Educational Policy, Ethics, & Leadership

The Freedom Writers Diary

Linda Campbell, a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, writes about one teacher whose student motivation has gained a wider audience.  LINK

For her first day of teaching English, Erin Gruwell put on her polka-dot dress and pearls, carried her Coach purse out to her sporty convertible and took her perky attitude to Wilson High School in Long Beach, Calif., where she was confronted with a class of students who segregated themselves by race, mostly didn't like reading and disdained her white suburban privilege.

So a once-naive California idealist was supposed to motivate Fort Worth teachers to strive for excellence in the new school year?

Gruwell's students included teens who'd belonged to gangs, who'd watched friends slain by gunfire and knives, who'd been in juvenile detention, who'd performed poorly in school if they attended at all, who'd watched their mothers beaten or been abused themselves. Feeling that teachers and parents had given up on them, many had given up on themselves.

When an ugly racist caricature circulated through the class, Gruwell erupted, ranting about the Holocaust. When it became evident that her students hadn't even heard of that horrible historical blight, she tore up her curriculum and replaced the freshman literary canon with Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl and Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Sarajevo.

So an obsessed iconoclast was supposed to inspire Fort Worth teachers to find creative ways to reach students regardless of race, ethnicity, background or family circumstances?

Exactly. And she didn't disappoint.

Through other teenagers' writings about the Holocaust and the Bosnian war, Gruwell helped her students see the folly and destructiveness of intolerance, the senselessness of violence. They drew parallels to their own troubled neighborhoods, to their own prejudices and attitudes. She got these students -- tough, quiet, timid, belligerent, intimidating and intimidated -- to think, to talk. And then to write.

The student essays were published and helped pay for college tuition for the student writers.  Campbell reports that the story is now being made into a movie.

A Slightly Less Than Half Full Glass

The good news from the ACT college admissions test is that scores of Texas students improved slightly.  The bad news is that the gap between Texas students and those across the country widened.  LINK

Texas high school students registered modest gains on the ACT college entrance exam this year, but the gap between Texas students and their counterparts across the nation widened slightly.

    

New results on the ACT released Wednesday indicated that Texas students showed their biggest improvements in math, while scores on the other three subject areas measured on the exam – English, reading and science – inched up less significantly.

    

The average composite score, reflecting performance on all four parts of the test, was 20.3 in Texas out of a possible perfect score of 36. The national average was 21.1. A year ago, Texas students had an average        score of 20.2, while the national average was 20.9.

1 in 12 Texas Schools Fall Short of Federal Standards

That's the headline in an article for the Friday Dallas Morning News.  LINK

One in 12 Texas schools failed to achieve minimum federal standards this year, and nearly half of those – 291 campuses – have multi-year failures that will tag them for sanctions ranging from staff replacements to optional transfers for students.

    

State Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley on Thursday announced new federal ratings for Texas schools under the No Child Left Behind Act, touting the increased number of campuses that made the grade this year. About 81 percent met or exceeded the so-called “Adequate Yearly Progress” targets specified in the federal law.

    

A year ago, 78 percent of schools met the AYP targets. The percentage of school districts meeting AYP this year was virtually unchanged from a year ago.

Poorest Students Get Weakest Teachers, National Study Finds

That's the title of a story in today's San Antonio Express-News.  LINK

Nearly every state, including Texas, has been ignoring a federal law requiring them to monitor the number of inadequate teachers in the nation's poor and minority schools and come up with a strategy to make sure those students are getting the teaching they deserve, according to a report released Thursday by Education Trust, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group.

       "Most states aren't acknowledging the disparity," said trust policy        director Ross Wiener.    

    

No Child Left Behind, the sweeping education reform signed into law by President Bush in 2002, mandates that states address the practice of disproportionately assigning inadequate teachers to work in the poorest schools.

    

Until July 7, however, when the U.S. Department of Education required states to present plans to remedy the problem, the federal government never enforced that portion of the law.

    

The lack of policing by the federal government has had profound results, according to the Education Trust study of plans from all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

The Education Trust's press release is here.  The full report, "Teaching Inequality: How Poor and Minority Students Are Shortchanged on Teacher Quality" is here.

It Takes More Than Schools to Close Achievement Gap

That's the title of this week's On Education column in the New York Times. 

WHEN the federal Education Department recently reported that children in private schools generally did no better than comparable students at public schools on national tests of math and reading, the findings were embraced by teachers’ unions and liberals, and dismissed by supporters of school voucher programs.

   

But for many educators and policy makers, the findings raised a haunting question: What if the impediments to learning run so deep that they cannot be addressed by any particular kind of school or any set of in-school reforms? What if schools are not the answer?

