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People in our business commonly talk about the challenges of teaching students who are still learning English. Not so Ted Appel of Luther Burbank High School in California. He sees these students as an asset.
More than half of his school's students are English language learners. About nine in ten come from low-income families. Though some schools might see such students as a drag on their test scores, Luther Burbank High welcomes them from neighborhoods far from its own. For appel, such students enrich the school in ways standard school rating systems cannot begin to capture.
Appel recently told us about his stchool--and about the state and federal policies that can at times impede its vital work.
Public School Insights: Tell me a little bit about Luther Burbank High School.
Appel: It is a comprehensive high school with about 2100 students. About 90% are on free or reduced lunch. About 35% are Southeast Asian, mostly Hmong. We are about 25% Latino, about 20% African-American, and whatever percentage is left is from everywhere else in the world.
Public School Insights: So you must have a lot of different languages spoken in the school.
Appel: Yes. The predominant languages are Hmong and Spanish. For about 55% of our student population, English is not the primary language spoken at home. They are English learners.
Public School Insights: I would assume this population has a pretty big impact on your school and the teaching strategies you to use. Is that true?
Appel: Absolutely. One of the advantages of having such a large number of English learners is that we in a way do not have an English learner program. We try to foster a sense that all teachers are likely to be teaching English learners, so there is not a sense that English learners are the kids that somebody else ...
Newsweek excels at self-parody. It has long produced lop-sided and simplistic reporting on school reform. But this week's lead story takes the cake: "The Problem with Education is Teachers."
I had a hissy fit when I first read that inflammatory and irresponsible headline. And the lede pushed me over the edge: "Getting rid of bad teachers is the solution to turning around failing urban schools." Any journalist who writes about "the solution" to anything should get a pay cut. Another subtitle for the article just added insult to injury: "In no other profession are workers so insulated from accountability." Well, what about journalism?
It's too bad Newsweek ran such a poor piece. They could have learned a thing or two about schools and journalism if they had read Elizabeth Green's wonderful piece in last weeks' New York Times Magazine. Newsweek's authors interviewed only the usual reform suspects, ignored viewpoints that clashed with their angle, ignored the role of factors like staff development and curriculum, and went for the sensational headline. Green's story is a world apart from all that.
For one, Green asks logical questions about what has become received wisdom in some school reform circles. Can TFA really supply the needs of all our troubled urban and rural schools? If we fired "bad teachers" at the bottom and hired "great" ones at the top, would we really solve our education problems? What about the ...
We now know which sixteen states made the cut in the first round of Race to the Top applications. It seems many should be grateful that the Gates Foundation lent a hand.
I made some hasty calculations: If a state received help from Gates in putting together an application, it had a 56% chance of making the cut. If a state received no help from Gates, it had an 8% chance of making the cut.
So here are some questions to think about as we consider a future in which the feds shift much more money into competitive grants. Will wealthy foundations become the arbiters of who gets that money? Will they help preordain the winners and the losers? And is that necessarily a bad thing?
Remember that many poor and small districts can't easily pay for grant writers. They'll have to wait for the deus ex machina.
[Hat tip to @politicsk12 on Twitter. Any mistakes in my hasty calculations are all my own.] ...
We hear a lot about the need to ensure that all children succeed. But I'm beginning to think that the rhetoric of "all" has got too many reformers promising things they cannot possibly deliver. It's time to be more honest about the limitations of any single reform strategy.
In fact, many reforms getting the lion's share of attention these days might actually undermine the goal to serve all children. For example:
Competition for Federal Dollars. At first blush, this idea seems hard to reconcile with the aim to help "all kids." The feds want the states and districts to compete for federal money--and may the best, most innovative ones win. Doling the dollars out by formula, some claim, merely props up the status quo.
But shouldn't we be at least a tad concerned that the rich will get richer and the poor, poorer? Districts that can afford grant writers will have an edge. Those that cannot? It's too bad for them. "Unto him that hath, much shall be given, and from him that hath not...." (You know the rest.)
And if the feds aren't careful, they'll look like vengeful gods who visit the sins of the fathers upon the children. After all, it's children who stand to lose the most ...
Who cuts a more forlorn figure than a poor kid who graduates from college facing crippling loan payments during the Great Recession of 2010?
Unlike too many of her peers, that student was prepared for college when she came out of high school. She made it through college despite the financial pressures that kept her friends from finishing or even starting a degree. Now, saddled with crushing debts, she seems as far as ever from the better life we all promised her.
You'd think more people would be willing to give her a hand. Instead, we have a system that encourages debt without doing much to raise the real value of grants to low-income students. What's worse, a growing number of people in the policy world seem to be concluding that college just isn't worth it for poor kids like her.
