(Reuters) - The Chicago teachers strike, which appeared headed toward a resolution Friday, has underscored a fundamental split over the biggest issue confronting America's public schools: how to provide a decent education to children mired in poverty.
Across the U.S., poverty is irrefutably linked to poor academic performance. On last year's national reading exam, nine-year-olds from low-income families scored nearly three full grade levels below their wealthier peers. The gap was nearly as large in math.
The poor performance of poor students accounts for all of the achievement gap between U.S. students and their peers in academic powerhouses such as South Korea and Finland. On the latest international reading test, U.S. teens from more affluent schools were at the very top of global rankings, while those from schools with high poverty rates were near the bottom.
To many educators, including the teachers walking the picket lines in Chicago, the inescapable conclusion is that schools serving low-income communities can be improved only by addressing the social ills associated with poverty.
EMPTY STOMACHS, ABUSED PSYCHES
Chicago teachers speak of children coming to school hungry and unwashed, with throbbing toothaches, without proper shoes. They talk of kids, scarred by violence, who desperately need counselors in schools that have none. They note that Chicago, where 87 percent of students qualify for federally subsidized meals, spends less than half as much per student as wealthy suburbs; the union says 160 of the city's elementary schools don't even have a library.
"I am hitting it hard in the classroom, giving it everything I have," said Romanetha Walker Looper, who teaches middle-school science. "But the students at my school..." She stopped, unable to put their struggles into words. "I'm their mother, teacher, nurse and psychologist," she said.
Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, bluntly attributes poor student performance on standardized tests not to teachers or school administrators but to "factors beyond our control."
Yet a rival philosophy, which first gained traction with the "no child left behind" initiative, holds that such talk amounts to so many excuses. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and other education reformers argue that if kids are falling behind it's because their schools -- and their teachers -- are failing them. So public education needs a radical makeover.
The reformers' agenda starts with sorting schools by test scores and taking action against the worst by firing teachers, bringing in private management or shutting the school down altogether. Another key tactic: Hold teachers accountable for raising their students' standardized test scores.
Reformers, both Democrats and Republicans, have called improving urban schools the civil rights challenge of our time, saying society can no longer tolerate such vast inequalities in opportunity and achievement.
Mic e Rhee, the former chancellor of Washington D.C. schools and a leading reform advocate, put it this way in a recent piece for the Huffington Post: "Poverty presents huge challenges in our schools. But expectations of academic success for a child should never hinge on the cir stances of his or her birth."
A COCOON OF SUPPORT SERVICES
The reform movement has enjoyed a powerful wave of bi-partisan political support in recent years, from President Barack Obama on down. Yet in a few corners of the nation, with much less fanfare, the unions' preferred approach is being tested.
In Cincinnati, for instance, the public school district and an array of corporate and philanthropic donors have spent tens of millions over the past decade to wrap nearly every school in a cocoon of support services.
Most schools in poor neighborhoods have a full-time resource coordinator on staff to connect struggling families to the help they need. Often they don't have far to go: Many schools have food banks, health clinics and counseling centers on site. The schools are open into the evening for clubs, sports, tutoring, parenting classes and support groups.
The result: Kids are staying -- and succeeding -- in school like never before. In 2000, just 51 percent of ninth-graders made it to graduation. A decade later, the graduation rate hit 82 percent, district figures show.
The impoverished mining communities in McDowell County, West Virginia, are trying a similar tactic: They've built a coalition of 80 public and private groups, including the teachers union, to boost school achievement explicitly by tackling poverty.
Linda Darling-Hammond, an education professor at Stanford University and a supporter of this approach, says it has worked before.
During the War on Poverty in the 1960s and '70s, government invested in preschool, teacher training and urban development. The gap between the reading skills of black and white high-school students shrank by two-thirds and high school graduation rates for black students more than doubled, Darling-Hammond said.
More recently, in the late 1990s, New Jersey began investing huge sums in its poor urban schools after courts repeatedly ordered it to erase inequities. Black and Hispanic students made rapid gains in both reading and math at the fourth-grade level, according to federal testing data, though the achievement gap didn't budge for older students.
"Kids in poverty can learn at much higher rates when they have the resources they need," Darling-Hammond said. When they don't get those resources and fail, she added, "you can't land all that on the backs of teachers."
