we never could have thought would perform educationally at the level that we are. We used to have the highest percentage of high school graduates, the highest percentage of college graduates. It’s no longer so.
But perhaps the thing the report will shine a spotlight on is the national security implication. One statistic that blew members of this task force away is that three out of four kids today in America are simply ineligible for military service. It’s unbelievable. We’re drawing our national security forces from a very small segment of the population. And a lot of the problem is they simply don’t have the intellectual wherewithal to serve in the military.
The other thing we found is how non-innovative K-12 education is. K-12 education is still one teacher, twenty-eight kids, twenty-five kids, whatever, and trying to figure out the sweet spot for a class of very different and heterogeneous skills. Surely, you would think in an [education] industry that is as complex and dynamic and heavily invested in — second after health care in the United States — that you’d see dramatic innovations, and the truth is, you haven’t.
The report recommends adopting Common Core Standards, which is controversial.
A second recommendation, and one not present in Kansas to any degree, is school choice: “The second big idea is really a uniquely American approach, and it’s controversial. That is, to move toward meaningful [school] choice. We need to generate an environment that leads to innovation, and that empowers parents to really look over the next decade or so. We need to look at how we can transition from a monopoly on public school systems to one that gives parents and their children meaningful choices that stimulate innovation and differentiation.”
Class size reduction not effective
Recently the Center for American Progress released a report about class size reduction in schools and the false promise it holds for improving student achievement. While I am normally quite cautious about relying on anything CAP — a prominent left-wing think tank — produces, I’ve read the report, which is titled The False Promise of Class-Size Reduction. It’s accurate.
It’s quite astonishing to see CAP cite evidence from Eric Hanushek of the Hoover Institution and Caroline Hoxby of Stanford and Hoover. These two researchers are usually condemned by the public education establishment and bureaucracy, including teachers unions. These are some of the key constituents CAP usually caters to.
In a nutshell, class size reduction produces very little benefit for students. (It benefits others greatly. More in a moment.) It’s also very expensive, and there are other things we should be doing instead if we really want to increase student achievement.
The report summarizes the important studies in class size reduction, and it’s accurate, based on the reading I’ve done over the years. The upshot is that there is only one study showing positive results from class size reduction, and that effect was found only among the early grades. The effect decreased after a few years, even though small class sizes were still used.
The report also notes that class size reduction is very expensive to implement. Because it is, the report says we should look to other ways to increase student achievement, such as policies relating to teacher effectiveness: “The emerging consensus that teacher effectiveness is the single most important in-school determinant of student achievement suggests that teacher recruitment, retention, and compensation policies ought to rank high on the list.”
Recently the Kansas Policy Institute sponsored a trip to Wichita by Sandi Jacobs of National Council for Teacher Quality. My reporting of that event and an audio recording is at Kansas ranks low in policies on teacher quality. The importance of teacher quality is this: “In the example she illustrated, third graders who had teachers in the top 20 percent of effectiveness for the next three years went from the 50th percentile in performance to the 90th. For students with teachers in the lowest 20 percent for the same period, their performance dropped from the 50th percentile to the 37th percentile.” Kansas ranks below average among the states in its policies that promote teacher quality.
Who benefits from class size reduction?
If class size reduction doesn’t work, why is it so popular? The answer is it benefits many special interest groups. The first group is the parents who send their children to public schools. While class size reduction doesn’t help their children (except in limited circumstances), they think it does. Intuitively, it seems like small class size should help. More individual attention to their kids, the parents are told. And what parent doesn’t want the best for their child? This leads to an effective tactic that school spending supporters use: Any reduction in school funding, no matter how small, will cause class sizes to “explode” or “balloon” out of control, causing student achievement to “plummet.”
