There already are a lot of incentives to work in urban districts. You can qualify for about 18k in student loan repayment after five years in a qualifying district. There are programs that will pay for entire degree for people who commit to three years in an urban district. Teach For America doesn't give you a degree but it's a highl competitive program that recruits amongst te best and brightest to teach in urban schools.

TFA will be the first to say money isn't the solution to the problem...and I agree.

I'm a fan of single sex classrooms as an OPTION...not mandatory. But it a parent in a larger district wants to choose this option it should be available. I did single sex HS and now I'm in the science profession. Many of our graduates are in technical professions as well; the majority have done very well for themselves despite the fact that our now closed school served a lower income urban population (for the most part).

This experience also makes me advocate for smaller schools and classrooms but with all the budget cuts...smaller schools are going away.

Along those lines, someone mentioned busing times. The disappearance of the "community school" in rural communities (a byproduct of budget cuts and forced mergers) is making commute times for these students unreal. Two hours spent on a school bus is just a waste of time when the kids in question used to be able to walk to school :(

As someone who has worked with numerous TFA teachers, let me just say that 75% of them were NOT all they were cracked up to be. TFA does recruit to people who are considered the "best and brightest" but NONE of these recruits has any background in education. TFA then throws them into a 5 week "education" program.

Now I'm not saying that all education programs are excellent, hell mine sucked, but it was definitely better than a 5 week program.

TFA isn't all its cracked up to be.

Plus, most TFA's do there 2 year stint and then book it, leaving education all together but getting a shitload of their loans paid off. Doesn't seem quite fair to those, like myself, who are in the profession for the long haul and oh wait aren't getting their loans paid off.

Actually, no.

Crappie is the name of the fish. "Crappy" is the descriptor for the school.

Unless you mean that Crappies sometimes travel in schools. Although, as full grown adults, I don't know if that's true.

I mean, unless you meant "crappie" to be a reference to the fish. In which case, carry on.

She's probably the exception to the rule, but my cousin graduated in Psychology (wanted to be a HS Guidance counselor) but became a kindergarten teacher through TFA over 5 years ago and is a STAR. Her district actually uses her to teach others in her field. She's in it for the long haul, loves her kids and goes the extra mile (as does her parents who visit her classroom to help out!) for her students. They even put her in a poor performing school, and she shined there too. Some people just figure out where they were meant to be after college.

I don't comment on the "political" threads often, but since I do have about 25 years of teaching experience, I put in m two cents on this one.

1) I do think education should be as locally based as possible meaning I think the more the local community controls where education money goes, the better, and I don't see that the DOE has done much good for education as a whole. The one exception I see to this is that I do think there should be national standards in terms of what children need to know or learn at what age. This is all over the board from district to district, so if a kid moves around at all (and most will at some point) they lose a ton of time trying to play catch up because there is a likelihood that what the 4th graders in Columbus, Ohio are learning at what the 4th graders in Bozeman, Montana are learning aren't remotely connected. It also means that a college instructor will face a class of 200 kids with radically different background information.

2. Other than agreement on what information a child should be exposed to or learn from grade to grade, I tend to be wary of any absolute statements in terms of what works for kids. Nothing works for all of them and most things will work for at least a few. This is the reason that while I taught in public schools and I believe in them as the best option for most kids, I don't think it is the right option for all of them and I do believe parents need those options.

3) I agree that standardized tests should not be a sole determining factor for anything, but they should be considered as one of many factors. The problem isn't the tests but how they are used. I will say that most of the tests currently used aren't like the CAT or Iowa achievement tests most of us took. They aren't strictly fill in the bubble. For instance, on the WASL (the test Washington state uses) students work out math problems. They don't pick from a list of possible answers, and they are given points (1-4). They write an essay. Very little of the test is filling in a bubble (I have other issues with the test, but it does give a pretty good indicator of what a student knows). On most of the current tests used - teachers can get a wealth of data back that helps us know what concepts they understand and what they don't understand. Ours are also pretty lenient with students who have test anxieties. It doesn't solve every problem, but they aren't out to scare the kids to death.