HEAVY HOMEWORK, EXACTING STANDARDS
Reformers respond that kids need help now and can't wait until society finds the will or the means to fight a new war on poverty.
Their overhaul agenda does cost money. Districts that embark on reform may spend heavily to develop new standardized tests to measure teacher efficacy. They may also hire private managers to run schools deemed in need of an overhaul.
Philanthropies such as the Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation have invested hundreds of millions in priorities of the reform agenda, such as charter schools and new teacher evaluation systems.
In Chicago the district has turned over a dozen low-performing schools to nonprofit turnaround specialist AUSL, or Academy for Urban School Leadership. Before making such a handoff, the district spends up to $500,000 renovating the school with fresh paint, new athletic fields, and science and computer labs to send students and parents a signal that they're making a fresh start, district officials said.
The district also funds an extra assistant principal position for a year, at cost of $140,000. And it pays AUSL an annual management fee of $420 to $500 per student.
Officials say targeted spending like this, meant to raise achievement in a specific school, is more feasible than a diffuse commitment to help kids everywhere overcome the challenges of poverty -- especially in a struggling district like Chicago, which faces a $3 billion deficit over three years.
As proof that poverty is not insurmountable, reformers point to the stellar test scores posted by hundreds of "no excuses" charter schools nationwide.
Charter networks like KIPP, Achievement First, Yes Prep and Noble hold their students, mostly poor and minority, to exacting standards: They have heavy homework loads, extended school days, and rigorous behavior codes that may lead to disciplinary action for infractions such as failing to sit up straight.
From the first day, teachers -- who tend to be non-union -- emphasize that they expect students to excel and go to college. A great many do.
Union leaders point out that many charters don't achieve that level of success -- and in fact post worse scores than neighborhood schools -- and note that only highly motivated kids can stick with such a strenuous program. Teachers fear the emergence of a two-tier system in which the best students go to charters while traditional public schools are stuck with the rest.
Yet fans of charters say the fact that not every student can handle a rigorous school is no reason to deny the option to those who can.
"For certain poor kids, this is a great solution -- and there aren't a lot of other solutions out there," said Paul Tough, who has written extensively about education, including the just-released book "How Children Succeed."
Chicago school officials agree; their 2013 budget ramps up spending on charters by $76 million.
OPTING FOR BEST OF BOTH
The debate over how to boost achievement for poor kids is emotional and often nasty; it rages on Twitter and in blog posts and in rival reports that seek to build up or tear down the near-mythical status of top "no excuses" charter schools.
Behind the sharp rhetoric, however, the two sides may not be as far apart as they seem.
Consider Spark Academy, an elementary school in Newark, New Jersey, affiliated with the KIPP network of charter schools.
Teacher expectations are set so high, kids learn to identify themselves by what year they'll be graduating from college. But it's not all "no excuses."
The school, with just over 400 students, employs two full-time social workers and a dean whose sole job is to get students the help they need so they can focus on academics, whether it's grief counseling, medical treatment or a safe place to sleep, said Ryan Hill, executive director of KIPP's New Jersey network.
"The camp that says none of this stuff matters," Hill said, "is as wrong as those who say we can't make a difference with these kids."
http://news.yahoo.com/strike-highlig...200536201.html
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Union, non-union, whatever.
I want what works.
I think we are, after decades, finally getting a handle on it.
Repugs/conservatives want to put ALL the blame on the teachers, bust the teachers union as a source of Dem funding, iow, Repugs/conservatives are lying.
Many public schools get EXCELLENT results with unionized teachers, so obviously there is much more to the failure of schools that JUST unionized teachers.
btw, teaching and testing to test results, and firing teachers on that alone is bull for the students and the teachers.
I agree with this. There is little or nothing the schools can do unless we want to remove children from their families. What follows the quoted material, we have little control over. What are the parents doing with the food stamps they receive? When hunger is a reason, it isn't for lack of trying. It's bad parenting.To many educators, including the teachers walking the picket lines in Chicago, the inescapable conclusion is that schools serving low-income communities can be improved only by addressing the social ills associated with poverty.
Over the last 40 years, I have noticed things that are flat out wrong. The education system keeps catering to these kids who cause problems in class, or don't keep up. They need to be kicked out or held back a grade case by case, instead of dragging the other kids down with them. I've seen kids flunked when I was in school. They are embarrassed and often accel in school following such an experience.
