School board member in Florida flubs standardized test

I know there is a ton going on in CPS these days with the school closings and re0penings and longer day and people protesting all of these.  I am in the middle of getting ready for our house photo shoot (again, awesome Bungalow in the Waters district if anyone is interested…) so I don’t have time to organize all the info for a few days, but in the meantime I had some mixed reactions to this article about a school board member who took the disctrict’s 10th grade standardized test and didn’t do so well and is now calling the test crap.  Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.  If you click on the link about his comments and identify, it’s kind of interesting (and a wee bit defensive.)

As I try to teach my son geometry and he asks why he’ll need it later in life (ie what is a trapezoid?) I can’t give him a good answer.  But does that mean that kids shouldn’t learn it?  Or be tested on it?  I recall the GMATs (test for business school) also having a lot of sorta useless math on it as well.  Should we be teaching more “practical math? Don’t high school kids still have to learn the basics?  What do you think?

From the Washington Post:

When an adult took standardized tests forced on kids

Update, 4:40 p.m. Tuesday:

Revealed: The school board member who took standardized test

Original post:

This was written by Marion Brady, veteran teacher, administrator, curriculum designer and author.

By Marion Brady

A longtime friend on the school board of one of the largest school systems in America did something that few public servants are willing to do. He took versions of his state’s high-stakes standardized math and reading tests for 10th graders, and said he’d make his scores public.

By any reasonable measure, my friend is a success. His now-grown kids are well-educated. He has a big house in a good part of town. Paid-for condo in the Caribbean. Influential friends. Lots of frequent flyer miles. Enough time of his own to give serious attention to his school board responsibilities. The margins of his electoral wins and his good relationships with administrators and teachers testify to his openness to dialogue and willingness to listen.

He called me the morning he took the test to say he was sure he hadn’t done well, but had to wait for the results. A couple of days ago, realizing that local school board members don’t seem to be playing much of a role in the current “reform” brouhaha, I asked him what he now thought about the tests he’d taken.

“I won’t beat around the bush,” he wrote in an email. “The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system, that’s a “D”, and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction.

He continued, “It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate.

“I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities.

“I have a wide circle of friends in various professions. Since taking the test, I’ve detailed its contents as best I can to many of them, particularly the math section, which does more than its share of shoving students in our system out of school and on to the street. Not a single one of them said that the math I described was necessary in their profession.

“It might be argued that I’ve been out of school too long, that if I’d actually been in the 10th grade prior to taking the test, the material would have been fresh. But doesn’t that miss the point? A test that can determine a student’s future life chances should surely relate in some practical way to the requirements of life. I can’t see how that could possibly be true of the test I took.”

Here’s the clincher in what he wrote:

“If I’d been required to take those two tests when I was a 10th grader, my life would almost certainly have been very different. I’d have been told I wasn’t ‘college material,’ would probably have believed it, and looked for work appropriate for the level of ability that the test said I had.

“It makes no sense to me that a test with the potential for shaping a student’s entire future has so little apparent relevance to adult, real-world functioning. Who decided the kind of questions and their level of difficulty? Using what criteria? To whom did they have to defend their decisions? As subject-matter specialists, how qualified were they to make general judgments about the needs of this state’s children in a future they can’t possibly predict? Who set the pass-fail “cut score”? How?”

“I can’t escape the conclusion that decisions about the [state test] in particular and standardized tests in general are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.”

There you have it. A concise summary of what’s wrong with present corporately driven education change: Decisions are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.

Those decisions are shaped not by knowledge or understanding of educating, but by ideology, politics, hubris, greed, ignorance, the conventional wisdom, and various combinations thereof. And then they’re sold to the public by the rich and powerful.

All that without so much as a pilot program to see if their simplistic, worn-out ideas work, and without a single procedure in place that imposes on them what they demand of teachers: accountability.

But maybe there’s hope. As I write, a New York Times story by Michael Winerip makes my day. The stupidity of the current test-based thrust of reform has triggered the first revolt of school principals.

Winerip writes: “As of last night, 658 principals around the state (New York) had signed a letter — 488 of them from Long Island, where the insurrection began — protesting the use of students’ test scores to evaluate teachers’ and principals’ performance.”

