Public-Private Partnerships For School Improvement Efforts

Turning good intentions into meaningful action is one of the toughest elements of trying to improve public education. How can school and community partners most effectively join forces to produce positive academic, physical, and social outcomes for those students who arrive with the fewest advantages?

These were some of the questions The After School Corporation (TASC) and the Partnership For Youth Development tackled earlier this month in a New Orleans forum. The audience included educators, community leaders and advocates from both the public and private sector. I moderated one discussion on how schools and community partners are finding ways to work together, instead of at cross-purposes, to help students learn. (You can visit TASC's Web site for more on the forum.)

One approach to school improvement that’s getting significant attention at the national level is expanded learning time. In fact, the 19 states that received waivers from the more onerous requirements of No Child Left Behind were required by the U.S. Department of Education to include more time for student learning as part of their school improvement blueprints. It’s also a cornerstone of TASC’s ExpandED Schools model.

Created in 1998 to provide high-quality after-school programs for public schoolchildren, the nonprofit TASC counts the Wallace Foundation and the Open Society Foundations among its major supporters, along along with public agencies, corporations and individual donors. Last year, TASC partnered with 11 schools -- three in Baltimore, three in New Orleans and five in New York City --  to implement a new blue print for improvement. Known as ExpandED Schools, the campuses are finishing their first year of operations. The five New York City school were also part of a pilot program for TASC’s Expanded Learning Time model, which ran from 2008 to 2011. It was based in part on the success at those pilot campuses that the organization designed its ExpandED Schools.

While it's still early to be evaluating student achievement, there are already signs of progress, said Lucy Friedman, TASC's president. At the same time, Friedman said, the ExpandED Schools are building the community ties that are crucial to long-term success.

TASC works with community partners – such as AmericaCorps – to bring volunteers into the schools, and also provides more professional development for teachers and other staff. Perhaps most importantly, the school day is extended by about three hours. The extra time is used for supplemental learning opportunities that complement the core curriculum taught during the “regular” academic day. Having their children in a safe -- and educational -- environment makes it easier for working parents, and the community partnerships ensure that teachers are not required to work extra hours.

The ExpandED School model also emphasizes principal empowerment, which enables the individual campuses to be more responsive to what parents want for their children, Friedman said.

“Parents get a voice in redesigning the school day and students get a wider range of opportunities and more time for core academics,” Friedman said. “And citizens get a better result for their tax investment in schools.”

Another initiative that’s building public-private partnerships is the Campaign For Grade-Level Reading, a collaborative effort of political, education, business and advocacy leaders to close the nation’s literacy gap. The nonpartisan campaign, which officially launches today with a conference in Denver, already has 124 communities and more than 1,800 organizations signed on. The diversity of the municipal partners is worth noting, ranging from New York City (the nation’s largest school district) to Southern Pines, N.C., (population 11,586). Big or small, each partner has committed to improving three key areas for students: school readiness, attendance and access to summer learning.

For those goals to be accomplished, it’s going to take a committed effort by every sector of the community, Ron Fairchild, a senior consultant for the campaign, told the audience in New Orleans. “One of the dangers in conversations about accountability is we often frame it as a conversation about blame,” Fairchild said. “For too long, schools and teachers have borne the brunt of that.”

One example of successful public-private collaborations featured at the New Orleans forum is the STRIVE Partnership in Cincinnati and northern Kentucky. Part of a national STRIVE network, the organization helps connect over 300 partners with schools so that students get the health and wellness support services they need to succeed academically and in life.

STRIVE’s primary objective is to get the various partners to abandon their individual agendas and agree to work toward a core set of outcomes. The result, said Leslie Maloney, senior vice president of the Carol and Ralph V. Hailie, Jr./US Bank Foundation and a member of the STRIVE Executive Committee, is what’s known as “collective impact.”

(The collective impact model is gaining traction nationally, and it was one of the panel discussions at EWA’s 65th National Seminar.)

STRIVE focuses on specific academic milestones including kindergarten readiness, third-grade reading, eighth-grade math skills, high school graduation, and postsecondary enrollment and completion.

At the forum, Maloney acknowledged that these are big goals and that “we’re going to be at this for a long time.”

Indeed, these sorts of investments require not only resources and human capital but also a fair amount of patience. So how long should it take for schools to improve? As Friedman, the president of TASC, so aptly noted in New Orleans, change takes time -- and it probably can't happen faster than “the speed of trust.”

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily. 

Career Programs Fail U.S. Department of Education's `Gainful Employment' Tests

The U.S. Department of Education intends to crack down on postsecondary career programs that can’t demonstrate that enough graduates have found “gainful employment,” a move some for-profit colleges say could cost thousands of students the opportunity for a better future.

Amid much controversy, the feds last year set new regulations for career training programs at public, nonprofit and for-profit institutions. In order to qualify for access to federal student aid, the programs must meet the new “gainful employment” requirements, which are designed to ensure graduates are in a position to earn enough money to pay back what they owe.