Nice take, Boutons. I can see a whole classroom tank a school year so they can see a teacher get fired.
I wonder how much money this strike cost the parents. I for one say the teachers showed their true colors whining about their wages. Shameful. God bless
gfy, partisan clown.
http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfa...lity_debat.php
Edumication News
Chicago's Teacher Quality Debate? Texas Republicans Built That. Thank God.
By Jim Schutze Wed., Sep. 12 2012 at 10:27 AM 68 Comments
Categories: Edumication News
The New York Times this morning has a piece arguing that the Chicago teachers strike is a window on the nation's heart over the last few years, where education is concerned. I would say it's been 15 years at least, and in a weird way a lot of it started right here in Dallas.
In the mid-'90s Dallas was one of a few places nationally where a few freelance education researchers and activists, including our own Russell Fish, were focusing on so-called "anomalous schools" -- schools where kids were testing way better than they should have been according to all the usual indicators of income, family structure, transience and so on.
One of the stand-outs was Joseph J. Rhoads Elementary in South Dallas, where kids who should have been educational toast by fourth grade were out-performing rich white kids -- and way-out-performing other poor minority kids in the rest of the Dallas school system.
We wrote about it at the Observer in 1998. A really intriguing aspect of what we found was the way the issue came down on the traditional liberal/conservative matrix. It was the opposite of what might have been expected.
Liberals like former Governor Ann Richards, with very strong support from the teachers unions, were still saying the anomalous schools were a fluke and the only way to effectively teach poor kids was to end poverty ... which, of course, was impossible. So, you know: forget about it. Just try to maintain partial order until you retire.
It was then-governor George W. Bush and his education team who were calling bull . Armed with a huge data trove, a lot of it from Tennessee, where systematic testing had been going on for a decade, the Bush administration in Austin was saying the data proved that poor kids could be brought up to crucial educational levels by fourth grade.
The Chicago strike centers, in part, around teacher evaluations.
Those fourth-grade achievement levels either allow or disallow success from the fourth grade on. They determine everything about the rest of a kid's destiny as an adult.
In our system, kids learn to read from K through third. From fourth grade on, they read to learn. If they can't read by fourth grade, they're toast.
Acting up is a way for them to preserve their dignity in a system that shoves evidence of their stupidity in their faces from fourth grade on until they get out. Some research indicates the smarter they are the worse they act.
That's where the Bush line came from about reading being the new civil right. I remember talking to these really bright people who were on Bush's education team, like Phyllis C. Hunter of Houston, his reading guru, and being sort of shocked out of my liberal skin.
I thought, "No, wait, listen. I am willing to believe anything bad about a Republican you tell me." I grew up in a Roosevelt liberal house. We were taught as children that Republicans were things that would reach out from under our beds and grab us by the ankles if we got up during the night.
But these people -- these Republicans -- were the ones who believed in the dignity, equality and promise of infant human beings who suffered the totally undeserved bad luck of being born into terrible cir stances. It was a flip. A one-eighty. A bucket of ice water on my head. I'm the son of a union teacher, and I never stopped and will never stop listening to or respecting teachers when they talk about their work.
But I couldn't stop my ears to what the Bush people were saying. They were saying, and I paraphrase, "We know how to teach these kids. It takes teacher training, not money. If we know how to do it, it's a sin not to do it."
And here is what really stopped me cold. I remember when Hunter told me this, I literally got chills. She said the other thing you have to have, in addition to the training, is an absolute conviction in your soul -- the certain knowledge -- that no matter how screwed up they were when they showed for school, these kids have it in them to be just as smart and just as accomplished as rich white kids.
The Bush people talked about the "soft bigotry of lowered expectations." That forced me to think of a certain kind of liberal compassion as ... what? The last bastion of racism? No! Say it isn't so.
Is there a point at which liberal compassion says to the kids, "We believe in and are deeply personally committed to your fundamental inferiority, and just to prove it we're going to forgive you for it?"
Bush went to Washington. Then 9/11 happened. All of "no-child" got lost in the shuffle. Rod Paige, the former Houston superintendent, Bush's education secretary, was a business success as well as an educator and a brilliant advocate of change. But Paige was dissed by the national press because his speech was southern black. Let's talk someday about the soft bigotry of New York/Washington media.