The question has come up before. In 1966, Prof. James S. Coleman published a Congressionally mandated study on why schoolchildren in minority neighborhoods performed at far lower levels than children in white areas.

To the surprise of many, his landmark study concluded that although the quality of schools in minority neighborhoods mattered, the main cause of the achievement gap was in the backgrounds and resources of families.

  

Teachers Union Calls for TAKS Overhaul

That's the headline in today's Fort Worth Star-Telegram.  LINK

DALLAS -- One of Texas' largest teachers unions Tuesday called for an overhaul of standardized testing, saying the state's emphasis on scores is "destructive" and takes away from students learning critical thinking and other essential skills.

"We are not turning out well-rounded students that can compete," said Linda Bridges, president of the 52,000-member Texas Federation of Teachers. "Teachers are saying enough is enough and it is really time to bring back sanity to all of this."

The federation says it wants the Legislature to take action to curb schools' constant drilling for the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills or TAKS test. Teachers spend more than half their classroom time teaching test-taking strategies, repetitive exercises and practice exams instead of the curriculum, Bridges said.

The union's announcement in Dallas comes at a time when the TAKS test is carrying increasing weight for schools. Students take the TAKS every year and cannot graduate or advance certain grades unless they pass. Schools face sanctions ranging from staff changes to closure if too many students fail for four years in a row.

This year, Texas raised the bar for schools from 50 percent of students having to pass the liberal arts portions of the TAKS to 60 percent. The passing rate for math went from 35 percent to 40 and science rose from 25 to 35 percent of students having to pass.

And:

The federation says it wants to start a dialogue among parents, teachers and administrators leading up to the winter session, when the state legislature is set to appoint a commission to look at standardized testing.

The union is pushing for the state legislature to institute school evaluation methods that account for poverty, high mobility and other factors that affect the learning environment in low-performing schools.

It also seeks legislative support for giving individual teachers more control over how students prepare for tests. Bridges said some schools mandate that students take time-consuming weekly practice tests.

Roundup of TAKS Ratings - UPDATED

Ratings are out and depending on the headline things are improving with more schools rated exemplary or recognized, or worsening with more schools rated unacceptable.

The Austin American-Statesman has "State rankings give 28 percent of public schools two highest marks."  LINK

Almost twice as many Texas school districts received the state's highest accountability ratings this year as in 2005, according to the Texas Education Agency.

The annual ratings — exemplary, recognized, academically acceptable and academically unacceptable — are given to campuses and districts based on student performance on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills and graduation and dropout rates. Results released Tuesday were preliminary; campuses and school districts can appeal the ratings.

Dallas Morning News, "More Texas schools rated unacceptable."  LINK

From teachers and parents to school board members, people statewide eagerly await the state ratings each year. Parents and real estate agents use the evaluations to find neighborhoods with the best schools, although the ratings tend to reflect the backgrounds of students served – not merely the job teachers do with those students.

Ratings are based on scores on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills exam as well as student dropout and high school completion rates. Typically, schools with a higher percentage of low-income students score lower on TAKS tests, reflecting a strong, well-documented link between poverty and student achievement.

Fort Worth Star-Telegram, "Texas schools make gains in TAKS."  LINK

Statewide, the number of campuses rated exemplary or recognized increased this year.

According to a prepared statement from the Texas Education Agency, 3,380 Texas public schools earned one of the top two ratings from the state, compared to 2,213 schools last year.

At the other end of the scale, there was also an increase of campuses rated academically unacceptable, from 264 to 321.

The Fort Worth school district retained its acceptable rating but more than doubled the number of exemplary and recognized schools - from 16 in 2005 to 37 in 2006.

Houston Chronicle, "'Unacceptable' schools face closing."  LINK

The news wasn't as good for HISD's high schools. Almost half of Houston's traditional high schools — 11 of 23 — are rated "academically unacceptable." Last year there were five.

Houston also stacks up poorly against Dallas, Texas' second-largest school district. Dallas beat Houston in terms of top-rated schools by an 80-to-75 margin and has fewer unacceptable schools — 23 compared with HISD's 35.

San Antonio Express-News has, "SA-area schools soar in ratings."  LINK

The local results mirrored a statewide trend of more schools posting high ratings. A total of 555 schools were rated exemplary and 2,825 recognized this year, compared with 304 exemplary and 1,909 recognized last year.

Bexar County school districts are home to 21 exemplary schools this year, compared with one last year.

You can go the Texas Education Agency's data, here.