4) My current school uses uniforms. Do I think they make a huge difference? Probably not. I don't think they prevent kids from picking on each other. I do think they prevent some distractions. I do think teachers spend less time dealing with dress code violations and discussions over what is or isn't appropriate in a school setting. It standardizes those issues so that no one feels singled out. Beyond that, I'm not sure how much they matter.

5) While I agree that it isn't financially feasible, and I don't think it should be mandatory, having taught once in a single sex setting, I do think it generally works better. It isn't an issue of it being better for girls or better for boys - it works better for both of them. Usually (not always) they spend too much time when they are together trying to impress each other and their methods for doing that often revolve around things that disrupt classroom learning. I've just found that if you remove the distraction they are to each other, they focus better on the task at hand. I should say that I am referring to middle school and high school here. Don't think it makes a difference in elementary schools as much.

6) Totally agree that children and their parents need to be directed in paths that are best for them. I am a little nervous about the European system. I know at one point in Germany they used tests to decide which direction to track students (technical, vocational, college) in the 4th grade. I personally think that's much too young, and I think what a child and their parent wants should be taken into account. I would be uncomfortable leaving that decision to a school. We are wrong about kids all the time. They surprise us all the time. On the other hand, I do think Americans are too sold on the "college is the only way to have a future and any kid who doesn't go will be stuck in a dead end job for life" mentality and its two steps down from the stressed out parents on college confidential who think their child is ruined if they don't end up at an Ivy League school. Not everyone wants to go to college and not everyone should go to college.

Most of the guidance counselors I knew were caring people who loved the kids they worked with and put a lot of time into them. I'm sure there are some who might direct a kid based on their economic background, but I never met one. If anything, they were guilty of the same thinking we just mentioned - they wanted every kid to go to college - even if it wasn't always a good option for them based on interest and ability. Again, I would put the blame for that on our culture as a whole. We believe strongly that education is the key to a successful life. I believe in it or I wouldn't be a teacher, but education can mean a lot of things, and it doesn't always mean a classroom. Unfortunately, with budget cuts, those other types of learning are usually the first things to go.

So true. I went to college with 3 of my best friends, 2 of them being national merit scholars (for having a high score on the SAT-not sure if merit scholars still exist these days?), one of those having a full scholarship to A&M. I won't mention what I got on the SAT here as it was embarrassingly low:(, but I can say I was in the top 5% of my highschool and had only made 1 B over those 4 years. Anyways, by our sophomore year, both merit scholars were on academic probation, my friends full ride was gone. Meanwhile, I continued to do very well and was accepted to vet school a year early.

I did not do well on standardized testing but this did not impact my performance in college. It did hold me back from receiving several scholarships and from being in the honors program.

My friends could take a 4 hour test and do well, but when it came to studying, attending class and even classroom testing-they did not do well. I am still a bit bitter:mad: over the SAT (also substitute the GRE for the SAT I had to take for vet school-again I did awful but my grades saved me)

You're setting up a false dichotomy: Either (A) we keep the current set-up, or (B) We keep all control local. (Although earlier you wanted the control to be at the state level. Where should it be -- state or local?)

Maintaining some federal involvement doesn't have to mean keeping things just like they are. But we live in a global economy, and our national economy is very interconnected. If some states fail to provide adequate schools, the country suffers, not just the people in that state or district. If you want to look at it through a state lens, the states all have an interest not only in making sure their own schools are good but in holding other states accountable. Otherwise, we all suffer.

There is a role for the federal involvement in education, particularly the role that AXOmom identifies: national standards and expectations.

I agree- I was going to apply for TFA but I was completely unimpressed with their "training" program. Instead I'm applying to grad school- one that places student teachers in urban classrooms with a mentor teacher from day one, to maximize your hands on experience.

I have not worked with any TFA teachers personally, so I cannot comment upon their effectiveness. However, in the present economy, with so many fully credentialed, well-qualified teachers unemployed, why would any district hire from the TFA corps? In California alone, there are thousands of laid-off teachers.

*I have taught for eleven years, and I have mentored several excellent student teachers over the past two years. These teachers were trained at either CSUN or CSU Bakersfield. Only one of them has been hired to teach full time, and she was hired by a private school.