Today The New York Times is right. The Chicago teacher strike is a window on the national heart. Dr. Schutze looks into that bloody cavity and he is tempted to give a prescription of "triple bypass operation, psychotropic drugs for life." But remember this: Dr. Schutze is not a real doctor. Sometimes he would rather do invasive half-assed surgery than face certain unwelcome but insistent realities.
BTW...the comments section on my link is very good reading.
Well, my opinion is the level of education is not the teachers fault. That said, paying them more money does not improve education either. It's the stupid rules that state and federal levels come up with the keep teachers from being able to punish and reward students as needed.
It's your opinion. It's re ed.
What part is re ed?
1) the level of education is not the teachers fault.
2) paying them more money does not improve education.
3) stupid rules that state and federal levels come up with keep teachers from being able to punish and reward students as needed.
All of the above with a caveat on #1.
Why is the level of teaching the fault of the teacher?
How does paying someone more suddenly make them a better teacher?
How can teachers maintain a classroom when there is no effective discipline?
Did you even bother to read the links?
smh
Your questions are ridiculous. You don't pay teachers to make them better, head. You pay the teachers that are better.
I taught for 10 years. Like most teachers, I knew there were other ways to enforce discipline outside of whacking a kid with a board.
Seriously, stfu.
Oh My God... You really have to twist things to claim I'm wrong.
Not all of it.
No Sherlock. Where did I say otherwise? I have heard time and time again from teachers that paying them more will make them better.
Many of the tools of disciple no longer exist.
No. You shut the up unless you wish to be honest in your attacks.
The liberal compassion, believing that poor kids are not equal, and need to move along too is a problem. You fail kids who do not meet the next grade requirements instead of passing them as not to hurt their feeling. Keep diluting the next level classes with kids who should be held back, and the entire class suffers.Is there a point at which liberal compassion says to the kids, "We believe in and are deeply personally committed to your fundamental inferiority, and just to prove it we're going to forgive you for it?"
No. You do that well enough.
Except if you had bothered to read the links, you would know that this wasn't even discussed in a causal relationship. .
Yet, many of them still do. That you don't know what the you're talking about is par for the course.
I was. Your views on this topic are so ing, incredibly, stupendously inaccurate, they are almost beyond logic. They are boutastic.
TB...
Are your panties in a bunch?
I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make you cry.
Teysha, that article is a rah rah piece. It in no way correlates the anomolous schools with the Bush method. It says that he wanted to enact reforms but then 9/11 happened when we both know what those programs went forward nonetheless.
It's been widely do ented as a failure no matter how much the Dallas GOP fluffer beats circles around it.
Schultz is a dyed in the wool liberal. Ive been reading him for years. His recall of actual conversations against the back drop of his knowledge of educational affairs in Texas rates a bit more than an offhand dismissal.
Furthermore, the article discusses the (sound) concepts underpinning NCLB. True, the execution of which was horrible. The resarch underneath certainly was not.
That's not an offhand dismissal. he makes no link between the 'anomolous' schools and the Bush programs and at no point outlines efficacy in them.
As for the research I do not know but he only alludes to programs from Tennessee. At no point does he demonstrate any level of success from the Bush administration in Texas or on the national level.
Our educational system was bad when he took office and bad when he left. We have been bottom 5 across the country for decades at this point.
Quite frankly, it's about as worthwhile as a commentary about Schwarzenegger, California and fiscal responsibility. Texas should not be used as an example of a successful educational system. If you taught here for 10 years you know that.
And what 'sound concepts,' man? That you need to have conviction that your kids aren't stupid and teachers need training? I fail to see anything groundbreaking in eitehr concept and the 'execution' in regards was worth than horrible in those regards. It didn't even consider them.
busting teacher unions and destruction of public schools with privatization is a major point in the ALEC's program. Transferring taxpayer school dollars into for-profit corps (commercial axiom: tiest product for highest price) and reducing/destroying the teacher union as a source of Dem funding.
No doubt, plenty of Repug citizens, some might even have a smattering of good will and intentions about educational quality, have no clue about ALEC/VRWC/Repug strategy, but that's their ignorant fault.
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