One of those school principals, Winerip says, is Bernard Kaplan. Kaplan runs one of the highest-achieving schools in the state, but is required to attend 10 training sessions.

“It’s education by humiliation,” Kaplan said. “I’ve never seen teachers and principals so degraded.”

Carol Burris, named the 2010 Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State, has to attend those 10 training sessions.

Katie Zahedi, another principal, said the session she attended was “two days of total nonsense. I have a Ph.D., I’m in a school every day, and some consultant is supposed to be teaching me to do evaluations.”

A fourth principal, Mario Fernandez, called the evaluation process a product of “ludicrous, shallow thinking. They’re expecting a tornado to go through a junkyard and have a brand new Mercedes pop up.”

My school board member-friend concluded his email with this: “I can’t escape the conclusion that those of us who are expected to follow through on decisions that have been made for us are doing something ethically questionable.”

He’s wrong. What they’re being made to do isn’t ethically questionable. It’s ethically unacceptable. Ethically reprehensible. Ethically indefensible.

How many of the approximately 100,000 school principals in the U.S. would join the revolt if their ethical principles trumped their fears of retribution? Why haven’t they been asked?

December 6, 2011 at 9:17 pm 71 comments

Good News! School Closings!

I don’t mean to make light of the closings, but I to had to laugh when I received an email whose content I knew would be about school closings (CPS had to announce them by today) and it was cheerfully titled “CPS Proposes Providing 7,800 Students with Access to Higher Quality School Options.”   Now that is a positive spin on something we know that families hate – school closings.

I think it is certainly justified, as CPS makes a compelling case in this nice PowerPoint document.  (This document has the really depressing graphs of performance by race.)   Something has to change in this city and if there are under-performing, under-enrolled schools, closing them seems the way to go.  I can’t seem to find a list of the actual schools though.  I also wonder how some schools made it as turnaround and others were closed?  I get the sense that these closing are the tip of the iceberg.  I think there a lot more “low-quality seats” that are on the line in the city and many under-enrolled schools on the south and west side that may be closed over the next year or two.

In the comments section, I’ve included a thought-provoking point from a reader from another thread that is relevant here.

http://www.cps.edu/About_CPS/The_Board_of_Education/Documents/BoardMeeting_October.pdf

FROM CPS:

Dear Friends,

Our goal at the Chicago Public Schools is to provide a high quality education for every student in every community so they can graduate college- and career-ready.  However, we have fallen far short of that goal for too long. The facts are undeniable:

• Only 7.9 percent of our 11^th graders last year tested college-ready.
• Despite some progress in the past decade, only 57 percent of our students graduated last year.
• There is a 44 point gap in achievement between African American and white high school students, while the achievement gap for white and Latino elementary students is 33 percentage points –123,000 students are in underperforming schools.
• More than half of all schools are on probation.

As the CEO of CPS and a parent, I find this simply unacceptable.

That’s why I’m making a promise to all parents and children in our school system that I will not allow this failure to continue. We can no longer accept a status quo that hasn’t pre­pared our students for college, career and life. We have no choice but to make the difficult decisions to boost student achievement throughout the district.

To that end, on Tuesday we announced the list of schools the district is proposing for turnaround to the Chicago Board of Education, and today we are releasing the list of schools (see www.cps.edu/qualityschools for list) being recommended for actions to help increase higher quality school options for our students. The schools on this list represent some of the lowest performing schools in the system and are being recommended for action in order to provide their students with the opportunity to attend higher performing schools in their communities.

Not only will these students have access to better schools, but we will also make investments in these schools to help make them even better to support student achievement. Additionally, CPS will take every necessary step to ensure the safety and security of students in all schools – paying particular attention to students moving into new schools. From art and music classes to afterschool and school safety programs to social-emotional supports, our investments will go above and beyond what’s been offered in the past to provide a solid foundation for a smooth and safe transition for all students affected by these actions.

We are announcing these actions after a lengthy and thorough process. Since releasing the guidelines that were used to determine these proposed actions, my team and I have hosted more than 40 community meetings with various groups of people, including parents, faith leaders, community organizations and local elected officials to get their input and guidance. We also conducted multiple walk-throughs of the schools proposed for actions to observe their climate and culture first-hand.