The career programs will be required to meet federal standards on at least one of three metrics: At least 35 percent of former students must be repaying their loans; the estimated annual loan payment must not exceed 12 percent of a typical graduate’s total earnings; and the estimated annual loan payment must not exceed 30 percent of the individual’s discretionary income.

For the first-round of evaluations, the feds looked at 3,695 programs in 1,336 schools, representing 43 percent of students in career training programs. Of those, 5 percent – 193 programs at 93 individual schools – fell short on all three metrics. Just 35 percent of the programs satisfied all of the regulation requirements.

"Career colleges have a responsibility to prepare people for jobs at a price they can afford," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said. "Schools that cannot meet these very reasonable standards are on notice: Invest in your students' success, or taxpayers can no longer invest in you."

Inside Higher Ed has a concise breakdown of the feds’ list of campuses that fell short in all three areas.* Among them are cosmetology academies, culinary schools, art colleges, and programs preparing students for careers in technology or health-related fields.

The feds are offering a substantial grace period in which to improve. The regulations take effect this fall, and schools have until 2015 to come into compliance before they would lose eligibility for the federal student aid.

The new regulations come amid a national debate on the relative value of higher education. Tuition costs at both public and private institutions have been soaring, even as many universities and colleges have cut programs and services. The for-profit college sector has come under significant scrutiny, in part because of how quickly it’s been growing. Enrollment is up 160 percent since 2000.

The career programs affected by the new regulations are particularly popular among older adults returning to school in the hopes of improving their career prospects by earning an additional degree or completing a certification program.

There’s a significant financial incentive for the feds to push for-profit programs to improve the career success rates of their students. For-profit institutions account for about 12 percent of all higher education students but, as the policy think tank Education Sector pointed out in a 2010 issue brief on the new regulations, but they “consume 25 percent of all Pell Grant dollars disbursed and 21 percent of all federal student loan dollars.”

The nonprofit advocacy group Project On Student Debt reports that in 2010 the student loan default rate at for-profit institutions was 25 percent – more than double the 10.8 percent for public colleges, and more than triple the private college rate of 7.8 percent.

The for-profit college sector had lobbied hard against the new regulations, saying the feds’ methodology was too heavy handed.

Steve Gunderson, president and CEO of the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities — whose membership consists of for-profit colleges — said Tuesday that the Education Department’s metric doesn’t accurately measure what career colleges provide, and the new regulation could cut off thousands of students from the chance to continue their education beyond high school.

"America faces a demand for eight to 23 million workers with postsecondary education over the next decade, but this regulation seeks to only impose a series of faulty numerical measures that ignore the economic reality of inner-city and rural areas, education's long-term benefits and the will of the Congress," Gunderson said in a written statement released following the feds’ release of the data.

Given that federal student aid accounts for as much as 90 percent of the revenue for many for-profit colleges, there’s likely to be strong motivation to satisfy the new requirements. At the same time, losing those federal dollars could force many programs out of business.

There’s another underlying issue at play here: community college capacity. Often students in career programs in private colleges choose that route because there’s a waiting list for the most popular programs at the public colleges.

A few years ago, I met a young woman who chose to go in debt -- $14,000 in federal student loans --  to enroll in a nine-month medical assistant certification program at a for-profit college. The same program, spread out over 12 months, would have cost her about $3,200 at the local community college, had there been room for her to enroll. In fact, she really wanted to be a practical nurse, but she couldn’t afford to wait to get a spot in the two-year community college program.

She needed a better job now, and was ready to gamble that the higher-price certification program would improve her career prospects. With these new regulations, the Education Department is signaling it is less willing to take similar risks.

*This sentence has been updated to reflect that the Inside Higher Ed story dealt with schools that missed all three metrics. 

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily. 

Should Schools Carry Weight of Obesity Prevention Education?

The American Medical Association is recommending that schoolchildren be taught about the dangers of obesity, and supported using revenue from proposed taxes on sugary sodas to help schools pay for the educational programs.

The call for obesity prevention education in grades 1-12 came at the AMA’s annual policy meeting held last week in Chicago. The association’s membership is hardly alone in its concern. First lady Michelle Obama has made tackling childhood obesity one of her policy priorities, and there are massive campaigns underway at the local, state and federal levels to address the underlying issues. Indeed, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports the crisis is now a full-blown epidemic. The childhood obesity rate nationally is 33 percent, triple the rate of 30 years ago.

An obvious question that springs to mind when such initiatives are proposed is how will schools find the time in an already crowded day for yet another instructional priority? It’s worth noting that the AMA’s recommendations included urging its own members to volunteer to help schools implement obesity education programs. But given the controversy surrounding proposed taxes on junk food, funding for such initiatives could still be scarce.

