Saturday, November 18, 2017

Fox News: Punish the Parents of Absent Students?


An article written by Fox News’s Chris Papst about the rate of absence in Baltimore City Public Schools was brought to my attention when it was posted and discussed by my neighbors on a website called NextDoor. The article discussed the findings of PROJECT BALTIMORE which, according to their website, is “an investigative reporting initiative” that “examines the unique challenges that confront the Baltimore area’s public school systems” with “significant emphasis [...] placed on investigating the Baltimore City Public School System which spends large sums of money on education, but yields sub-standard test score and low graduation rates.”
The article is a not-so-subtle attempt at fear mongering, feeding into its readers fears about the perceived inherent dangers that come with the overwhelming black and brown students in Baltimore City Public Schools by immediately drawing a correlation between poor attendance rates and increased violent juvenile crime in the city. In an attempt to further demonstrate his point about the low attendance rates in BCPSS, Papst shared the attendance rates of surrounding counties Baltimore County, Howard County, and Anne Arundel. While these districts do have attendance rates between 15 and 19 percent higher than Baltimore City’s, the article does not mention that these “surrounding districts” are considerably whiter and more affluent (MD Report Card), two advantages that make it significantly easier to be a student who’s at school every day.
Literature about the connection between poverty and absence seems prevalent enough to be assumed as public knowledge, especially by those who work in, care about, and write about public education. This makes it all the more confusing that the suggestion for improvement that the article seems to be suggesting is that BCPSS and its school police enforce the state truancy law which “hold[s] parents accountable with up to $500 in fines or jail time.” In a city whose residents are daily fighting battles against institutionalized racism, extreme poverty, and purposeful and persistent segregation, how can fining the parents of students who are obviously already struggling be the answer?





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Wednesday, November 15, 2017

Kindergarten Readiness in Baltimore City


As a kindergarten teacher, I collect a lot of data from within my classroom which demonstrates that students who attended a pre-kindergarten (or a high-quality early learning program) came into kindergarten with far more skills than their peers. These skills range from academic to social emotional skills. However, I have been wondering if there is more broad research to support what I see everyday. Additionally, I was saddened to see an article in the Baltimore Sun, which explained that across Maryland, in the 2016-2017 school year, only 43% of kindergarten students were considered “ready for school” by the Kindergarten Readiness Assessment (KRA) (Bowie, 2016). In Baltimore, the data is even more saddening. In Baltimore, only 38% of students “were considered ready for school” (Bowie, 2016). The KRA assessment is conducted one-on-one with a teacher and assesses each student’s early literacy, math, social foundations, and physical well-being skills. The KRA assessment has 50 items of data which a teacher must collect about each child. To see that only 38% of students in Baltimore City are considered “ready,” shows a huge gap already in the skills of our youngest incoming students.


To understand how this readiness (or lack of) affects learning in school, I sought out some longer range data to explain the impact. In April 2017, The Washington Post presented a summary article of a much broader study called: “What do we really know about the value of prekindergarten?” (Strauss, 2017). The larger study was conducted by a group of scientists to examine “evidence on the impact of state-funded prekindergarten programs” (Strauss, 2017). In the Washington Post article there is a link to the entire text of the study, which seeks to unpack and examine larger questions such as, “How can scale-up be improved? Should pre-K be targeted or universal?” (Strauss, 2017). Check the link below to read more.

 To summarize, the study found, “the uniformly positive evidence of impact on kindergarten readiness, and the nascent body of ongoing inquiry about long-term impacts lead us to conclude that continued implementation of scaled-up pre-K programs is in order”(Strauss, 2017). The research acknowledges the struggle to measure long term impact of pre-kindergarten on student success later in life. It is challenging to keep track of students for long periods of time and to account for the other factors in a student’s life, which affect their learning (Strauss, 2017).


As Baltimore City grapples with its own questions of how to fund and address early learning needs of the students within our city, this report offers substantial argument that the Kirwan Commission (and other funding sources) should consider the importance of the quality pre-kindergarten experiences for the lives of our students and the health our city.


References
Bowie, L. (2016, December 05). Less than half of Maryland kindergartners ready for school. Retrieved November 15, 2017, from


Strauss, V. (2017, April 24). Analysis | What do we really know about the value of
prekindergarten? Retrieved November 12, 2017, from
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/04/24/what-do-we-really-know-about-the-value-of-pre-kindergarten/?utm_term=.5ac63a3ef76c

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