So What's The Problem with Student Lending? Here's how Arne Duncan describes the current state of student lending:
Every year, taxpayers subsidize student loans to the tune of $9 billion. Banks service these loans, collect the debt, keep the interest, and turn a profit. When borrowers default on their loans, taxpayers foot the bill, and banks still reap the interest.
Duncan and President Obama want to end the subsidies and issue loans directly through the Education Department. The move would save billions of dollars ...
An old idea is making a strong comeback in several states: Let 10th graders graduate from high school and enroll in community college if they're ready to do so. The idea of early graduation has a lot of merit, because it lets students choose a course that best suits their specific talents and aspirations.
But what about the opposite idea? What about late graduation?
No natural law dictates that high school should take four years. Some students can do it more quickly if they're ready to move on. But others, like recent immigrants who are still learning English, may need more than four years.
A high school principal once told me that she did what she could to keep some recent immigrants in her school as long as possible, even though her school's on-time graduation numbers suffered as a result. Some students arrive at her school at age 15 with no English and little or no formal schooling under their belts.
The larger point of any flexible graduation scheme is that the number of hours you spend warming a seat in your school should be less important than what you learn while you're there. As we weigh the benefits of early graduation, we shouldn't forget the needs of those students who need a little more time. ...
North Carolina’s Laurel Hill Elementary School is a model school. Its rural, diverse and high-poverty student population consistently exceeds state targets on standardized test scores, and the school has made AYP each year since 2003. It has also been recognized for its great working conditions.
But getting there wasn’t easy. In the early 2000s, one challenge stood out: The school failed to make AYP because of the performance of its students with disabilities (known in North Carolina as its “exceptional children”). Rather than throw up their hands at the daunting task of educating special education students, staff at Laurel Hill made lemonade out of lemons. They took the opportunity to study their school and its structure, revise its schedule and move to full inclusion. The result? A Blue Ribbon school that can confidently say it is meeting the needs of all its children. Principal Cindy Goodman recently told us about the school and its journey.
Public School Insights: How would you describe Laurel Hill Elementary?
Goodman: Laurel Hill is a pre-K through fifth grade community school. We have about 500 students and are located in an extremely rural community. We have a very nice facility, which is about 11 years old.
We have an outstanding staff that holds our children to very high standards for behavior, for academics…just high standards in general.
Public School Insights: What kind of population does the school serve?
Goodman: Our community, the little town of Laurel Hill, is located in Scotland County, North Carolina. The county currently has, and for a good while has had, the highest unemployment rate in the state. So it is a very poor area. Between ...
School segregation is back in the news, and it has me worried.
Early this month, UCLA's Civil Rights Project released a report (PDF) calling the charter school movement "a civil rights failure" for worsening segregation in U.S. schools. Charter supporters shot back, calling it perverse to fault charter schools in poor areas for enrolling mostly students of color who were hardly thriving before the advent of charters. One wise observer struck a more moderate pose, calling on all sides to "make racially isolated schools better, and do lots more to reduce that racial isolation in the first place."
I worry that racial isolation will mask inequities that can persist despite gains in test scores. Just take a look at what appears to be happening in New York City. The New York Daily News reports that the city's most prestigious high schools now enroll fewer black students than they did in 2002. The share of black students in some of these schools, like Bard and Eleanor Roosevelt, has plummeted to nearly half of what it once was. District officials counter that new "high-performing ...
"In the 21st century, the best anti-poverty program is a world-class education." That sentence from the State of the Union address is bound to spark debate, and here's why:
We know too many well-educated people who are out of work. We can all name the well-educated people who helped plunge the nation into the deepest recession in many decades. Education alone guarantees nothing, and people in schools are right to get their backs up when others imply that schools manufacture poverty. There are just too many other culprits nowadays.
But we should face facts. High school dropouts barely stand a chance, even in good times. Children who can't clear even the lowest hurdles in state tests face a grim future if things don't turn around for them. Schools that lose more than half their students to the streets don't do much to promote social mobility in a ...
Ask South Carolina Lt. Governor Andre Bauer about free lunches for poor children, and here's what you'll get:
My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that.
He later implied that free lunch lowers test scores. (Hat tip to Alexander Russo.) ...
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A Village Route to Early Childhood Education
In the 1990s, we at Davenport Community Schools noticed a trend: Children were coming to kindergarten unprepared to learn. A troublingly low number of our district’s children (more than half of whom receive free or reduced price lunch) had preschool experience. Recognizing the importance of early childhood education in ensuring students are ready to succeed in school and life, we developed the Children’s Village, which includes formal preschool classes and all-day, year-round programming serving children from six weeks to five years old. Today, when a Children’s Village student arrives for the first day of kindergarten, the teacher can say, “This child is ready to learn.”
With early childhood education, students learn more, teachers accomplish more and taxpayers get more for their education tax dollar. But it takes all our students, teachers, staff, administrators, parents and partners to make the Children’s Villages a success. Indeed, it really does take a village to ensure quality early childhood education. Read more
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