Then, there’s the teachers union. Small class size means more teachers and more union members. Fewer students means an easier job for teachers, too, with less papers to grade, etc. The unions also oppose nearly all the policies that would improve teacher quality. For example, this year the Kansas Legislature spent quite a bit of time on a policy where the period before teachers are awarded tenure could be increased from three to five years in certain circumstances. This is what qualifies as “school reform” in Kansas. Remember, Kansas ranks very low in policies that promote teacher quality. Tinkering with the policy on teacher tenure is not going to improve our teacher quality, as tenure is a system that ought to be eliminated. In Kansas the teachers union is Kansas National Education Association (KNEA).
Public school administrators benefit from class size reduction. With more classrooms and more employees, their budgets and power swell. In Wichita, one of the main reasons USD 259, the Wichita public school district gave for the necessity of passing a bond issue in 2008 was the need for more classrooms to implement class size reduction.
Architects and construction companies. In my experience sitting in education committee hearing rooms in the Kansas statehouse, whenever there is any proposal that would reduce spending on school construction, a representative of architects is there to offer testimony in opposition. In the campaign for the Wichita school bond in 2008, an architectural firm headed the campaign, and construction companies contributed heavily. They also contribute to the campaign of school board candidates who are in favor of building more classrooms. Most of this is to support class size reduction, which is politically appealing, but we know doesn’t work. But the motivation of architects and construction companies is to build something, whether it is useful or not.
Politicians — liberals and most conservatives — promote small class sizes. Any politician who promotes policies other than small class size has to overcome the forces listed above. Therefore, most don’t try.
The rut we’re in
The perceived desirability of small class sizes by parents and politicians coupled with the powerful motivations of special interests like school administrators, teachers unions, and the construction industry have placed us in a rut. It’s going to be difficult to escape, and it’s refreshing to see the Center for American Progress on the right side of this issue.
The fact that such a well-known liberal think tank is promoting this issue provides a context other than the typical liberal vs. conservative dichotomy. We are now able to more clearly see the motivations of the special interests that benefit from high school spending and the incorrect evidence they rely on.
The False Promise of Class-Size Reduction
By Matthew M. Chingos, Center for American Progress
Class-size reduction, or CSR, is enormously popular with parents, teachers, and the public in general. The latest poll results indicate that 77 percent of Americans think that additional educational dollars should be spent on smaller classes rather than higher teacher salaries. Many parents believe that their children will benefit from more individualized attention in a smaller class and many teachers find smaller classes easier to manage. The pupil-teacher ratio is an easy statistic for the public to monitor as a measure of educational quality, especially before test-score data became widely available in the last decade. …
Parents, teachers, and policymakers have all embraced CSR as a strategy to improve the quality of public education. There is surprisingly little high-quality research, however, on the effects of class size on student achievement in the United States. The credible evidence that does exist is not consistent, and there are many low-quality studies with results all over the map.
Continue reading at The False Promise of Class-Size Reduction.
Obama: Not enough spending on schools
Andrew J. Coulson notes that President Barack Obama says we’re not spending enough on schools and presents evidence of just how much we are spending on schools. His article is Obama Jobs Plan to Push More K-12 Bloat?
Take a look at the chart that Coulson prepared, showing the growth rate of public school employment compared to the growth in students.
Changes in public school employment and enrollment.Considering that personnel costs are the largest portion of school spending, it’s pretty hard to make the case that we haven’t been spending on schools. Coulson’s article also compares the trend in student achievement compared to spending.
Looking at the numbers a different way, I computed the ratio of staff to students, with the following result: There are many more teachers and staff for each student.
K-12 Education Staff Per Student RatioCAP: Class size reduction not effective
Last week the Center for American Progress released a report about class size reduction in schools and the false promise it holds for improving student achievement. While I am normally quite cautious about relying on anything CAP — a prominent left-wing think tank — produces, I’ve read the report, which is titled The False Promise of Class-Size Reduction. It’s accurate.
It’s quite astonishing to see CAP cite evidence from Eric Hanushek of the Hoover Institution and Caroline Hoxby of Stanford and Hoover. These two researchers are usually condemned by the public education establishment and bureaucracy, including teachers unions. These are some of the key constituents CAP usually caters to.
