What kind of relationship should public and parochial schools strive to foster with each other?

What kind of relationship should public and parochial schools strive to foster with each other? On March 17, the Baltimore Sun reported that officials at the Baltimore International Academy – a local charter school – were informed by the archdiocese of Baltimore that they could not purchase the vacant St. Anthony’s of Padua school. The charter school required more space after outgrowing its current facility on the campus of the Maryland School for the Blind. Last year, Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien closed thirteen schools in the hopes of placing the archdiocese’s remaining schools in a strong financial position. According to archdiocese spokesman Sean Caine, the archdiocese would not sell or lease the property to a charter school because it could weaken other local Catholic schools by attracting families who otherwise would send their children to a parochial school. (Baltimore Sun, http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2011-03-21/news/bs-ed-catholic-charters-20110321_1_catholic-schools-charter-schools-baltimore-international-academy) This issue begs the question: what sort of a relationship should public and parochial schools strive to foster with each other? Other than the fact that religion informs the curriculum in parochial schools, both public and parochial schools share several of the same goals and, in many cases, serve the same demographic. It seems as though it would be very advantageous for public school leaders to reach out to their parochial school colleagues in an effort to establish some sort of a relationship and potentially share best practices. Education is a business. But every business is comprised of individuals. If these individuals would view each other as colleagues rather than “the competition” then the students in Baltimore, regardless of what school they attend, will reap the benefits.

The Value of Consistency

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about whether or not I should stay at the same school next year or explore new options. I was leaning towards moving on until listening to a panel of charter school teachers and administrators who brought up the value of consistency to the school and the students. If a school is going to truly improve is it important for teachers to stay to give stability and consistency to the kids? How much do the adults matter?

One reason why I think consistency could be important is the improvement I saw in my students behavior when I looped with them to the 8th grade. I didn't get a fresh start with a new group of kids, but the relationships I had built with students made the beginning of the school year fly by. I'm not sure if this would effect students whom I haven't taught, but there is something about knowing adults in the same environment for a period of time.

Another question I have been pondering is whether or not consistency in one classroom can make a difference for students and adults in other areas of the school. For example, I know I feel calm knowing there are adults who have been in the school for a long time to help me if I need it. Just having them there and listening to stories about the school in the past makes me feel like part of a team, motivated to improve the school.

The question that I am left with is: Will staying at my school for a third year ultimately impact my students and their academic success? I don't know how to begin to measure this, but it is a question worth exploring.

Private Lives

Private Lives

In a world where almost anything we want to know is a mouse click away, are those who serve the public entitled to down time? Already we have everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, telling us how to do our jobs of educating children based on personal experiences and “common sense.” As educators we are in a position of power of so many, mainly the children we work with on a daily basis. I am personally afraid to express any real opinions about non-academic topics in my classroom for fear of influencing, or being perceived as influencing, my students one way or the other.

Recent events in the media regarding teacher behavior make me afraid to even post to this academic blog. A teacher in Arizona is fired for refusing to remove a bumper sticker, one of more than sixty that adorned her vehicle. Another is suspended for venting on a private blog about how her students where being lazy by not doing the assigned work. While neither case is black – and – white as far as appropriateness of the circumstances, those we serve need to remember that we are also human. We’ve been encouraged to delete our Facebook and Twitter profiles, avoid public forums, and basically always be the modest school marm of years past.

At what point does it become inappropriate for my students to search for my information? They know where I live because the sale of my house is public record. They know how many traffic tickets I have because that information can be bought. They have found what sorority I am a member of, what awards I won in college, and what I post on Facebook before it became as locked as it currently is. When will we all be punished for saying something or posting something that the wrong person sees? When will we be giving up the right to be something besides a teacher?

Labor Unions for Professionals

Labor Unions for Professionals

There are a lot of younger, new teachers who are NOT part of the BTU, which is apparently causing some concern for the organization. While I am personally not a fan of unions, I wonder why we have a union exactly in this day and age. But that is not the point I wish to make. Instead I will be focusing on the idea of our desire to be treated as white collar professionals while still adhering to a blue collar labor union’s guidelines. If unions have historically been for those persons employed in a physical labor profession, why are there teachers unions? By many we are considered glorified babysitters and others we are the keys to the future. Either way we are seen, we frequently want to be considered in a professional capacity. After all, those of us in these alternative certification programs all went to college and did well in a field outside of education. We excel at traits, such as communication and inner strength and perseverance that have been proven as character traits of successful educators in urban and rural environments. Had we chosen another path after college we would have been negotiating our own salaries and benefits with the Human Resources staff in a “professional” environment – whether that be business, industry, academia, etc. Those personal would have worked with our managers/supervisors to place us appropriately in an allowed range of pay and benefits. We would have been competing in a business model for our jobs and our returns on those jobs. Our job security would have only been as strong as our performance and progress. Instead we chose for whatever personal reasons we all have to enter the classroom in Baltimore City. We still have those same in demand character traits and high quality education, but instead of acting as the professionals we would have been outside the classroom, we hold ourselves back by being considered a labor commodity.

I know I am not a laborer, but a professional. Someday I will be represented as such.