B: Local (county/city) school boards with State oversight

Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results - Albert Einstein

Again, though, a false dichotomy: Doing just what we're doing now or purely local contriol with State oversight are far from the only options. Einstein would know that. ;)

Also (and one reason I'm not in love with that quote), it's clear Einstein was a theoretical physicist - experimental physicists know that repeatability is one of the main difficulties in high-level scientific research today. You'll often do the same thing over and over and get different results.

Similarly, often government programs aren't inherently or implicitly broken - the implementation is poor, not the conceit. A do-over (more likely, a clean start-over) could indeed give tremendous results.

How many do-overs does the Federal Government get? The DOE has been, realistically, in existence since 1980. Are our schools better or worse than prior to that year? That is 31 years of wasted $$$$ going down a bottomless well with no real return on investment. Every year should have been a do-over.:confused:

How many do-overs/restructurings of DOE have there been? (That's a different question from how many one thinks there should have been.)

Sorry, but I think "solutions" like "get rid of DOE and return the power to local communities," while they might sound great and appealing, are terribly simplistic approaches to a complicated problem. It's not a real solution -- it's just trading one set of problems for another set of problems.

Without arguing over efficacy or semantics like the above, let's try it this way:

What, exactly, makes you think anybody at all on a local level of government is qualified to dictate educational policy? And I don't even mean "more qualified" than somebody else - I seriously mean, for the average community, what about the dopey, slow, limited, and largely ceremonial governments of most towns and suburbs makes you think THAT is the group who really needs more money and power pushed toward them?

And if you instead want to discuss the state level ... States puked all over themselves trying to spend stimulus funds, then cried when they didn't get more. Many state governments are run by part-time state legislators whose qualifications were "Put Up A Lot Of Signs In Yards." That's your solution? Give them more stuff to do, more money to blow?

Sorry if I'm non-plussed at the concept of removing the DoE in favor of essentially this plan:

1. Move money from idiotic bureaucracy to smaller, less experienced idiotic bureaucracy.

2. ????

3. Profit.

Contracts.

My old district in AZ had like a 5 year contract with TFA and were only like 2 years into their new contract when the economy tanked and teachers had to be laid off. They would pay more to cancel the contract with TFA then to just continue with the contract.

Um...that would make it 31...not 41.

Don't do this. Don't make me 40 before my time.

Thanks,

A 1979 Baby

:o

No, let's instead continue like we are with a truly bloated inept bureaucracy (DOE) that thinks it knows best for everyone and every state.

The states administer and oversee the public University systems? I don't believe the Federal Govt. is involved and they (States) do, by all accounts, a good job. At least in NC we have a very good system with some pretty good leaders. I don't see why it would be an automatic fail if the states took over total control of the schools from Washington. I don't see local and state control as idiotic. They seem to do a very good job around here and they have a stake in the outcomes unlike the "idiots" (your term) at the DOE.

Sorry but Einstein was right.

Perhaps you need to meet some of the local school board folks in my neck of the woods.

To be honest, I get the feeling that you think the Department of Education has a lot more power and authority than it actually has. With the exception of No Child Left Behind (only 10 years old, not 31), the bulk of decision-making authority is already with the states and local school boards. And of course, it's essentially NCLB that Matt Damon was criticizing and that many of us have been criticizing.

Yep...NCLB is a really, really poorly executed plan that has not helped many in the past ten years. Now states are spending thousands of dollars investigating cheating scandals over standardized testing. What is it all for...what it is all proving? That schools are failing? We already knew that.

Again, fallacious logic - those aren't the only two options.

As noted multiple times here, post-secondary (essentially opt-in) education is a different ball of wax. Expectations, outcome, etc. are all massively different.

I know you know this, but the plural of anecdote isn't data.

Ahhhhhhhhh. :p

I want to say irony isn't the right word, but perhaps it really is.

If we hadn't identified and imposed requirements on failing schools, they would have done nothing more than maintained the status quo (or slid further). Now, they're being forced to change. That they bitch and moan about it is not really shocking.