In a nutshell, class size reduction produces very little benefit for students. (It benefits others greatly. More in a moment.) It’s also very expensive, and there are other things we should be doing instead if we really want to increase student achievement.
The report summarizes the important studies in class size reduction, and it’s accurate, based on the reading I’ve done over the years. The upshot is that there is only one study showing positive results from class size reduction, and that effect was found only among the early grades. The effect decreased after a few years, even though small class sizes were still used.
The report also notes that class size reduction is very expensive to implement. Because it is, the report says we should look to other ways to increase student achievement, such as policies relating to teacher effectiveness: “The emerging consensus that teacher effectiveness is the single most important in-school determinant of student achievement suggests that teacher recruitment, retention, and compensation policies ought to rank high on the list.”
Recently the Kansas Policy Institute sponsored a trip to Wichita by Sandi Jacobs of National Council for Teacher Quality. My reporting of that event and an audio recording is at Kansas ranks low in policies on teacher quality. The importance of teacher quality is this: “In the example she illustrated, third graders who had teachers in the top 20 percent of effectiveness for the next three years went from the 50th percentile in performance to the 90th. For students with teachers in the lowest 20 percent for the same period, their performance dropped from the 50th percentile to the 37th percentile.” Kansas ranks below average among the states in its policies that promote teacher quality.
Who benefits from class size reduction?
If class size reduction doesn’t work, why is it so popular? The answer is it benefits many special interest groups. The first group is the parents who send their children to public schools. While class size reduction doesn’t help their children (except in limited circumstances), they think it does. Intuitively, it seems like small class size should help. More individual attention to their kids, the parents are told. And what parent doesn’t want the best for their child? This leads to an effective tactic that school spending supporters use: Any reduction in school funding, no matter how small, will cause class sizes to “explode” or “balloon” out of control, causing student achievement to “plummet.”
Then, there’s the teachers union. Small class size means more teachers and more union members. Fewer students means an easier job for teachers, too, with less papers to grade, etc. The unions also oppose nearly all the policies that would improve teacher quality. For example, this year the Kansas Legislature spent quite a bit of time on a policy where the period before teachers are awarded tenure could be increased from three to five years in certain circumstances. This is what qualifies as “school reform” in Kansas. Remember, Kansas ranks very low in policies that promote teacher quality. Tinkering with the policy on teacher tenure is not going to improve our teacher quality, as tenure is a system that ought to be eliminated. In Kansas the teachers union is Kansas National Education Association (KNEA).
Public school administrators benefit from class size reduction. With more classrooms and more employees, their budgets and power swell. In Wichita, one of the main reasons USD 259, the Wichita public school district gave for the necessity of passing a bond issue in 2008 was the need for more classrooms to implement class size reduction. Now progress is in a “pause and study” phase, as the district has realized that funding to run the new schools and classrooms on an ongoing basis may not be available. (The bond issue pays for construction, but not operation, of new schools and expansion of existing schools.)
Architects and construction companies. In my experience sitting in education committee hearing rooms in the Kansas statehouse, whenever there is any proposal that would reduce spending on school construction, a representative of architects is there to offer testimony in opposition. In the campaign for the Wichita school bond in 2008, an architectural firm headed the campaign, and construction companies contributed heavily. They also contribute to the campaign of school board candidates who are in favor of building more classrooms. Most of this is to support class size reduction, which is politically appealing, but we know doesn’t work. But the motivation of architects and construction companies is to build something, whether it is useful or not.
Politicians — liberals and most conservatives — promote small class sizes. Any politician who promotes policies other than small class size has to overcome the forces listed above. Therefore, most don’t try.
The rut we’re in
The perceived desirability of small class sizes by parents and politicians coupled with the powerful motivations of special interests like school administrators, teachers unions, and the construction industry have placed us in a rut. It’s going to be difficult to escape, and it’s refreshing to see the Center for American Progress on the right side of this issue.