There are also critics who say such programs cross the line into meddling in what should be a family matter. Some efforts by school districts have been more successful, such as setting up extracurricular activity programs that involve the entire family. Others, such as sending home report cards informing parents that their child’s body-mass index qualifies them as obese, have been viewed less favorably. A 2009 research review by researchers at Boston’s Children’s Hospital found BMI report cards used by schools in the United States and in Europe had not improved parental awareness, or reduced the percentages of overweight and obese children. In some cases, the report cards might have made things worse if they spurred children to diet – something that’s discouraged at a young age because of the potential risk factors and the possible connections to adolescent eating disorders.

But as educators know – and the research supports –students can’t learn well when they’re not healthy. Recent research suggests that students who are obese score lower on standardized tests, and they are also less likely to go to college than their healthy weight peers. The reasons behind this relationship between academic performance and obesity aren’t clear-cut. Some studies suggest that a student’s self-esteem is a significant factor in academic performance, and being overweight can influence that.

Students also can’t learn when they’re not in school. A 2007 study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University found that the rate of absenteeism was 20 percent higher among children who were overweight. According to the study's overview, obesity was as significant a factor in determining absenteeism from school as the age, gender, race, and socioeconomic status, which are the four main predictors.

And the problems don’t end when the students graduate. Economists say obesity-related expenses cost states billions of dollars annually in increased subsidized health-care costs and lost productivity.

As for the AMA’s recommendation, it would be difficult to argue that public school teachers couldn’t play a role in educating students about the heavy burden of obesity. But given the short-term harm to individual children, as well as the long-term risks for the broader community, it’s not a burden that schools can shoulder alone.

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily. 

`Carrots, Sticks, And The Bully Pulpit:' Should the Federal Government Be Fixing Schools?

What lessons can be learned from looking at the federal government's involvement in public education? How effective have attempts been at the national level to promote equity, improve achievement, and develop effective policies? Does that track record support more or less involvement by Washington?

Those are just some of the tough questions tackled in the new book "Carrots, Sticks, and the Bully Pulpit: Lessons From a Half-Century of Federal Efforts To Improve America's Schools." Edited by Rick Hess, resident scholar and director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and Andrew P. Kelly, a research fellow at AEI, the collection features 12 essays by experts chosen for their diverse points of view.

A few years ago, Hess and Kelly invited researchers and policy experts who had worked for recent presidential administrations (both Republican and Democrat) along with advocates from the state and national level, to take part in a day-long discussion on the federal government's involvement in education.

As a result of that gathering, "It became clear to us that hardly anybody who actually understands federal policy has the time or energy to sit down and think about what we have learned -- What do we know today that we didn't know yesterday," Hess told an audience Thursday at the U.S. Department of Education, where Peter Cunningham, assistant secretary for communications and outreach, hosted a conversation with the authors.

Certainly this is the time to be talking about the federal government's role in public education. No Child Left Behind took effect in 2002, and was supposed to be put up for review every five years after that date. Instead, Congress has put off having the tough conversation and has approved school funds on an annual basis. In recent months there's been plenty of wrangling, but not much progress, over the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

While it's often lamented that education policy is more partisan today than it was 10 years ago, that's actually a double-edged sword, Hess said. The fighting is fiercer because education "matters a lot more now," Hess said. When the federal government "is not just running a conveyor belt with cash out to states and localities, people have a lot more to argue about," Hess said.

The book's 12 chapters are divided into key areas, including the federal role in research, and the sometimes rocky relationship between the federal government and local school districts. A particularly timely chapter covers the challenges of policy implementation in a public education system that's as fractured and decentralized as the one in the United States. As Cunningham noted Thursday, that's something you don't find in many other countries where public schools are doing comparatively well, and it illustrates how difficult it can be for the federal government to try and reshape what's expected of schools.

At the same time, "No one thinks we should move to centralization," Cunningham said. "No thinks that the federal role should be to run all schools and we (the Education Department) don't either."

Thursday's discussion also touched on the Race To The Top program, in which states compete for federal funding after meeting certain conditions for implementing new programs and accountability measures. That's considered a "carrot," particularly when compared to the "stick" of No Child Left Behind, which focuses heavily on sanctions for schools that fall short of meeting hard-target benchmarks for student achievement.  But I was particularly interested in the discussion of the Investing In Innovation (i3) grant program, which requires public-private partnerships for schools to qualify for funding.

Despite its name, the grant program isn't necessarily about spurring innovation in schools, Hess said. Rather, it's about helping communities replicate programs that have already shown to work, and encouraging the broader community to take a bigger role in supporting public education.

A key message from the book might be that the federal government helps schools when it's "creating space for entrepreneurs and innovative programs, rolling back things that might be in the way of local decision makers," said Kelly, who co-wrote the introduction with Hess.

There's also a continued need for accountability, Kelly said, and "exposing places where states and districts are not doing what they're supposed to be doing -- these are the things that the federal government has been wildly successful at."

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily. 

