Education in the News This Week

Obama's 2011 Education Budget Request
On the heels of last week's State of the Union speech, the Obama administration proposed a sweeping overhaul of Bush's "No Child Left Behind" law this week. Calling for broad changes in how schools are evaluated and for the elimination of the law's 2014 academic proficiency deadline, "the White House wants to change federal financing formulas," writes the New York Times. Funding would be "awarded based on academic progress, rather than by formulas that apportion money to districts according to their numbers of students, especially poor students." Gabriel Arana of The American Prospect blog points out that "making federal funding contingent on competition also has the same drawbacks as making it contingent on students' test scores: In the same way that schools rigged the system and 'taught to the test' under NCLB, school districts will be rewarded not on their ability to educate students but on the ability to write grant proposals. "

The Myth of the Gifted
"How can you lock children into a specialized educational experience at so young an age?" asks the University of Pittsburgh's Robert McCall. "As soon as you start denying kids early, you penalize them almost progressively. Education and mental achievement builds on itself. It's cumulative." That's the basis of an argument that New York Magazine's Jennifer Senior builds in a new article on education and child development, "The Junior Meritocracy." Five years ago, a psychologist at the University of Iowa co-authored a paper called "Gifted Today But Not Tomorrow?" illustrating just how adaptable 'giftedness' is. Only 45 percent of kids who scored high IQs would do so later on another, similar test. "Combine this with the instability of 4-year-old IQs, and it becomes pretty clear that judgments about giftedness should be an ongoing affair, rather than a fateful determination made at one arbitrary moment in time."

Seattle Parents Rule Curriculum
Last year Seattle schools implemented a new math curriculum called "Discovering Math," but recently two parents and a university professor questioned the school board's decision in court. Yesterday the local judge ruled in favor of the plaintiff, stating that "there is insufficient evidence for any reasonable Board member to approve the selection of the Discovering Series." Apart from finding the textbook material generally inferior to convention, its detractors also claim that it discriminates against ESL students by its verbal approach to math. "The ruling doesn't order the district to stop," The Seattle Times reports. "In fact, there's nothing in it that bars the district from hanging onto the curriculum after its review." As Robert Pondiscio of the Core Knowledge Blog concludes, "Consider me deeply sympathetic with the plaintiffs concerns about the curriculum. And equally concerned about the potential for seeing every decision made by a school system brought before a judge."

College Bound: What We’ve Learned From Our Beta

Note: this entry is part of a series called "The Making of College Bound". Click here to read the series-to-date.

We all think our kids are smart. That's one of the not-so-startling discoveries we made when we shared our new College Bound content with kindergarten parents who agreed to tell us their thoughts about online lessons on how to help kids succeed in school.

After viewing the lesson that encourages parents to praise their kids' effort and hard work rather than label them as "smart," many of our testers told us that working around certain labels was going to be pretty tough. But they'd give it a try.

That may be what was most encouraging about the testing experience, which we kicked off in August and will be continuing into the middle of the year: the parents we heard from were very open to expert suggestions.

Before taking College Bound into a small sampling of kindergartens in Miami, Milwaukee, and Oakland (with Denver and San Diego to come), we were a little nervous. We liked the quick animated segments we'd produced around key parenting messages — but would anyone else?

It turns out, parents do.

We've had close to 100 parents participate in our feedback sessions thus far, and the great majority are hungry for tips on what they can do to support their kids in school. They also want to talk about it.

After watching each lesson, they've shared comments and then asked one another for additional examples of what worked — to help a child follow directions, or learn to enjoy reading, or get comfortable with numbers. They've shared concerns that went beyond lessons, like the way spouses or grandparents treat their children and how to get them to do the right thing. They've sought out other parents whose kids also have learning disabilities to find out how they deal.