The fact that such a well-known liberal think tank is promoting this issue provides a context other than the typical liberal vs. conservative dichotomy. We are now able to more clearly see the motivations of the special interests that benefit from high school spending and the incorrect evidence they rely on.
The False Promise of Class-Size Reduction
By Matthew M. Chingos, Center for American Progress
Class-size reduction, or CSR, is enormously popular with parents, teachers, and the public in general. The latest poll results indicate that 77 percent of Americans think that additional educational dollars should be spent on smaller classes rather than higher teacher salaries. Many parents believe that their children will benefit from more individualized attention in a smaller class and many teachers find smaller classes easier to manage. The pupil-teacher ratio is an easy statistic for the public to monitor as a measure of educational quality, especially before test-score data became widely available in the last decade. …
Parents, teachers, and policymakers have all embraced CSR as a strategy to improve the quality of public education. There is surprisingly little high-quality research, however, on the effects of class size on student achievement in the United States. The credible evidence that does exist is not consistent, and there are many low-quality studies with results all over the map.
Continue reading at The False Promise of Class-Size Reduction.
President Obama has not delivered on school choice
Advertisement placed in New York TimesPresident Barack Obama has talked favorably about school choice, both in his campaign, and while in office. But his actions have not lived up to the expectations of Americans, and importantly, the residents of Washington, DC.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal today, William McGurn notes: “That deafening roar you hear — that’s the sound of Barack Obama’s silence on the future of school reform in the District of Columbia. And if he doesn’t break it soon, he may become the first president in two decades to have left Washington’s children with fewer chances for a good school than when he started.”
It’s come to the point where the president’s supporters are criticizing him for his lack of action on school choice. Over the weekend Kevin P. Chavous of Black Alliance for Educational Options placed a full-page ad in the New York Times. There is a news release (Leader of Black Alliance Blasts President Obama on Parental Choice) regarding the ad, and Chavous’ letter appears below.
Dear Mr. President:
One of the reasons I supported you, as did virtually all of the Black community in this country, is because we believed that you would stand up to vested interests and do the right thing even if it was not politically expedient. You have now left us confused and dismayed.
We simply cannot reconcile what you are saying about education reform with what you are actually doing to give parents the opportunity to choose the best schools for their children.
Last year, you refused to support the reauthorization of the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program. As you know, this program allows low-income parents to receive government-funded scholarships so their children can attend private schools of their choice. This initiative has been an educational lifeline to thousands of children.
You acted to eliminate hope for thousands of low-income children who live just blocks from the White House, despite compelling data that confirms these children are receiving a better education than they would receive in the D.C. public schools.
While opposing this program would appear to be a contradiction to what you said on the Today show earlier this week, some might call it the height of hypocrisy. As a beneficiary of a privately funded scholarship, you attended the most elite private school in Hawaii. You and Mrs. Obama have also chosen a private school for your own children. Because there is not enough money to provide private scholarships to all low-income families, you more than anyone should be an advocate for government-funded opportunity scholarships nationwide.
Far too many of our children are confined in schools that continue to fail, year after year. As Dr. Martin Luther King said during the civil rights movement, we need to act with the fierce urgency of now. Our children cannot wait. Opportunity scholarships help educate kids today.
So, Mr. President, there is still time for you to throw off the shackles of the educational establishment and join our ranks. There are over one million empty urban private school seats in this country that are waiting to be filled if low-income families had government-funded scholarships. If you would like to learn more about our work at the Black Alliance for Educational Options or would like to meet some of the families who would like to participate in these programs, I would be happy to introduce them to you
.
Please, Mr. President, let’s educate our children by any means necessary.Sincerely,
Kevin P. Chavous
Board Chair
Black Alliance for Educational Options
Changes in public school employment and enrollment.
K-12 Education Staff Per Student Ratio