NCLB has also inspired quite a bit of innovation. In Oklahoma, we're working on testing programs which, especially in the primary ed levels, test kids constantly during the year. Problem teachers/students/districts can be identified basically in real-time.

In OKC public schools, they're now trying all kinds of things to get back on track. Some of our inner-city schools have had new principals take over who were told to clean house. We've had mass resignations of teachers these principals identified as not being part of the solution. We'll see if that produces results, but at least we're doing something--and like it or not, none of this would have happened without NCLB.

That is great for OK...but here the same schools that were failing in 1993, when I was a freshman...are still failing. Honestly...there are people manipulating the data/testing so the schools can pass, otherwise they will never make any progress. That is disturbing.

In certain cities the dropout rate is 45% or higher...grads are barely literate and ill-prepared for the real world. So it's safe to say there are still schools that are passig kids through...

I respect the idea behid NCLB, because it addresses a huge problem that had been swept under the rug for many years. However I've not heard much positive about it from teachers who are in the front line in education. That bothers me- if teachers feel it isn't effective, someone needs to be listening to them!

The point you're not getting is that NCLB is an EXTREMELY narrow way of evaluating things. Just because someone does lousy on standardized tests doesn't make them a "problem student." It means they're bad at that kind of test. On the other side of the coin, there are people who can breeze through those tests and take home straight Fs - or who can memorize answers to the tests. There are no checks and balances.

These people do exist - and you're correct that testing only shows who can pass a test, and that other forms of interpretation/application are a MUCH higher-level skill than simply responding to questions.

However, these people are NOT the norm - in fact, they're an extreme minority. The overwhelming majority of people who do poorly on a test have poor understanding of the subject material.

NCLB sucks in its implementation more than its concept.

I agree completely with you, though, that NCLB is narrow - there are many things it could do to obviate some of the "bad test taker" concerns (untimed tests would be one, and making testing less formal another, among easy things that we've known about for decades) but instead, it just sort of pukes on itself.

Agree with all of the above.

I can't speak for every state, but the test our state uses (OAKS) for NCLB isn't timed, students are allowed a break whenever they need it or the tester thinks they need it, they can be tested alone, in small groups, or large groups, and there are a host of other accomodations (for instance, in some cases the tester can read the questions and answers fro the math and science portion to the students, and they can have them read the reading sections out loud).

Some kids will get stressed no matter what you do, and some will never test well, but I think our state made every effort to alleviate that issue. On the other hand, the legislature voted in the middle of October (when most schools were doing the first round of testing) to raise the score required to pass the math portion by 7 points which was a big jump. They didn't give the districts, schools, or teachers any time to prepare for that change. I oversee state testing at the charter school where I currently work. We are required by state law to show that our students are performing better than the students in our district (I believer we have to show that 80% pass or exceed) or we are out of business. It led to a pretty stressful situation for everyone.

I do have other issues with how state tests are sometimes used (for instance, I'm not sure this is still the case, but when I taught in Washington, they were moving towards making the state test a requirement for graduation. I think they've backed off on that, but I'm not sure). To make matters worse, at the time, they had no Plan B for special education students. The state made it clear they were just going to wait for a lawsuit which they knew would happen at some point and then deal with it.

I think my biggest problem is that evidence of a successful education isn't always shown in test scores that occur immediately in high school. It's shown in an ability to handle college, or manage your finances, or have an ability to manage your time well. To having a balance to social and work life as well as finding hobbies and other areas that interest you. There's a reason that better schools with higher achieving students often times have the money to give to extra activities and more creative ventures. These students have most likely started in strong elementary schools and worked their way up so they can more effectively manage their money rather than focusing just on brining up test scores as well as most likely living in areas of higher tax income where the local town can support the educational system better, plus having more involved parents and kids who don't need to start working the minute they can to help support the family, or need to come home right after school to baby sit.

Testing is just a way to ignore these massive structural issues and in some situations, blame the teachers for the issue. Are there bad teachers, sure, but there are bad doctors and lawyer etc etc, that's no reason to knock an entire profession. More than anything I've seen teachers be beat down to the point where they've given up. The City of Detroit just cut salaries where teachers could be making only 24,000 a year. Why would intelligent, driven and ambitious people be attracted to a career where they are not allowed a say in their style of teaching or even their appreciation.