We've just begun, of course, and the program has a lot more growing up to do. But the best news so far is a result we hadn't expected: parents report that after watching College Bound lessons, they're more patient with their kids. Imagine the possibilities once our program is distributed to families across the country! Suffice it to say, we've learned that there’s much to be excited about.

Meet GreatSchools: Liana Lo Conte

We'd like to introduce you to our Associate Product Manager, Liana Lo Conte. While you might know her as the smarts behind our most popular email newsletter, Liana has also been responsible for the freshness of our school profile information for the last year. She came to us with experience in both education policy research for Abt Associates and management consulting for NWNIT Smart Government Solutions, and we're thrilled to employ her expertise throughout our website.

What inspires you about the GreatSchools mission?
Liana: I believe in empowering people to make choices that will improve their lives. That's what I love about our mission to provide credible information for parents to take control of their kids' educational experiences. The more parents know about a school, for instance, the better choices they can make about whether it's the right school for their child.

Who in your childhood most inspired your love of learning?
Liana: My mother, no contest. She would be the GreatSchools definition of an involved parent. All throughout my childhood she focused so much of her energy on educating my brothers and me. On her own she taught each of us to read before we got to school, and this was while working hard on her PhD dissertation! When she found out that our school system was cutting funding to math and science programs, she formed an extracurricular math club for me and my friends to ensure that none of us fell behind. Every Sunday my mother taught us pre-algebra concepts and organized fun projects to learn at our house. She showed us how math figures into selling products, and we designed foam-core models of our dream houses — accurately built on the topography of land near a local quarry, which we measured ourselves.

What's the best parenting advice you've heard?
Liana: I'm not a parent yet, but I am looking forward to starting a family in the coming years. The best parenting advice I've heard is about giving your child "ownership." Even at very young ages, kids love projects that they can be responsible for. Caring for a small plant or animal teaches them that they have agency in this world. It teaches children about the space outside of their own heads, instilling a love of giving back and helping others that can last throughout their lives.

Sounds like your mom definitely took matters into her own hands!
Liana: Her intense focus on the importance of our education really instilled in me a passion for knowledge — for striving beyond what's assigned as homework and for learning just for the sake of it.

Education in the News This Week

Obama's State of the Union
On Wednesday night President Obama delivered his first State of the Union speech, turning to education as his administration's next priority. He proposed a $10,000 higher-education tax credit for families and debt forgiveness for graduates who have been repaying their college loans for at least 20 years, stating that "no one should go broke because they chose to go to college." Obama even said, "The best anti-poverty program around is a first-class education." Read more about his plans for higher education by the Quick and the Ed's Ben Miller here.

Duncan's Transparency — or Lack Thereof
"U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has pledged to conduct an open, transparent competition for $4 billion in Race to the Top funds," writes Education Week's Michele McNeil. "But the Education Department is falling short on one key piece: letting the public know who will judge the competition." Mike Petrelli of Flypaper explains that if Duncan releases "everything — the applications themselves, the names of the reviewers, all of the instructions given to the panels, etc. — then the whole policy community will be able to see for ourselves which states most deserve the money."

WAITING FOR SUPERMAN
The Sundance Film Festival is in full-swing this week, and Inconvenient Truth's director is back with a documentary about education. "Despite increased spending and politicians' promises," Sundance describes, "our buckling public-education system, once the best in the world, routinely forsakes the education of millions of children. Filmmaker Davis Guggenheim reminds us that education 'statistics' have names: Anthony, Francisco, Bianca, Daisy, and Emily, whose stories make up the engrossing foundation of WAITING FOR SUPERMAN."