`Nation's Report Card:" Students Struggle To Explain Scientific Principles

American students are more successful at correctly completing simple scientific tasks than they are at explaining how they used evidence to draw their conclusions, according to the latest results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as “The Nation’s Report Card.”

The NAEP results released Tuesday represent a sampling of U.S. students in grades 4, 8, and 12 who participated in interactive science assessments in 2009. Some of the questions involved what are known as “hands on tasks,” while others were “interactive computer tasks.” The assessments measure the students' grasp of prior knowledge – material covered in class – as well as their ability to predict, observe and explain outcomes based on the evidence provided.

That cognitive leap  -- from choosing the right answer and being able to articulate how it was reached -- matters, said Alan Friedman, chairman of the assessment development committee for the National Assessment Government Board, which sets policy for NAEP.

“Science and technology would be easy if all our challenges could be solved with simple memorization of accepted facts, and purely procedural application of known principles and laws,” Friedman said at a press conference Tuesday in Washington, D.C. to announce the NAEP results. “In the real world, things are messy and one size does not fit all.”

The hands-on tasks for fourth graders included having them assemble a simple electrical circuit and then determine the conductivity of various objects. The 12th graders were asked to test samples from two different water sources to determine the better location for a new town. (The interactive computer tasks for all grade levels are available online via the NAEP Web site.)

The interactive activities used for the assessments were hugely popular among the students, said Jack Buckley, commissioner for the National Center for Education Statistics, which oversees the NAEP administration. Teachers reported that their students said they had actually tried harder on the activities “because it didn’t seem like a test,” Buckley said.

When it came to the achievement gap for minorities and students from low-income households, the science assessment results mirrored prior NAEP findings in core subjects including math, reading, and history. The group of students qualifying for free and reduced-price meals scored significantly below their more affluent peers. The group of black students had the lowest percentage of correct answers at every grade level.

Interestingly, the gender gap that typically favors boys on science assessments was reversed in some areas of the new results. By a margin of between 2 and 4 percentage points, girls’ group outscored the boys’ at every grade level on the hands on tasks. For the interactive computer tasks, girls also outscored the boys in grades 8 and 12, although the margin was just 1 percentage point.

Part of the problem is that even in schools where hands-on science learning is commonplace, students are not being asked to write or explain how they reached their conclusions, NAEP officials say. Just 39 percent of fourth graders and 57 percent of eighth graders had teachers who said they put at least a moderate emphasis on cultivating scientific writing skills. At the high school level, 28 percent of 12th graders said they had to complete a written science report at least once a week.

Indeed, it’s one thing to be able to give the correct answer to a question or follow directions for a lab experiment, and another to use that knowledge as a springboard to deeper levels of intellectual inquiry. Since that rarefied air is where innovation happens, the new NAEP results are of particular interest to Change the Equation, a coalition of over 100 leading companies that have teamed up to help transform how STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) courses are taught in public schools.

The NAEP results are “further confirmation that it’s those broader kinds of skills, the ability to draw appropriate inferences to understand and explain, is where we show weakness,” said Claus von Zastrow, Change the Equation’s chief operating officer and director of research. “That’s very much the area where we need to show strength.”

Change the Equation's corporate partners want students to have greater access to the kinds of interactive learning opportunities used in the NAEP assessment, so they are doing more than just rote memorization, von Zastrow said. However, students still need to master basic skills and core subject matter.

“There’s been a long-raging, and somewhat phony, debate between knowledge and application -- could you have 21st century skills without knowledge,” von Zastrow said. “These (NAEP) results are further proof that’s a false distinction.”

Change the Equation is using a $1.5 million grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York (as part of its campaign to add 100,000 high-quality STEM teachers to public schools in the next 10 years) along with private donations to scale up successful programs in underserved schools. The long-term goal is to cultivate students who will be the next generation of scientists and engineers, so that corporations can look closer to home for talent instead of recruiting outside of the United States, von Zastrow said.

“Innovation means creating something new out of what you know,” von Zastrow said. “If students don’t have the ability to move from facts to understanding to explanation to higher orders of thinking, there’s not much hope for them to be particularly innovative.”


Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily.

Learning From Leaders: Highlights From EWA's National Seminar

Over on the Ed Beat blog we're featuring guest posts from some of the reporters who attended EWA's 65th National Seminar at the University of Pennsylvania in May.

The sessions covered the full spectrum of the P-16 pipeline. Among the newest blog posts: Kevin Hardy of the Chattanooga Times Free Press covered a session on how schools are struggling to maintain high-quality early education programs for disadvantaged students. And This Week In Education blogger Alexander Russo reported on how open-source college classes are rippling the waters of mainstream higher education.

Later this month we will have videos to share from National Seminar, including the hugely popular "Tomorrow's Teacher" session -- 11 speakers were each given 12 minutes to share their views on the future of the profession.

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily.

Criminalizing School Bullying: Do New Laws Go Too Far?