We recognize that for many in our community, the actions we are proposing may be difficult because of the deep, personal connections they have with these schools. However, we must be willing to accept that some schools simply cannot be turned around.

Every day we wait to provide our children with opportunities for higher quality schools, our kids fall further behind. In fact, some communities with historically low performing schools have seen little or no growth in student achievement for two decades.

The ultimate decision on each school action will be made by the Chicago Board of Education in the new year. In the meantime, over the next few months we will continue the dialogue on these proposed actions by engaging the community through multiple venues as part of our commitment to having an open and transparent process.

We thank you for your support as we work to provide every student in this city with access to a quality school in their community – and help future generations of CPS graduates prepare to thrive in their college and career.

Jean-Claude Brizard

Chicago Public Schools I CEO

December 1, 2011 at 12:58 am 61 comments

Re-Invigorating a Neighborhood School – Hyde Park

I got an email from a parent who is working with a new Friends Of group that is trying to encourage local parents to consider Shoesmith Elementary in Hyde Park.

I know that many of us here often tell people to “consider your neighborhood school!” as an elementary option.  I know first hand that “marketing” a school that hasn’t had a great reputation is a lot of work.  An insane amount of work. (and by first hand I mean I saw others really busting their butts and I helped out when I could.)

After about 5 years, I STILL have not seen a school replicate what Nettelhorst did with the PR and the impressive grants and donations and art, etc.  Other schools have done an impressive job at raising money.  Alcott in Lincoln Park asks for around $1200 per year from parents.  Other hold amazing auctions.  Other get grants.  But the donations from outside the school family community at Nettelhorst have always impressed me.  If anyone knows how they did it (beyond what the book says, feel free to share.)

Obvious one of the key elements was “marketing” the school – finding out what parents wanted in a school and also “selling” the place and damn, if they didn’t knock that one out of the park.  Chicago parents are a bit on the Sheeple side when it comes it schools.  Nobody wants to be the first to test out a school, but once it’s been given the Gentrified Seal of Approval, suddenly the flocks hit.  And it can be frustrating trying to get that first group mobilized.  Again, this was key at Nettelhorst as well as my neighborhood school.  A group of maybe 8 families finally said “we’re gonna do it.”

I’m not complaining, I’m just commenting on the patterns of enrollment I’ve seen where a school goes from under enrolled to jam-packed within about 4 years.

If you have any other schools with new Friends Of groups, feel free to post information here.  Or if you have any thoughts on what was worked (or not) in trying to build attendance at a local schools, please share…..

She says:

I wanted to send you a flyer for our neighborhood school, Shoesmith Elementary.  I recently joined a group called Friends of Shoesmith and we are making efforts to reform and revitalize this neighborhood school in hopes of making it a viable option for folks in  Hyde Park (sort of inspired by the “How to Walk to School” Jaquiline Edelberg movement).

The school has a new principal and new administration and has decent test scores that have vastly improved in the past decade.  The situation looks hopeful.

The Open House is this Tuesday, November 29th, from 9:00 – 10:30.

November 28, 2011 at 3:23 pm 94 comments

New HS Application Process / School Closures

Mayfair Dad sent a link to the article below that is interesting in the news about high school applications.  Brizard talked about the need to streamline the application process.  Apparently there are a lot of top people in CPS now with little kids who are having that “Are you F-ing kidding me?” reaction that we all did when we found out about the convoluted application processes in CPS.  And it seems they want to fix it.  He DID explicitly mention the inclusion of Charter schools in the process (and why would they not if the current admin and Rahm seem very pro-charter.)  It is a positive mark of sanity, in my opinion.

As for the school closings, I got a glimpse of a chart at CPS headquarters that showed a huge number of schools that are both under-enrolled AND underperforming.  There was a number that said that something like 100,000 seats need to be eliminated in the system.  Or maybe that was just elem school.  In any case, difficult choices will have to be made.  And we know how people hate having their schools closed, even if they are underenrolled and underperforming.  I believe that part of the new data initiation is to help some of these parents understand that their schools ARE underperforming.