I think this could be highly effective IF implemented with the right leadership. I have seen principals who give bad final evaluations because they don't like a certain teacher even if they made growth. This makes it easy in some states to fire teachers over petty issues rather than their ability to effectively teach their class.

This isn't a response about qualification, but I think local governments are at least more responsive and aware of the pressing issues in their communities. I also think officials are more invested in the results. The accountability for problem solving is pretty diffused when you get to the federal level.

I don't have a big problem with national standards or national assessments, but I'd generally like the federal government to deal with things that only the federal level can handle. Education isn't one of those things.

The decisions for how the plan would be implemented were up to the states. I always thought it was delusional to say that every kid could be on grade level by a certain date, but a lot of what NCLB is blamed for has to do with implementation and the response of local districts to being held accountable. They elected to game the system rather than focus on real instruction.

(I'm not saying that bad tests scores are an instructional failure or that that kids' homes and parental expectations don't matter. But when the districts decided the games they would play, those games weren't required by NCLB.)

Finally, the NAEP actually does show some progress from the years of NCLB particularly with subgroup performance. Sure, it's a standardized test, but when you talk about educational outcomes, we don't maintain a whole lot of other data to evaluate the entire country at once. If we have evidence that kids are reading better than before NCLB, for example, I'd say we might have actually improved real student achievement.

ETA: someone mentioned having doubt about NCLB because teachers didn't like it. Well most people would prefer to use their own measures than embrace being judged from the outside. I think that's a pretty natural response but it doesn't mean that much objectively.

The real risks to individual teachers from NCLB itself are pretty low unless your district or principal is crazy (in which case, again, NCLB itself isn't really the problem.)

This are the problems I have though. First, while I can agree that local officials may be more likely to be responsive to pressing local issues, those local issues can be quite narrow -- things like school assignment, teaching sex ed and the like. And second, the day is long gone when communities were by and large educating the people who were going to stay in that community and live and work in the community. The people who will one day be working and contributing to community life where I live are now being educated all over the country. We all have a stake in education nationally. So maybe things like minimum standards is something only the federal government can handle.

That said, I still think a straw man is being beaten up here. The vast majority of real decisions about education are still made at the state and local level, including, as you say, how to implement NCLB. The only substantive federal involvement is standards and assessment. The issue, as I see it, is whether the assessments are working the way they should and measuring what they should.

I don't know why everybody thinks the schools and the teachers have ANYTHING to do with why certain cities have a lot of students who are failing. I would hazard a guess that the teachers in the Detroit Public Schools primarily went to Eastern Michigan and Michigan State, just like in every other district in Michigan. I would hazard a guess that most of these teachers had essentially the same education. I know that they have all the same requirements to maintain their certification.

The difference between successful school districts and failing school districts is about:
a) Whether the families in those districts value education, make sure their students attend school every day and do their homework, and work with them to get that done
b) Whether those students live on the streets or in homes, whether the homes they live in have electricity, heat and water or not, whether those students have meals on the table
c) Whether students see any value in getting an education
d) Whether students even feel safe in school, or in their homes and neighborhoods

It's pretty clear that there are students who excel and go forward to do great things, even from the worst performing schools. Those students are getting what they need from someone... a mentor, a parent, a relative.. somebody. Somebody is taking care of those kids and somebody is doing something to help them see that getting a good education is important.

Schools aren't failing. Society is.

There are great teachers who change a kid's life and there are teachers who just phone it in. I want a way to distinguish between the two and I think measuring outcome is the best way to do it.

But I also agree that you can't pin the failures of Timmy's last three teachers on this year's teacher. If he didn't master addition and subration in K-2, there's no way he's gonna grasp multiplication in 3rd grade no matter how dedicated that teacher is. So instead of basing success/failure on the raw score of today's test, why can't we base it on the amount of progress he has demonstrated since last year's test? I read about a school district in southern California who was doing that and I love the idea. Then even if Timmy is not up to grade level on his math skills, Miss Landers is still rewarded for helping him master the basics that he missed before.