When it comes to school bullies, are they misunderstood kids who just need to pointed on a better path? Or are they criminals who will only be curbed by the full weight of the law?

Earlier this week, USA Today's Greg Toppo looked at the sharp increase in states enacting anti-bullying initiative despite questions as to their effectiveness. And for anyone wondering if bullying takes a summer vacation, Toppo notes that students "might leave behind the face-to-face bullying that includes everything from simple taunts to brutal beatings, but too often they can't escape the digital world that gives the predators access to their prey day and night and well beyond the schoolyard gates."

There's no doubt that states are pushing through legislation that not only criminalizes bullying but also sets new accountability standards for educators who fail to take action to stop it. In some instances the onus is being put on the students themselves, although it's unclear how effective it will be to make them take an anti-bullying pledge as states like Maryland are now requiring.

Much of the push toward anti-bullying legislation comes in the wake of several high-profile cases of students committing suicide. There have been some significant questions raised about the Phoebe Prince case, a girl in South Hadley, Mass. who killed herself allegedly after being bullied by classmates.  The most aggressive pushback has come from Emily Bazelon of Slate.com, who has written extensively about the case and is at work on a book about bullying.

New Jersey swiftly passed anti-bullying laws in the wake of the  much-publicized suicide of Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi. His roommate at Rutgers, Dharun Ravi, allegedly used a dorm room webcam to view Clementi kissing another man. (Ravi was convicted of spying on Clementi, and sentenced to 30 days in jail.)

The New Jersey law is both comprehensive and demanding. Anti-bullying lessons will be incorporated into instruction for students as young as kindergarten. High schools will be required to have anti-bullying coordinators and these efforts will be monitored by the state. Schools that fall short of the requirements face serious sanctions. New Jersey educators have argued the law is both unrealistic and unfair, and that teachers have enough to do in the day without adding another obligation.

I agree that teachers can’t be responsible for the behavior of every single student. But they certainly can influence it.

My middle school years which were a cauldron of adolescent politics, cliques and cruelty -- some at my expense, some by me at the much-regretted expense of others.  It took the direct action of my eighth-grade science teacher to change my behavior. One afternoon she pulled me into her office, and told me how disappointed she was to see me engaging in such unnecessary drama. That conversation was the first of many, and along the way she helped me realize how my actions were affecting others. She forced me to consider the kind of person I wanted to be.

While my change in behavior cost me dearly in the popularity department at the time, I can look back with gratitude for my teacher’s timely intervention. I am sure my parents would have given me a similar lecture if she had the benefit of my teacher’s vantage point. Perhaps that's why so much of the burden to prevent bullying, fairly or unfairly, rests with educators.

*Portions of this blog were previously published. 

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily. 

The `Good Grade Pill,' Extended Learning, and Community Partnerships

By now you've probably read the disturbing New York Times front-pager on students abusing the prescription ADHD medications to boost their performance on high-stakes exams. One of the more striking aspects of the story was a screen shot from a New York-area Craigslist.org site, showing dozens of offers for "study aids." 

I'm curious whether Craig Newmark, the online resource's founder, had any reaction to the story, or whether it might force a conversation about some of the site's posting policies. Certainly how students are improperly obtaining the medication is just one part of an important story, and online black markets are just one source. But I think it's worth exploring. 

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I'm off to New Orleans for a forum on how community partnerships can help support public schools, hosted by The After School Corporation. TASC is a nonprofit organization that is implementing extended learning programs in New York City, Baltimore and New Orleans. I'll share more after the event but in the meantime you can read about extended learning time here. For more on community partnerships, take a look a post written for EWA's Ed Beat blog by Diana Lambert of the Sacramento Bee. 

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily. 

A Troubling Time Capsule: JFK On The State Of Education

In his commencement speech at San Diego State College, the President of the United States covered unsurprising territory in describing the challenges facing the nation’s public schools – inequities for minority students, a high dropout rate, and the need for better teacher training.

What might be surprising is that the president was John F. Kennedy, and he was addressing the class of 1963.

“Our current education programs, much as they represent a burden upon the taxpayers of this country, do not meet the responsibility,” Kennedy said on June 6, 1963 at what is now San Diego State University. “The fact of the matter is that this is a problem which faces us all, no matter where we live, no matter what our political views must be.”

Five days after that graduation speech—and 49 years ago today—Kennedy delivered his historic speech on civil rights from the Oval Office. His commencement address “was a recognition of what needed to be done,” said Gary Orfield, an education professor and co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. “The last time the three branches of government worked together to do something about segregation started with that period.”

The familiarity of Kennedy’s remarks from a vantage point of nearly half a century “speaks both to the aspirations we all have for education and how tough these issues are,” said Andrew Rotherham, who co-founded Bellwether Education Partners, a national nonprofit  in Washington, D.C. focusing on improving opportunities for low-income students. “He’s talking about exactly the same problems we’re talking about now.”