Education in the News This Week

Race to the Top Reforms
On Tuesday, 40 states met the application deadline for Arne Duncan's Race to the Top initiative, which uses the lure of $4.35 billion in grants to encourage school districts to raise standards, make better use of data to track student achievement, and take more forceful steps to intervene in failing schools. As Andy Smarick explains it in the latest issue of Education Next:

Duncan ingeniously used Race to the Top to induce states to improve their policies. If you want a grant, said the secretary, your state had better be hospitable to reform. The swift and positive response from the states amounts to the greatest achievement of Secretary Duncan’s tenure: Illinois, Louisiana, and Tennessee lifted charter school caps. California and Wisconsin ended prohibitions on linking student performance data to individual teachers. Delaware passed legislation making the state more hospitable to Teach For America, and Rhode Island put a stop to all seniority-based teacher assignments. A number of states, including Massachusetts and Michigan, were hurrying to make legislative changes before the first submission deadline in January, and others, including Maine, Maryland, Nevada, and Washington, were planning to apply in the second round to give their legislatures time to pass reform laws.

Wondering how this could affect your school? This Week in Education's Alexander Russo compiled a list of 24 states' applications here.

Generation M²
The third in a series, a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation unveiled the latest media habits of 8- to 18-year-olds: "an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week)." Said Donald F. Roberts, a Stanford communications professor emeritus who is one of the authors of the study, "In the second report, I remember writing a paragraph saying we've hit a ceiling on media use, since there just aren't enough hours in the day to increase the time children spend on media. But now it's up an hour." On the heels of this research, Common Sense Media published some advice for parents of media-overloaded kids.

Education Innovation in Intelligent Technology
Sramana Mitra, a technology entrepreneur and strategy consultant in Silicon Valley, interviewed a few of the founders of education's leading software solutions for Forbes Magazine. "If teachers all across America (and the world) can be motivated to use technologies such as those offered by K12, Apex and Revolution Prep, the entire K-12 education problem will become tractable. The 'guide on the side' model takes off a lot of the pressure on teachers in terms of lesson plan design and content delivery." Find out why.

Education in the News This Week

States Simplify Exit Exams
Similar to the news that 15 states lowered their academic proficiency guidelines to stay ahead of NCLB penalties, the New York Times reports:

As deadlines approached for schools to start making passage of the exams a requirement for graduation, and practice tests indicated that large numbers of students would fail, many states softened standards, delayed the requirement or added alternative paths to a diploma.

Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and exit-exam expert, John Robert Warren said, "The real pattern in states has been that the standards are lowered so much that the exams end up not benefiting students who pass them while still hurting the students who fail them."

Cultivating Failure
In the latest issue of Atlantic Monthly, Caitlin Flanagan argues that "Alice Waters's enormous celebrity, combined with her decision in the 1990s to expand her horizons into the field of public-school education, has helped thrust thousands of schoolchildren into the grip of a giant experiment, one that is predicated on a set of assumptions that are largely unproved, even unexamined." That giant experiment Flanagan decries is the simple community garden growing outside elementary and middle schools nationwide. But as Salon's Andrew Leonard points out, "In her entire 3,500-word article, there is no indication that [Flanagan] talked to a single Latino in Berkeley who might have misgivings as to the merits of elementary and middle school kids spending a mere hour-and-a-half a week tending a garden." What a debate!

Is Education Reform All Talk?
That's what NPR's Seward Darby wants to know. This week the president of the American Federation of Teachers "voiced support for some major education reforms — most notably, tying students' test scores to teacher evaluations and making it easier to fire bad teachers," but what about teacher seniority, performance pay, and implementation? Darby reminds us to remain skeptical of promises without definitive plans.

The Parent Trigger: New Leverage for Parents

Originally posted at the National Journal's Education Experts blog, in response to the provocation: Under a provision known as the "parent trigger," if 50 percent of parents at a given California school sign a petition, the school board must choose among several options, including closing the campus, converting to a charter, or replacing the principal and other administrators.

Is the parent trigger a good idea? Did California make the right choice by adopting it, or should the state rely on other school improvement strategies?

The Parent Trigger is a fabulous idea!

Not because it will — by itself — turn around many of California's low-performing schools. But because it will change the conversation among parents, community activists, and school boards across the state.