Now I just need to figure out how to interpret that school report card we got last week….

From Catalyst Chicago, by Sarah Karp:

New high school application process

Board members gave an okay to a $390,000 contract to develop a singular high school application process with the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice, an organization that has worked with New York and Boston.

Ever since Arne Duncan’s tenure there has been talk of streamlining the process of applying to schools. Not only is it hard for students to navigate, but also neighborhood schools are stuck waiting to see who will end up on their rolls as students try to get into other schools.

But the big questions that remains is whether CPS leaders want to move to a system of total high school choice in which students must apply even to their neighborhood school or keep the current mixed system of some neighborhood schools and some choice schools.

Dependent on what leaders are thinking, a host of other questions will come up. For example, does every eighth grader have to fill out an application, even if they want to go to a neighborhood high school?  And what if a student fails to fill out an application? Surely, they will still be allowed to attend high school.

Also, will charter schools be part of the process? Right now, students must fill out an application for each charter school they are interested in attending, even ones that are part of the same network. However, charter schools, with autonomy as a basis for their existence, might be reluctant to join into CPS’ application process.

Then, there’s the question of what if a student doesn’t get into any of their choices.

According to the contract, the first phase for the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice is to help the district think through these questions. After that, they will develop the software and hardware needed to implement the process.

Update on portfolio process

Also at the school board meeting Wednesday, Chief Portfolio Officer Oliver Sicat updated board members on the feedback to school closing guidelines, which will be finalized next week. He said that at the community hearing on Monday evening, many attendees asked CPS officials to reconsider closing schools all together and instead focus on putting resources into neighborhood schools.

“What do you say to them?” asked Board Member Jesse Ruiz.

“I tell them that we all agree we need better schools for students, we just disagree on how to get there,” Sicat said. Wednesday night is the final hearings on the proposed guidelines.

November 17, 2011 at 10:57 am 13 comments

Talk to the Man Thurs 11/17 at 6:10pm

Hello, is Mr. Brizard there?

I’m trying to get more details about how this call will work and how people can ask questions.  I’ll let you know if I find out.  But if you have a question or a (brief) rant, why not call up (and of course come back and report what you heard.)  Rally cry: CONSISTENT GRADING SCALE!

Dear CPS Parent/Guardian, Please join me for a “teleforum” discussion this Thursday, Nov. 17, at 6:10 p.m. This is the first of what I hope to be many opportunities for me to talk with you about what CPS is doing to drive the academic achievement of your children and to hear your feedback. We want to make sure we are being as inclusive, responsive and transparent with you in our efforts as possible, and having these discussions with you on an ongoing basis will help us accomplish that. To access the teleforum on Thursday, please call 1-877-229-8493 toll-free from any phone, and, when prompted, enter the access code 18528. I hope you will be able to participate. Thank you for engaging in the discussion and for the invaluable role you play in the success of your child and of the district as a whole.

Sincerely, Jean-Claude Brizard Chicago Public Schools | CEO

MORE DETAILS:

The questions will be moderated — it definitely won’t be a free-for-all. CEO Brizard will start the discussion off by talking about the challenges facing CPS and how he and his team are tackling them, and then we’ll move into a moderated Q&A for the second part.

We can’t say for sure how many questions we’ll be able to get through, because this is the first time we’ve done a teleforum like this. Parents can also tweet their questions @ChiPubSchools or ask them on our Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/chicagopublicschools

November 16, 2011 at 1:07 pm 10 comments

Brizard Meeting – Part 1

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present the original Buffy and Jody

Based on a couple comments today on here about whether we should be working to fight for the kids in the system who are in the most need or work to acknowledge a range of challenges in CPS, I figure I’ll start some writing about my Brizard meeting.  The day before the meeting, they sent me the info at the bottom of this post about the achievement gap in CPS.  I think anyone would agree it is appalling.

During that same time I was debating which would be the key issues I’d want to verbalize during the meeting.  After a LOT of thought, the high school problem seemed worth bringing up.  And by that, I mean what feels like a problem to “parents like me” who are Tier 3-4, have kids who may not make it into the SE high schools, and feel great uncertainty about the other CPS options.