Indeed, Kennedy made reference in his remarks to the segregated schools of the South and the “de facto” segregation in the North. Many of the underlying problems of segregation haven’t been solved, even if it’s no longer legal, Rotherham said.

“Laws that sentenced blacks to third-class educations – those were the easy targets,” said Rotherham, who was a special assistant for domestic policy during the Clinton administration. “What’s driving segregation now is housing patterns, and that’s much more difficult to solve. It’s also not necessarily a problem you can solve with education.”

There are public policy initiatives that can “nudge things along,” Rotherham said, “but no one runs for school board on a platform for changing the school boundaries. There’s a reason for that.”

Researchers like Orfield note that the nation's public schools are more segregated today than they were in the late 1960s. According to Orfield, part of that backslide is due to rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court over the past two decades. That includes a landmark 2007 decision invalidating Seattle Public Schools’ voluntary desegregation plan which used race as a factor in school zoning decisions.

Many of the nation’s schools are segregated by ethnicity and poverty, and for some minority students – particularly the soaring Latino population -- the segregation is also by language, Orfield said. While the nation’s racial barriers are lower in many ways, those advances have not been enough to cancel out the effect of inadequate political leadership and a “hostile” Supreme Court, he said.

“When Kennedy made that speech, no one knew how to do what he was going for,” Orfield said. “Now, we know how to do this. We know what works and what doesn’t work. But we’re not doing anything about it. We are allowing our Latino population to grow up in some of the most segregated schools we’ve ever had.”

To Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group focused on closing the achievement and opportunity gaps for poor and minority children, Kennedy’s speech was distressingly familiar. With the exception of Kennedy's references to California as a leader in public education and a fiscal model for the nation, "the same speech could be given today with equal urgency,” Haycock said.

The Golden State is certainly struggling in the wake of the recession, and both K-12 and higher education are reeling from substantial cuts to funding, programming and services. In a recent blog post, the Silicon Valley Education Foundation called Kennedy's speech "a reminder of a period in California’s not too distant past, when the Golden State led the nation in expanding the commitment to preparing future generations of educated citizens."

While funding issues are certainly part of the problem in many states, “a lot of the inequities are actually choices that educators make,” Haycock said. “I don’t think educators always think of it as a conscious choice, but it is.”

The research suggests that “when a classroom is overwhelmingly black and poor, we expect less of kids,” Haycock said. As an example, she pointed to enrollment data for higher-level math classes. In most states, not even the highest-achieving black and Hispanic students get access to algebra in the eighth grade, although it's more commonplace for their white peers, Haycock said.

“Kennedy was clear that while we might not all have equal abilities, we have to provide truly equal opportunities to all children -- that’s where we continue to lag, and where we stand out among developed countries,” Haycock said. “We continue to spend less on poor students, we give them the weakest teachers, and we assign them to the lowest level courses.”

That’s not to say the United States hasn’t made significant strides in the decades since Kennedy’s speech. But the lack of greater progress – including in the critical area of teacher preparation – is disheartening, Haycock said.

“He called the problems right, and he called the way forward right,” Haycock said. “That the opportunities remain so unequal in this country is terribly troubling.”

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily.

EWA National Seminar: Learning From Leaders

Reporters have been producing some top-notch work out of EWA's National Seminar, held late last month at the University of Pennsylvania. Over on the Ed Beat blog we have guest posts from participants on some of the most popular sessions. We also have a round-up of the articles and columns that have been published by individual news outlets. If we missed yours, let us know.

Later this month we will have videos to share from National Seminar, including the hugely popular "Tomorrow's Teacher" session -- 11 speakers were each given 12 minutes to share their views on the future of the profession.

**

As the Politics K-12 blog noted, it was a busy week for federal higher education policy, including the contentious issue of the impending interest rate hike for student loans. While that's still being fought over, there's a new study indicating that in some circumstances, a short-term vocational certificate can mean better salary prospects than a bachelor's degree. But as USA Today reporter Mary Beth Markelein points out in her story,"the devil, of course, is in the details."

Some of those details: the vocational certificates outweigh the bachelor's degree more often for men than for women, and more for blacks than Hispanics, according to the report. However, certification programs that train workers relatively quickly for a specific occupation can be "the fastest, cheapest way to get a job that pays," Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, told USA Today. 

 Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily. 

Punting the Problem: When Athletes Struggle As Students

In case anyone needed further evidence of just how difficult it can be for students to catch up once they've fallen behind on their reading skills, consider "The Education of Dasmine Cathey."

This powerful (and often heartbreaking) narrative by Chronicle of Higher Education senior writer Brad Wolverton is the result of three months spent with Cathey, a football player at the University of Memphis, documenting his struggle to complete his college career on and off the field. Cathey managed to make it to his senior year despite being semi-illiterate, and finds himself at a crossroads with the safety net of his athletic scholarship about to disappear.

