Charters and the school board

One way of defining the divisions on the Milwaukee school board is to look at their positions on charter schools. One group is strongly supportive of expanded charters. The other, in part reflecting opposition to charters from their teachers' union supporters, are much more suspicious of charter schools.

Ironically when it comes to holding charter schools accountable, the roles usually reverse. This is reflected in an article in this morning's Journal Sentinel about a committee meeting on the administration's proposal to end the charter for something called the Truth Institute for Leadership and Service. According to the article, strong charter supporters Danny Goldberg and Ken Johnson voted to terminate the contract, while charter skeptics Jennifer Morales and Charlene Hardin wanted to give it one more year.

Perhaps there is some logic to this apparent role reversal. If one believes strongly in charter schools, one wants to make sure they are successful. If one does not, then success or failure are less important.

Alan Borsuk has a detailed, interesting, and rather depressing series on what goes on in the Milwaukee Public Schools, particularly the heavy number of students who are unmotivated. It appears that the majority of schools have not figure out how they can demand commitment from their students. Students at private schools know there are certain expectations; not meeting these expectations can lead to expulsion. Perhaps a start for MPS schools would be to decide on the consequences for students who do not meet their obligations.

J-S Article on Morales

An article in this morning's paper, MPS board member Morales comes out as a lesbian, refers to a post in this blog, one of several profiles of school board members published in 2004 prior to the last election. For the original post, click here.

The Washington Consensus

One of the ironies of the No Child Left Behind act is that it sets basic requirements on how many students in a school need to be considered proficient, but then gives proficiency-setting authority to the states. As more than one commentator has pointed out, if a state wishes to avoid having lots of schools declared failing this creates an incentive for states to set the standards low. According to a report from an organization called Education Sector, Wisconsin has played this game particularly skillfully, better than any other state. (Click here for a Journal-Sentinel article on this report.)

A recent commentary describes the "Washington Consensus" on education. According to the authors, the Washington Consensus has three big ideas:

1. The most important goal is closing racial and economic achievement gaps.
2. Schools can overcome the challenges of poverty.
3. External pressure and tough accountability are critical to school improvement.

Both the people behind Education Sector and the two authors of this commentary have embraced the Washington Consensus. It is easy to understand the motivations behind this consensus: for too long the education of low-income and minority students was neglected, schools used poverty as an excuse for poor results, and there was no accountability for outcomes. In the historical context, the Washington Consensus was a necessary corrective. Yet in many ways, it is as unbalanced as the ideas it replaced.

By emphasizing gaps, does it encourage neglect of the best students? For example, a school where 100% of the white students and 80% of the black students are proficient has a wider gap than one where 50% of each race is proficient. By putting such emphasis on the school's responsibility, does it deemphasize the student's responsibility for his or her education? In its emphasis on penalizing schools, will it discourage the best educators from working at schools likely to be at risk?

Perhaps it is time for a more nuanced version of the Washington Consensus. It could emphasis the absolute achievement of all students. It could use the massive amount of data being collected to start to break out the effect of schools on achievement. It might recognize that asking states to set proficiency levels is silly: the educational requirements for success do not vary from state to state. Until that is done, I am not sure that Wisconsin game-playing is all that important.
The indignation reflected in the report

More math wars

I recently came across the Project 2061 evaluations of middle school math curricula on the web site of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). It is clear from these that AAAS has chosen to take sides in the so-called math wars. The textbooks rated excellent, such as Connected Math (widely used in MPS), all seem to stem from a series of standards first promulgated by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) and later embraced by the National Science Foundation. Programs preferred by critics of the NCTM standards, such as Saxon, are rated much lower.

It is puzzling why the AAAS, the country's largest scientific organization has decided to take sides in this war. Recently there has been a disturbing tendency among much of the public
and members of our national administration to discount the findings of science, whether on global warming, evolution, stem cell research, or a host of other issues. In each of these cases, perhaps the most telling charge by the critics is that the scientists acting as ideological
advocates rather than on the basis of the evidence.

Unfortunately, the scientific evidence is not available concerning which type of mathematics curriculum leads to better outcomes. An analysis in 2004 by the National Research Council of 147 studies, 75 of which were of curricula supported by the NSF, concluded that these studies did "not permit one to determine the effectiveness of individual programs with a high degree of certainty." Similarly, reports by the What Works Clearinghouse on middle school mathematics programs leaves the reader unable to say whether one program is more effective than another.

My impression is that programs like Connected Math are based much more on an underlying philosophy of how students learn mathematics than any empirical research on effectiveness. It appears that the students believe that students: don't like math, need to be convinced it is relevant, learn best when they discover the principals for themselves rather than having them explained, and that there is no best way for students to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. (This latter assumption leads to a daunting array of alternative techniques.) When good research is finally done, I suspect it may show that the programs work for students to whom these assumptions apply but that for many others the results are disappointing.