Which may not be possible in some districts that are inching up past 40 students per classroom. That's fine if you are focusing on the same topic for all students, but if you have to go back and identify deficiencies in half the students and fix those problems while still teaching on level, something is going to suffer. Large classes over 40 students in college are fine because the students who can't keep up are weeded out by pre-reqs. Grade school teachers don't get that luxury.

The way I understand it, some forms of value added assessment do this. They are based on a growth model and just compare the performance of the students a teacher has this year with those exact kids' previous performance. Apparently what gets called valued added varies quite a bit and is weirdly variable from year to you, so I'd want to know more about the exact model to say for sure what would work. But it certainly seems possible.

While I agree with a lot of what you say here, schools still spend a lot of money on the education of their students, and some aren't showing particularly good results.

I don't think anyone commenting here would be comfortable saying, well, there are some schools at which we just can't expect the students to show measurable learning.

So what it is reasonable to expect schools to produce and how do you know if the are doing it?

ITA- this is the problem I have with NCLB- it seems to villify teachers as the "reason" kids don't succeed...when kids are at home 16 hours a day and in school 8.

However the bottom phrase is the pink elephant in the room, the thing no one wants to say out loud. People are having kids they have no idea how to raise, kids who are left to their own devices. 8 hours a day can only go so far...

Honestly, I'm not convinced that, generally speaking, our schools are "failing". College enrollment has been steadily increasing since the 1960s. The type of student who used to aspire to a bachelor's degree is now aspiring to at least a Master's degree. When my dad graduated from college in 1958 with a 2.0 as a Sociology major, he could get a great job in the business field and be very successful. Even when he retired 14 years ago (before NCLB), he said there was no way he would hire a new grad who had the credentials that he'd had when he started out. There were too many candidates who had done much better than that in more relevant fields of study. Even in my middle-upper middle class high school, back in the 80s, about 20% of class went to college. In my current lower-middle middle class neighborhood, about 75% of kids are going to college. When I was in high school, there was no such thing as AP classes or IB programs. There were tracks.. "college prep", regular and "remedial", but nothing that gave us college credit before we even graduated.

So, what statistics are saying that we are "failing"? I've yet to see them.

You can take a kid from the inner city of Detroit who lives in an abandoned house with no heat and electricity who doesn't eat, except for his free school lunch, and enroll him in the best school in the state and he's not going to succeed because his drug addicted parent isn't going to support his success. The best teacher in the world just can't fix that.

My kids' school district isn't great. They seriously lack resources for gifted/brighter kids. At high school orientation, the principal spent a lot of time plugging the vocational center and very little time talking about the 6 (yeah, only 6) AP courses available. Somehow, every couple years, a few really determined kids get into Ivies or sub-Ivies. At the same time, it's not a horrible district either. There are some drug issues in some groups of kids, but there's no gang activity and there's very little crime in the area. It's an area where there are a ton of really small districts and I do think there would be some advantage to merging a couple of them. It would increase the AP/IB type offerings because there would be more students who would use those resources. I can see value in that. On the other hand, some districts are so huge that there is massive administrative overhead. Once a district has more students than some large cities, the costs become astronomical. There's a balance somewhere between the two situations that needs to be reached.

The other thought that comes to mind is... although people are always saying "you can't just throw money at a problem", why is it that the school districts with the highest funding per student are also the school districts that consistently perform better?

Teachers get paid a fraction of what most people with similar degrees make and do one of the most important jobs in our society. This trend of attacking them is making me ill. Teachers are not the problem with our society. Most of the teachers I know are far more dedicated to their jobs and put more heart and soul into their students than anybody in any other profession I've encountered.

Is all of this a sign that schools are 'succeeding' or that degrees are increasingly meaningless? My psychology degree didn't prepare me for a real job, my internship that paid for my school did. My Master's program has prepared me for a 'real' career.

Is the inability for people to work w/o a high school degree, even in jobs that don't have to require a diploma or GED a sign that schools are succeeding or that it's too easy to graduate and thus easy to discriminate against those who dropped out and yet would have done well in a labor/apprentice/journeyman position. And 40 years ago would have had a career and steady paycheck.