Cathey is far from alone. Colleges and universities nationwide are confronting similar issues of student athletes who are ready for the field but not for the classroom. In recent years the NCAA has stepped up its academic eligibility requirements and oversight, but significant problems persist. As Wolverton reports, University of Memphis officials were unaware of how widespread the problem was on their campus was until a reading test became a requirement for incoming athletes.

“"I was like, 'Holy crud, I can't believe how many kids are reading below a seventh-grade level,'” the university’s athletic director Joseph Luckey told the Chronicle.

Cathey still needs to complete a course this summer in order to graduate, according to the Chronicle story. He failed to advance after an NFL tryout, and has since found work driving a truck and delivering beer.

Much has been written about insufficient academic standards for college athletes, particularly at top-ranked campuses where big games can bring in big money. But I don't think I've seen a better example of how this system affects an individual student.

Cathey's experiences also reinforce the message of organizations like the Campaign For Grade Level Reading, which is pushing for better collaboration among schools and community groups to improve literacy at all levels. Some research indicates that students who are not reading at grade level by the end of third grade have only a 25 percent chance of ever catching up to their proficient peers. By those standards, Cathey was well behind the curve long before he was recruited to play for the Memphis Tigers.

Indeed, the odds of academic success for African-American student athletes like Cathey are particularly daunting, according to a recent study by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida. When looking at the 70 college football teams playing in the 2011-12 bowl games, the institute determined that the average “graduation success rate” was 20 percentage points higher for white student athletes than for their black teammates. The one exception among the individual campuses was Notre Dame, where the graduation success rate was actually higher for black football players.

To be sure, many of Cathey's struggles started before he even enrolled at Memphis. But it's also interesting to read the comments on the Chronicle's Web site, with some readers putting blame on Cathey's inability to seize the opportunities put before him. Others saw a collegiate athletics system that exploits students, rather than helps them overcome their deficits.

“I’m not finding this a heartwarming s story,” wrote reader Maureen Basedow. “Too depressed about an education system that regularly graduates below-7th grade reading level from high school, and then admits them to college if they can do a fast 40. And when they're there, they can take an entire year of courses without reading (or presumably, writing) anything. Is Memphis proud of this? Are any of us?”

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily.

High School Rankings Give Skewed View Of Campus Performance

The New York Times' Michael Winerip has a thoughtful take on how the popular practice of ranking high schools -- including Newsweek Magazine's vaunted list -- can result in a skewed view of campus performance.

Various publications, including U.S. News & World Report and the Daily Beast, use formulas that typically rank schools based how many students take Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classes, and then score well on the related exams. Some of the formulas give schools credit for graduation rates and college-going rates. U.S. News' rankings this year were marred by reports of faulty data  for two campuses in the Top 20. The problem stemmed from incorrect figures reported to the U.S. Department of Education's Common Core of Data, the federal database used by the publication to gather information about schools.

Winerip argues that these numerical compilations can't truly reflect how well a school is truly serving its students. If such lists were to be believed, Winerip said, parents looking for the top schools for their children might consider avoiding the midwest altogether, as Newsweek has deemed it "an educational wasteland."

Indeed, given the problems with U.S. News' rankings, it's important to remember that the accuracy of such rankings isn't always a given. At the same time, Winerip's concern "that the lists are stacked," is a fair one.

"Schools with the greatest challenges can appear to be the biggest failures," Winerip wrote. "At a time when public education is so data-driven, that kind of thinking can cost dedicated teachers and principals their jobs."

To be sure, schools serving more affluent communities are more likely to appear high on the list. So are campuses that are able to practice some form of selective enrollment. 

When the annual high school rankings come out, I've often wondered if it's even reasonable to include magnet campuses, which are public schools that offer specialized programs in areas such as science, math and technology. The enrollment is typically determined by a competitive application process, and magnet schools draw standout students who are highly motivated to succeed. Given those factors, why even include them in the rankings of traditional campuses that must accept every student who enrolls?

When I broached this topic with Robert Morse, U.S. News' director of data and research, in an interview last month, he called it a fair question. But from the publication's perspective, "a public school is a public school," Morse told me. He pointed out that the elite programs are free to attend, "even if there are some barriers to entry."

School districts have set up magnet campuses "for a reason, and they are competing with other public schools," Morse said. "By including them in the rankings, it shows that these types of schools are producing really good results, and that deserves to be pointed out.”

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily.

Does More Time In School Mean More Learning?*

Most of the first 12 states granted waivers from some of the tougher provisions of No Child Left Behind have provided few details on how they plan to satisfy a key obligation of the deal: extending learning time for students at the lowest-achieving schools.

In exchange for being released from some of the law’s requirements, the states had to agree to use student testing data as a factor in evaluating teacher job performance, and to focus their efforts on reforming the lowest-performing campuses. Adding more instructional time was also a requirement.

A new report from the Center for American Progress examining the states’ waiver applications found that, in most cases, there were few details about how the extended learning requirement was actually going to be met.