Some years ago, I attended the Public Education Network's national conference. Darv Winick, chair of the National Assessment Governing Board at the time, said something to the attendees that surprised me given his position. It was to the effect that — at the end of the day, after all the laws are written and the regulations are promulgated — the schools in a community are about as good as the community wants them to be.

Now, we all know it’s more complicated than that. State and Federal policy certainly have a major impact on school quality.

But what makes the Parent Trigger such a great idea is that it provides a meaningful framework for parents to be involved in the struggle to bring quality education to their community. If a school really stinks, local organizers — parent activists, community-based organizations or clergy – can rally the parent community to consider the facts and consider "pulling the trigger."

The potential value of the Race to the Top grants is that they get everyone thinking and working together on priorities that are at the center of education improvement. And the potential value of the Parent Trigger is that it gets parents and community activists thinking about key questions like: How good is our school? What is good enough? If our school isn't good enough, what are we going to do about it?

The Parent Trigger provides a mechanism for parents and communities to have a larger ownership of education improvement. The way things stand now, education reform is almost completely "owned" by elected officials, business leaders and a certain class of activists. As Checker Finn describes in his recent National Affairs piece, the gulf between professional education reformers and parents is a major impediment to further progress.

When parents get involved, we can expect them to be concerned about more than just the standardized test scores that drive practically every aspect of accountability systems today. Among other things, they're going to be concerned about student safety, community values, the responsiveness of teachers and administrators, how engaged children are in school and the availability of after-school care. These things are important too. And it’s up to parent and community leaders to make sure that "how much our children are learning" remains a major component of the conversation.

Part of the value of the Parent Trigger is the potential to transform up to 75 low-performing California schools. (The California Legislature capped the number of schools that can be impacted by this program at 75.) But most of the value will be in the thousands of conversations that the trigger inspires between parents and community activists, and the new leverage that the trigger gives to parents when they deal with administrators and school boards.

Of course, for this value to be realized, parent leaders and community activists have to respond to this invitation to get involved. I hope they do!

Education in the News This Week

Putting Parents in Power
As the director of Parent Revolution put it, we did it. "For the first time anywhere in America, parents have been empowered and entrusted with the legal right to force dramatic change at their child's failing school." Part of a huge reform package signed into California state law by Governor Schwarzenegger yesterday, "the measures call for districts to take aggressive steps to turn failing schools around, including firing staff, closing schools and converting campuses to independently operated charter schools," reports the SF Chronicle. "The bills are intended to increase California's eligibility for as much as $700 million in federal Race to the Top grants, which the Obama administration is using to advance favored reforms."

What Makes a Great Teacher? A Great Citizen?
Teach for America "has been systematically pursuing this mystery for more than a decade — tracking hundreds of thousands of kids, and analyzing why some teachers can move those kids three grade levels ahead in one year and others can't," writes the Atlantic Monthly.

Things that you might think would help a new teacher achieve success in a poor school — like prior experience working in a low-income neighborhood — don’t seem to matter. Other things that may sound trifling — like a teacher's extracurricular accomplishments in college — tend to predict greatness.

Strangely enough, TFA participation does not necessarily lead to commensurate civic engagement. As the New York Times found out, "In areas like voting, charitable giving and civic engagement, graduates of the program lag behind those who were accepted but declined and those who dropped out before completing their two years."

The Recession's Impact on Our Schools
"A recent report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reveals that the economic recession and federal attempts to lessen its impact have dealt a mixed hand for school districts across the country," blogs Ed Money Watch. For example, the GAO estimates that while 50 percent of school districts will receive a 5 percent boost in federal funding in 2009-10, less than 10 percent will see a similar boost in state or local funding. At the same time, over 40 percent of school districts will receive a 5 percent or larger decrease in state funding and almost 20 percent will receive such a decrease in local funds. "In short, school districts were nearly as likely to receive cuts to state or local funds as increases in federal funds."