Mediocrity in Education

“Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world… the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

This excerpt is from the 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, but more than a quarter-century later, the words ring relevant and true as ever as we continue to tolerate, even encourage, mediocrity in educational performance throughout the nation.
In 2002, the Bush administration passed the landmark No Child Left Behind Act, which aimed to close the achievement gap by raising every child to 100 percent proficiency by the year 2014. NCLB is the most ambitious federal education legislation in U.S. history, but heavily criticized for being under-funded and ineffectively implemented. Under the new mandates, every public school in the nation is responsible for meeting annual proficiency targets called Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). The most significant flaws of NCLB are that proficiency goals are set at the discretion of states and AYP is determined solely on whether or not a school’s absolute scores reach the required achievement benchmark. Thus, states have incentive to lower the proficiency thresholds and make tests easier so that more students will meet the requisite proficiency levels. This inadvertently creates a perverse “race to the bottom,” which achieves the exact opposite of the goals of NCLB.

The Nation’s Report Card has boasted gains in achievement since the inception of NCLB, but the so-called progress is marginal at best. The reports fail to highlight the fact that a cringe-worthy majority of students still score below proficiency after more than eight years under the new legislation – mostly the poor and minority students for whom NCLB seeks to raise achievement. The National Assessment for Education Progress (NAEP) is currently the only national standardized test that allows for achievement comparisons between states.

Consider the 8th grade Reading scores as a demonstration of the startling lack of literacy progress our students have made in the past 18 years. NAEP classifies the 8th grade reading averages as “significantly different” in 2009 than 1992. On a 0-500 scale, this “significant” difference is between a 260 average in 1992 and a 264 average in 2009. However, this is an apples and oranges comparison to some extent, because testing accommodations were not permitted until 1998. Not surprisingly, the most significant increase in reading averages occurred between 1994 and 1998 – the first year accommodations were permitted – when the averages jumped from 260-264. During the past 11 years, scores dipped to 262 in 2005 and then rose back to 264 in 2009. Effectively, there has been no positive change for 8th grade reading averages since the onset of NCLB in 2002.

When the scores are disaggregated by percentile range, the results are even more shockingly stagnant since 2002. In the 50th, 75th and 90th percentiles, 2009 scores are all equal to the 2002 averages. In the 10th and 25th percentiles, scores are one point lower in 2009 than they were in 2002 after recovering from a dip in 2005.

According to the 2009 results, not a single state or province has reached even 50% proficiency in reading among eighth graders. Connecticut comes closest with 43% at proficient (38%) or advanced (5%) and New Jersey and Massachusetts are close behind with 42% at proficient (37%) or advanced (5%) in each state. Our nation’s capitol ranks lowest with a shameful 12% proficient and 1% advanced. On average, only one third of eighth graders are proficient readers. A statistic with such staggering propensity for economic and social consequences should launch the nation into a flurry of radical reform, but the executive summary headline dispassionately reads, “Reading scores up since 2007 at grade 8 and unchanged at grade 4.”

NCLB’s primary goal is to close the achievement gap that exists along race and class lines. Schools must now disaggregate data for subgroups of students so that low-performing students cannot be masked by averages. NCLB supporters claim that the law has been successful on this account, but close reading of the NAEP report reveals that white students continue to score 20-30 points higher in math and reading. This is the difference between “basic” and “advanced” skills. The discrepancy is equally stark between students who are eligible for free lunch and those who are not. We are still severely failing poor and minority students more than halfway to the 2014 goal.
Aside from the domestic implications of this mediocre performance, the United States falls significantly behind other industrialized nations in math and science. In the 2007 “Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study” (TIMSS), U.S. eighth graders ranked ninth in math and eleventh in science, falling behind China, Hong-Kong, Korea, Singapore, Japan, Russia and England, among others. Our poor performance is especially embarrassing when you consider that we spend more money on education – both in terms of total dollars and per student - than most of these countries combined, with a roughly $500 billion annual education budget. This indicates a severe misallocation of resources in terms of learning outcomes.
Our education system is plagued by mediocrity. As a nation we have collectively ceased to value education as a top priority, indicated by pitifully poor performance, woeful teacher retention and sub-par graduation rates. Aside from being ineffectual, NCLB is also uninspiring in terms of pursuing excellence in education. In more than 600 pages of legislative verbiage, words like “adequacy,” “proficiency,” and “minimum” appear hundreds of time. The world “excellence,” however, is mentioned less than ten times – mostly in the context of ambiguous titles rather than goals or specific recommendations.

Adequacy is not a worthy goal for the future leaders of the world. There is a culture of sufficiency in schools that threatens the prosperity of our nation. In the wake of NCLB, the knee-jerk response in most states was to lower standards to meet achievement levels rather than accepting the challenge to raise achievement to meet tough standards. Our education system fails to encourage life-long learning or the pursuit of academic excellence. Instead, the focus is on checklists of low level thinking standards that are assessed by multiple-choice questions. These skills will not suffice for solving complex global problems like poverty, water shortages, clean energy alternatives, and civil war. If we do not start setting expectations of excellence for our nation’s students, they have no chance of meeting them and they will flounder in the global economy of the 21st century.

The 1983 report prophecies: “History is not kind to idlers… We live among determined, well-educated, and strongly motivated competitors. We compete with them for international standing and markets, not only with products but also with the ideas of our laboratories and neighborhood workshops… Learning is the indispensable investment required for success in the "information age" we are entering.” The tide of mediocrity continues to swell.

Sources:
A Nation At Risk: http://www2.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/risk.html
Nation's Report Card: The Nation's Report Card - National Assessment of Educational Progress - NAEP