I had great angst, having read the numbers about how many kids in this city are so horribly far behind in the basic skills while I was about to go in rallying for a high school solution for upper middle class parents who are scared of most of the city high schools.  But as I thought about the size of CPS (something like 666,666 kids – ha, that 666 sticks in my head) I figure that Tier 4 kids (which I am not, but should be) comprise over 150,000 kids.  And I write the blog, and I was there to represent my readers.  Who have tended to be of a similar background as I am, for whatever reason.  I never advertised this blog (except at the NPN fair lately) so anyone on here is just here by finding me on their own.  We are who are are and I think our interests are valid.

So I sucked it up and expressed my concern on behalf of Tier 3-4 parents who need some high school options.  He knows about the achievement gap, clearly.  He knows that is the giant problem to solve in CPS.  I needed to bring the POV of parents who are in the same boat as I am and feeling great angst about it.

I did not ask for more SE schools.  I asked for more seats in places where parents will feel comfortable sending their kids.  I asked if I or some other group could meet more often to try to figure it out.  And if it is even on their radar.

In terms of answers… hm.  Hard to say.  I believe he understands the problem.  I believe he wants to have more options.  The CPS motto now is that they will go neighborhood by neighborhood, at a granular level to figure out what is needed.  I get the feelings that more SE high schools is not going to be the answer, except in rare exceptions.  He says we need to try to solve these problems while also considering the greater good of the system.

Which to me is saying “no we’re not building you guys a bunch of SE high schools for Buffy and Jody when kids in this city can’t read.” (my interpretation.)

If things are granular, I think we need to work at a local level to push for what we want.  Charters are an options. Perhaps programs within current schools are an options.  Squeaky wheels may get the grease?  It’s nice to hear that CPS is listening, but I think more than ever parents have to continue to advocate for more options.

Achievement Gap info from CPS:

Chicago Children Need Access to Higher-Quality Schools

 Providing all CPS students with a world-class education and ensuring that they graduate college and career ready starts with an honest dialogue about the quality of education in our schools.

These are the facts: far too few Chicago Public Schools students have access to a high-quality education — particularly African-American and Latino students, whose graduation rates, test scores, and indicators of college readiness lag behind those of Caucasian students. Worse, these already large gaps continue to widen. Though CPS has pockets of excellence, too many parents cannot secure a high-quality CPS education for their children. Overall, too many of our students are either not graduating from high school or not graduating college and career ready, pointing to a need to fundamentally reinvent CPS to boost student achievement.

Taking a hard look at the facts is the first step on the road to turning the system around. More than anything else, these facts drive home the urgent need to provide high-quality schools in every Chicago neighborhood.

Achievement gap facts

Not enough students are graduating:

• Overall, the graduation rate for CPS students stands at 57%. Just over one in two African Americans in CPS graduate from high school (52.7% in 2011).
• While graduation rates have increased over the last decade, the graduation gap between African American and Caucasian students has increased by 5.5 percentage points.

Students are not graduating college ready:

• Only 7.9% of all CPS 11^th graders in 2011 tested college ready.
• Barely one in seven African American students scored at or above a 20 on the ACT, which represents a 43.2 percentage point gap between Caucasian and African American students. The benchmark for college admissions is a score of 21.
• Over the last decade Caucasian scores have improved at three times the rate of African Americans, while Latino students have improved at twice the rate of their African American peers.

Achievement gaps are in double digits for high school and elementary students:

• On the ISAT statewide test for elementary students, the achievement gap between African American and Caucasian CPS students was 31.3 percentage points in 2011 – an increase of 13 in the last five years alone. The achievement gap between Hispanic and Caucasian CPS students was 27.1 percentage points, an increase of 7 over the last five years.
• On the Prairie State Achievement Exam for Illinois high school students (PSAE), the achievement gap between African Americans and Caucasian CPS students was 44.5 percentage points in 2011. The achievement gap between Latino and Caucasian CPS students was 33.4 percentage points.
• Caucasian CPS students are 16 times more likely to exceed standards on the PSAE than African American CPS students.

November 14, 2011 at 4:31 pm 116 comments