Key Character Traits: Motivation and Self-Control

Note: this entry is part of a series called "The Making of College Bound". Click here to read the series-to-date.

What's the secret to helping kids do well in school? We all know to help with homework and attend parent-teacher conferences. But what else is a father to do? You won't be surprised to hear that nurturing key character traits in young children leads to their educational success. But you may be surprised to hear about the easy, everyday ways to do this, and the expert research that backs it up.

Leading experts and psychologists offer compelling reasons for parents to develop their kids' motivation and self-control early:

1. Character traits are malleable, meaning that parents can change an attitude or behavior in a child just by intervening as explicitly as they can.
2. Willpower, self-discipline, and the ability to delay gratification are proven to predict academic achievement better than standard measures of intelligence, like IQ.

This is why we emphasize cultivating character traits as one of the four key roles of parents in College Bound.

The lesson "Nurture Your Child's Love for Learning" shows parents how to communicate with kids in a way that motivates them to want to learn. For example, did you know that it's more effective to praise a child's effort rather than her intelligence? In Nurture Shock, authors Po Bronson and Ashley Merriman argue that labeling kids with even positive innate attributes ("You're so smart") can undermine their confidence in their own ability to tackle difficult problems.

Companion lesson "Learning Self-Control" draws from another surprising discovery. Psychologist Lev Vygotsky found that children develop self-discipline while engaged in pretend play. In an issue of New York Times Magazine last year, author Paul Tough asks, "Can the right kinds of play teach self-control?" We believe it can. College Bound demonstrates make-believe play in young children that builds a foundation of healthy cognitive and emotional function. Practicing in a pretend world develops impulse-control and situational awareness, which prepares kids for following similar conventions in the real world.

These gems, and others like them, lie at the heart of College Bound. We think the combination of deep-seated research and simple how-to advice make for a winning approach to transforming parent engagement.

Next month we'll highlight some of our College Bound beta program partners.

Education in the News This Week

The End of the Education Debate
In an article for National Affairs, Fordham Flypaper's Checker Finn writes:

American education today is faced with the challenge of — and the opportunity for — a serious rethinking from the ground up. Its traditional structures and governance arrangements have more than proven their inadequacy, and the causes of these unacceptable deficiencies may simply lie too deep to be resolved by measures commonly thought of as "reform." Indeed, it is the underlying weakness of those structural arrangements that has made education reform so difficult — like trying to place a new hybrid engine atop a buggy meant to be pulled by a horse.

Finn argues that while no new way of thinking has emerged to displace what's preoccupied reformers for a quarter-century, the defining ideas of our current wave of education reform — standards, testing, choice and the frameworks built around them — are outliving their usefulness.

How Chaos Affects Kids
Cognitive psychologist Dan Willingham revealed the results of a study of 302 families, concluding that "chaos in the home contributes to lower IQ and to child conduct problems (i.e., kids who are aggressive, or who get into trouble with the law)." Researchers factored for the parents' education level, IQ, and warmth, as well as measures of the literacy environment at home, housing situation, and stressful events. Then they statistically removed "the effects of these other variables before they tested for an effect of chaos on the child's IQ and on the child's conduct. They found that chaos in the home was negatively associated with each." Education blogger Robert Pondiscio reasons that if chaos is unhealthy at home, the same must be said for classrooms.

Putting Power in the Hands of Parents
Last month Senate leaders proposed a "parent trigger" for California's "Race to the Top" education reform legislation, through which parents at a systemically failing school could circulate a petition demanding change. "If 51% of the parents signed it, the school would be converted to a charter school or reconstituted by the school district, with a new staff and new ways of operating," reports Parent Revolution executive director Ben Austin in a LA Times op-ed this week. But last week the chair of the Assembly Education Committee introduced a bill "weakened beyond recognition" from this Senate policy, which Austin says makes the case for why we need a parent trigger and why we need a parent revolution.