When it came to laying out plans for implementing extended learning time, the applications from Colorado, New Mexico and Tennessee lacked “strategic thinking,” according to the report. Seven other states (Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Minnesota, New Jersey and Oklahoma) were deemed “committed but missing details.”

Massachusetts was the lone standout on the list, because of its “plan to provide guidance on how districts and schools can best use additional time to improve instruction, add time for enrichment, and get the most out of teacher-collaboration time,” according to the report.

Earlier this week, eight more states were granted waivers by the Education Department. It will be interesting to see whether their applications also fall short of CAP's expectations for specificity as to how students will be given more time to learn.

The CAP report noted that it wasn't too late for the states to come up with more detailed blueprints for extended learning time that take into account the needs of specific student populations, and make the most of the available federal funding to support the effort.

The idea that the waivers might serve as some sort of free pass hasn’t sat well with critics of the Obama administration's approach to overhauling public schools. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has made a point of emphasizing that the states receiving waivers will actually be facing intense scrutiny and even more demanding expectations.

The notion that the U.S. students need more time in the classroom isn’t a new one. The number of instructional hours in each school varies widely from state to state, although most districts follow a 180-day calendar. A frequent complaint of educators is that there simply aren’t enough hours in the academic schedule for students to learn everything that is expected of them.

Finland, which has become a popular comparison against the U.S. public school system, has instructional days that range from 4 to 7 hours, and a school year that runs 190 days . At the same time, Finnish students have more recreational time (an average of 75 minutes per day of recess, compared with the U.S. average of 28 minutes) to break up those instructional periods.

"The children can't learn if they don't play," a Helsinki principal said in the New Republic's examination of the Finnish educational system.

But attempts to extend American school days have been met with fierce opposition. In Chicago, plans to extend the elementary school day to 7.5 hours angered some parents and teachers. The nation’s third-largest school district, Chicago currently has a school day of about 5 hours and 45 minutes, one of the shortest in the nation. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel gave some ground, and the plan is now for a 7-hour day at the elementary level and 7.5 hours for high school students.

Complicating the attempt to rally public support for the initiative is that many of the schools have yet to submit their proposals for how the extra time will be used, and because budgets have not been finalized, campus administrators don’t know how much money they will have to spend on expanded programs or services, NPR reports.

The Washington Post asked well-known individuals what tradition, idea or institution they would eliminate to improve daily life, and Peter Orszag, who headed the federal Office of Management and Budget from 2009 to 2010, suggested dropping the 3 p.m. school day. Extending the academic day to 5 or even 6 p.m. would result in “better-educated students and less-stressed parents,” wrote Orszag, pointing to several studies that have shown more time spent on learning can result in better student achievement.

Orszag, writing as part of the paper’s annual “Spring Cleaning” feature, noted that it would also mean fewer kids left unattended in the late afternoon hours, when they are most likely to be risk. The cost of extending the school day would add about 6 to 20 percent to schools’ budgets, said Orszag, citing a 2008 CAP study. But “to improve student achievement and worry less about latchkey children, that’s a price worth paying,” Orszag wrote.

But the issue of extended instructional time is more complicated than just tacking minutes onto the end of the school day, said Elena Silva, a senior policy analyst at the Education Sector, a Washington, D.C. based think tank. In fact, “we really don’t really have any evidence that more time will improve lower-performing schools or raise student achievement by itself,” Silva said. “What we know is that a lot of the things schools do need -- strong leadership, a rigorous and robust curriculum, high expectations for students, time for planning for teachers -- can’t happen without more time.”

Silva, who authored a new report looking at the use of extended learning time in the lowest-achieving campuses that received extra funding through the federal School Improvement Grant program, said there are “real cautions” to be taken into consideration. (For more on the latest research on these challenges, visit the Center on Time and Learning's Web site.)

“The problem is when schools see extending time as an easy win,” Silva said. “When that happens, they tend to focus on quantity over quality, and to see `time’ as an isolated intervention. What we know is that more time can be very useful for schools and students, but not by itself. Time is not an intervention at all – it’s a tool.”

The strongest evidence about extended learning time suggests that those instructional minutes might be best used on high-quality programs over summer months, rather than extending the day during the regular academic year, Silva said.

When it comes to looking at schools that have had success with extended academic days, there are common factors. They typically have the staff capacity to implement high-quality instructional programs. And there are strong partnerships with community-based organizations and after-school programs, as well as other resources that can “add really enriching challenging time” to the instructional day, Silva said.

“It’s still expensive, it’s still complicated, and it’s still controversial,” Silva said. “But it is possible.”

Extending the school day or school year, particularly if it’s seen as interfering with family vacations or extracurricular activities, could be a tough sell. Educators are already having enough trouble getting students to show up for the days that are already on the calendar. But if the extended schedule translated into a higher quality learning environment -- one where teachers were better supported in their work and principals were more effective leaders -- wouldn’t that make school a place students were more likely to want to be?

*Portions of this blog were previously published.  

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily.