Going to class? Why bother?

I loved this piece by Jeffrey R. Young at the Chronicle of Higher Ed about whether technology makes class attendance irrelevant. I think there is a similarly interesting piece to be written from students’ point of view—their calculus about whether and when to show up, whether it makes a difference in their learning or their grades (which can be two separate things), and so on. I went to a college where the bulk of my classes were small-group seminars and language classes where the personal interaction was the thing; then again, I could not have done worse in my large Cosmic and Biological Evolution class had I never shown up.

Curse the alignment of chronology and alphabetics that place a D-minus in freshman astronomy first on an otherwise pretty good transcript.

Natalie Munroe crossed a line, but let's talk about that line.

Natalie Munroe’s blog didn’t meet my own personal standards for acceptable public discourse—and blogs are, of course public discourse. But case of the teacher who was fired for blogging, nastily, about her students raises an important issue: There is almost no safe place for teachers to speak honestly and publicly about the challenges they face. I’m not talking about the right to call your students “jerk offs,” the term that got her fired, according to Patrik Jonsson in the Christian Science Monitor. (Which, by the way, should be hyphenated ... teachable moment.) I am talking about the degree to which administrators and school systems make it clear that “being a team player” means staying on message, and god forbid you talk to the press or even parents about what’s happening in classrooms, what’s working and what’s not.

Not all teachers who blog are cursing about their students; there are many serious teacher blogs out there that are to Natalie Munroe’s what Charlie Rose is to Maury Povich. The ante for entry into the public conversation is huge, though: a hell of a lot of guts and unusual confidence in your job security. I am not just talking about blogging. I am talking about talking.

Teacher quality = principal quality?

The Center for American Progress has published a report you should read: “Principals’ Approaches to Developing Teacher Quality.” The wide variation in the degree of authority administrators have in the hiring process, and how they wield that authority, is quite interesting. The principals surveyed emphasized the simultaneous importance and impotence of teacher evaluation. The phrase “dog and pony show” comes up more than once, and I have long held—because I have seen it for myself—that the lesson that is formally observed does not always reflect a teacher’s day-to-day instruction. Meaningful evaluation requires a lot of work. Do the principals you cover have time for it?

Many tidbits here that can be developed into stories. Take a look.

Higher ed cuts? Depends on how you slice it.

Genius story by Richard Lake of the Las Vegas Review-Journal explaining how different parties use different math to spin how bad (or not-so-bad) Nevada’s higher ed cuts are going to be.

P.S. On a totally unrelated note, just because I wanted to give you all a Valentine, click here. (Totally suitable for work, if your co-workers love glorious bass, awesome singing, gorgeous Afro!).

Stimulated?

On the second anniversary of ARRA, EWA and the Hechinger Report teamed up with journalists around the country to produce “Education Stimulus: Gauging the Impact of a Federal Windfall.” The project, whose lead writers were Michele McNeil and Andrew Brownstein, looked at what kind of impact the money has, and has not, made. Take a look!

The Media Bullpen launches.

Today marks the launch of the Media Bullpen, the Center for Education Reform’s mammoth effort to critique the education media. Jeanne Allen, CER’s president, called me yesterday to talk about what the Bullpen is and isn’t. What it isn’t, she insists: a means by which to press her agenda. Allen is one of America’s most vocal activists for school choice. She loves vouchers, she loves charter schools, and I am reminded of this regularly, and emphatically, in my e-mail inbox. Here is CER’s mission, according to its website:

“Center for Education Reform drives the creation of better educational opportunities for all children by leading parents, policymakers and the media in boldly advocating for school choice, advancing the charter school movement, and challenging the education establishment.”

Allen said she told her funders that the Bullpen will represent the bulk of CER’s efforts going forward, though she told me it will be an “independent subsidiary” of the organization. The plan is to have the staff—starting at three people, but growing to at least a dozen—critique hundreds of pieces of education journalism each day. “The issue is not that education is underreported,” she said. “It’s either misreported or doesn’t really focus on the issues at hand.” If there’s a bias, she said, “it’s that education is critical, achievement is down and needs to be better.”

And yet. A piece about vouchers “strikes out” (the site relies on baseball metaphors) because there is “no mention that kids pay highest price for lousy education.” A piece on charters gets only a double: “Need more than love, like info on what’s working at charter & why certain kids should go there.” Keep in mind this is a 400-word piece.

I do agree with Allen that giving readers context is really important, and sometimes lacking. Some of the Bullpen’s commentary regarding that is useful; I too am always trying to help reporters place their story within the national debate, like this critique suggests. But when Allen told me that a piece about school board pay doesn’t do its job if it fails to explain the role of the school board, and a piece about bullying is criticized for not mentioning the impact on academic achievement, I thought back to when an editor told me that I should not mention pompoms without telling readers what they are. I picture a reporter trying to squeeze a many-sided debate into ten inches on deadline, hearing this sort of thing from an editor, and curling up under her desk and crying.

Who bullies?

I am not a sociologist, but I have spent a lot of time in middle schools and have developed an archetype of the very most popular girl. Think back to seventh grade. Chances are that the Queen Bee rated her status through some form of actual merit, if you will. She was athletic, pretty, stylish and most of all kind. She was easygoing, at least on the outside, and because she had older brothers she was not awkward around boys. The girls in her circle all elbowed for her attention, and she didn’t quite understand what all the fuss was about.

All around her girls were acting nasty, because they thought that would cement their position in the group, but this particular girl neither participated in or condoned such behavior. (She didn’t stop it either, but that is a lot to ask of a 12-year-old.)

This was Mia, if you read Not Much Just Chillin’, or Julie, if you were in the class of ’84 at Maple Dale Middle School.

Nirvi Shah writes in Education Week about findings that mesh with my observations: The kids who bully sit in the middle of social hierarchies, not atop them. Talk radio notwithstanding, we do not admire the very meanest.

Turnaround, except at the top.

Do your turnover schools have the same principals as before? In a state like Michigan—and others—chances are they do, according to this piece by Sam Dillon in the New York Times. I would like to know more about why the principals are kept in place. What is the evidence of the promise they were showing in the last year or two?  Are there no good candidates to replace them? If that is the case, what is the district doing to fill up the pipeline with great leaders? Anyone covering turnover schools that kept their principals should be asking these questions. The choice to keep a school leader at a struggling school might make sense, but it shouldn’t go unexamined.

No good deed goes unpunished in Tennessee.

Stephen Sawchuk at EdWeek has a really nice sum-up today about threats to collective bargaining around the country. (Though, as I told him, the piece needed a clearer list up high of what kinds of policy issues are now subject to bargaining, and an explanation of what happens when collective bargaining is not an option. We may have an automatic understanding of this, but readers—even of a trade publication—may not.)

The state with the farthest-reaching proposal to bar collective bargaining is also one, Steve points out, where unions have hardly stood in the way of reform: Race to the Top winner Tennessee. Is the bill just legislator grandstanding, or is there a real chance for passage? It is hard to imagine unions wanting to compromise on evaluation and other issues if they are just going to get thrashed in the legislature later anyway.

This is definitely a ripe question for reporters in Tennessee.

And for some Friday fun, let’s talk TV.

Totally unrelated to education journalism: I wrote this piece 12 years ago. Funny that television competitions based on people’s willingness to be nasty to each other were once a novel proposition.

Light weekend reading: turnarounds.

The journalism on school turnarounds and takeovers and transformations suffers when reporters were not around to see what the school was like before the reforms started. Then you’re relying on secondhand accounts of what things were like, why various efforts worked or didn’t, and so on. But this is the situation most journalists are facing, and they need to make the best of it—and many do. Not surprisingly, most of the journalism to date on turnarounds is from large urban districts. A partial list follows. Except for the Banchero pieces, which are from 2007, these are all from the past year. I would still like some more examples of older stuff.

—Inside School Turnarounds by Laura Pappano, Harvard Education Press. Excerpt here in the Harvard Education Letter.
—The Big Fix, GothamSchools and WNYC, ongoing.
—In the South End, a ‘Last-Ditch Effort’ to Save a School by Bianca Vazquez Toness, WBUR.
—Firing Everyone, Even the Lunch Ladies, to Fix Failing Schools by Linda Lutton, WBEZ.
—Focus on School Turnarounds, Philadephia Public School Notebook, and their Renaissance Schools coverage.
—Coverage of Central Falls High School by Jennifer D. Jordan and Linda Borg in the Providence Journal.

—Changes Take Hold at Chicago’s First Turnaround School by Maureen Kelleher, Focus on Instruction Turns Around Chicago Schools by Dakarai Aarons, and a whole slew of older Education Week coverage by Lesli Maxwell (who has since left).

—The Toughest Assignment by Stephanie Banchero, Chicago Tribune.

If you expand your scope to research and analysis, there is a lot more to read:

2011:

—Turning Around the Nation’s Lowest-Performing Schools by Karen Baroody, Center for American Progress.
—Beyond the School by Joel Knudson et al., California Collaboration on District Reform.
—Unlikely Allies by Elena Silva and Susan Headden, Education Sector.

2010:
—Are Bad Schools Immortal? by David A. Stuit, Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
—The School Turnaround Field Guide by Jeff Kutash et al., FSG Social Impact Advisers.
—Restructuring “Restructuring” by Robert Manwaring, Education Sector.
—The Turnaround Fallacy by Andy Smarick, Education Next.

Earlier:
—Successful School Turnarounds by Julie Kowal et al., Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement.
—Breaking the Habit of Low Performance by Dana Brinson and Lauren Morando Rhim, Center on Innovation & Improvement.
—Turning Around Failing Schools: Leadership Lessons from the Organizational Sciences, Joseph Murphy and Coby V. Meyers, Corwin Press.
—Managing More Than a Thousand Remodeling Projects by Caitlin Scott, Center on Education Policy.
—The Turnaround Challenge by Andrew Calkins et al., Mass Insight.

Let's be clear on tenure.

A friend of mine is a principal at an urban high school. I was talking with a parent at the school once and she said, sort of amazed, “He fires people!”

Yes, it is rare for principals to fire teachers. No, it is not impossible. The process to remove an incompetent school employee may be complicated, but tenure does not mean the same thing in K-12 than it does in universities, and it certainly does not guarantee a job for life. It generally lays out strictures for the dismissal process, which varies by jurisdiction.

As the conversation over teacher tenure heats up, it is important for journalists to provide clarity on the issue: what tenure means, what dismissal requires, why administrators do or, more often, do not follow through on the procedure, and so on. Also, could the tenure rules be modified rather than tenure thrown out altogether? J.K. Wall of the Indianapolis Business Journal did a good job explaining the issue in Indiana;  I would love to see more.

Before this blog existed...

... I wrote a column in the newsletter that EWA e-mailed to its members. You can the archives by going here and clicking “Columns.” These reflect some of the same kinds of topics in the Educated Reporter, though usually in greater depth. Among the highlights (am I allowed to use the word “highlights” in reference to my own work? Does not feel quite right...): “Friday Night Lights” and college admissions, tips for writing short, tricks PR people use to obscure test-score data.

P.S. Forgive the often lousy formatting.

Do disadvantaged 12th graders score the same as well-off 8th graders?

Reading Wendy Kopp’s new book, I came upon a frequently used factoid: that students in poor areas “who do graduate will read and do math, on average, at the level of eighth graders in high-income areas.” The footnotes cite 2005 NAEP data. Usually I see this equivalency used in terms of race: black twelfth graders performing at the level of white eighth graders.

When I was writing Tested, I tracked down the specific data so that I could use it to illustrate the achievement gap. I spoke with three people who work on NAEP. One, a communications specialist, was comfortable with this use of NAEP data. But two psychometricians there confirmed what I was worried about: that the scales for the two tests were not aligned so that you could compare students across tests. So I found other ways to illuminate the gap—and you probably should too, unless the NAEP team has changed the metrics to make this sort of comparison appropriate.

Good work on turnarounds?

Turnovers, takeovers, reconstitutions, whatever you want to call them—they are the #1 topical issue journalists are coming to me about lately, given how many of them are covering School Improvement Grants. Everyone wants good examples of journalism already done on schools that were taken over by the state or outside groups or otherwise turned over with staff and curricular changes. This could be last year, or last decade. Successful, or not so much.

I certainly have some examples to share but am looking for more. Suggest some here in the comments or in e-mail to me, as well your favorite experts to call for perspective on the topic. I will assemble them in a way that is of use to all.