• Proposed National Civics Framework Shows Great Promise

    Our guest author today is Stephen Lazar, a founding teacher at Harvest Collegiate High School in New York City, where he teaches Social Studies. A National Board certified teacher, he blogs at Outside the Cave. Stephen is also one of the organizers of Insightful Social Studies, a grass roots campaign of teachers to reform the newly proposed New York State Social Studies standards.

    A couple of months ago, I warned, “We cannot possibly continue to move solely in the direction of ‘college and career readiness’ in History & Social Studies education without ensuring that ‘civic’ readiness is valued equally." While our struggle continues in New York State, the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) took an extremely promising first step towards assuaging my fears with the release of The College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards. This document was intended for a targeted review by certain groups last month. Copies, however, are not difficult to find by searching.

    Simply put, the proposed C3 Framework is brilliant. It is exactly what our nation needs to ensure civic life and participation is properly valued, and it is what the Social Studies teaching profession needs to ensure our discipline retains its unique and essential role within our education system. It is brilliant in its conception, its modesty and its usefulness as a document to inform policy and practice.

  • A Quick Look At "Best High School" Rankings

    ** Reprinted here in the Washington Post

    Every year, a few major media outlets publish high school rankings. Most recently, Newsweek (in partnership with The Daily Beast) issued its annual list of the “nation’s best high schools." Their general approach to this task seems quite defensible: To find the high schools that “best prepare students for college."

    The rankings are calculated using six measures: graduation rate (25 percent); college acceptance rate (25); AP/IB/AICE tests taken per student (25); average SAT/ACT score (10); average AP/IB/AICE score (10); and the percentage of students enrolled in at least one AP/IB/AICE course (5).

    Needless to say, even the most rigorous, sophisticated measures of school performance will be imperfect at best, and the methods behind these lists have been subject to endless scrutiny. However, let's take a quick look at three potentially problematic issues with the Newsweek rankings, how the results might be interpreted, and how the system compares with that published by U.S. News and World Report.

  • The Relationship Between Teacher Salaries And Teacher Salary Schedules

    The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) has released a brief report on teacher salary schedules since the recession.

    NCTQ looks at 41 of the 50 largest districts in the U.S. (i.e., all but nine responded to the survey). Between 2008-09 and 2011-12, four out of five of these districts froze pay at least once. As would be expected, districts did so in different ways – sometimes by freezing step increases (or awarding them without associated raises), sometimes via lower (or no) cost of living adjustments, etc. It’s compelling evidence that public school teachers, like most U.S. workers, have felt the pain from the recession. This is useful information (also check out NCTQ’s TR3 database, a terrific resource).

    There are, however, a couple of points worth mentioning about salary schedules, which may seem picky (or even obvious), but they do bear on the data presented in this report.

  • About Value-Added And "Junk Science"

    One can often hear opponents of value-added referring to these methods as “junk science." The term is meant to express the argument that value-added is unreliable and/or invalid, and that its scientific “façade” is without merit.

    Now, I personally am not opposed to using these estimates in evaluations and other personnel policies, but I certainly understand opponents’ skepticism. For one thing, there are some states and districts in which design and implementation has been somewhat careless, and, in these situations, I very much share the skepticism. Moreover, the common argument that evaluations, in order to be "meaningful," must consist of value-added measures in a heavily-weighted role (e.g., 45-50 percent) is, in my view, unsupportable.

    All that said, calling value-added “junk science” completely obscures the important issues. The real questions here are less about the merits of the models per se than how they're being used.

  • ‘A Single Garment Of Destiny’ For American And Bangladeshi Workers

    “Injustice anywhere," Martin Luther King famously wrote in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, “is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny."

    Two events last week which might seem worlds apart provide evidence that working people around the globe are indeed tied together in King’s “single garment of destiny."

    In Texas, fourteen people died and up to 180 were injured in an explosion that obliterated a fertilizer factory and leveled the surrounding town. In Bangladesh, over 400 garment workers died when a factory building collapsed with thousands inside. Rescue and recovery operations continue to find additional Bangladeshi dead, with hundreds still missing. The human toll makes this the deadliest accident in the history of the garment industry worldwide, even before the terrible final count is known.

    Neither of these terrible events was “an accident." In both cases, factory management engaged in dangerous and reprehensible conduct, creating entirely avoidable conditions that made these events possible, even predictable.

  • How Important Is Undergraduate Teaching In Public R1 Universities? How Important Should It Be?

    Our guest author today is Ian Robinson, Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and in the Residential College's interdisciplinary Social Theory and Practice program at the University of Michigan.

    I ended my previous post by arguing that (1) if teaching is at least as valuable as research, and (2) nontenure-track (NTT) faculty teach at least as well as tenure-track (TT) faculty, then the very large pay disparities between the two classes of faculty that characterize American universities today violate a basic principle of workplace fairness: equal pay for equal work. When conditions (1) and (2) are met, then, all an institution can do to defend current practice is plead poverty: we can’t afford to do what we ourselves must acknowledge to be “the right thing."

    But what about places like the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, where I work? Is condition (1) met in what are sometimes called “R1” universities like mine? If not, maybe big pay disparities are warranted by the fact that, in such universities, research is a much higher institutional priority than undergraduate teaching. If teaching is a low enough priority, current pay inequalities could be justified by the fact that NTT faculty are not paid to do research and publishing – even though many of them do it – and, conversely, that most TT faculty pay is for their research and publishing, rather than their teaching.

  • Can The Common Core Standards Reverse The “Rising Tide Of Mediocrity”?

    Our guest author today is Lisa Hansel, communications director for the Core Knowledge Foundation. Previously, she was the editor of American Educator, the magazine published by the American Federation of Teachers.

    Spring 2013 marks the 30th anniversary of two landmark publications. One, an essay by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., in The American Scholar titled "Cultural Literacy," sparked a small but steadily growing movement dedicated to educational excellence and equity. The other, A Nation at Risk, set off a firestorm by conveying fundamental truths about the inequities in our educational system with prose so melodramatic they have proven unforgettable.

    In the 80s, only one leader seemed to fully grasp the importance of both of these publications: Albert Shanker. Shanker, then-president of the American Federation of Teachers, was prominent partly due to his position, and largely due to the force of his intellect. He saw that schools were in trouble. He agreed that, as stated in A Nation at Risk, “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. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur—others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments."

  • The Arcane Rules That Drive Outcomes Under NCLB

    ** Reprinted here in the Washington Post

    A big part of successful policy making is unyielding attention to detail (an argument that regular readers of this blog hear often). Choices about design and implementation that may seem unimportant can play a substantial role in determining how policies play out in practice.

    A new paper, co-authored by Elizabeth Davidson, Randall Reback, Jonah Rockoff and Heather Schwartz, and presented at last month’s annual conference of The Association for Education Finance and Policy, illustrates this principle vividly, and on a grand scale: With an analysis of outcomes in all 50 states during the early years of NCLB.

    After a terrific summary of the law's rules and implementation challenges, as well as some quick descriptive statistics, the paper's main analysis is a straightforward examination of why the proportion of schools meeting AYP varied quite a bit between states. For instance, in 2003, the first year of results, 32 percent of U.S. schools failed to make AYP, but the proportion ranged from one percent in Iowa to over 80 percent in Florida.

    Surprisingly, the results suggest that the primary reasons for this variation seem to have had little to do with differences in student performance. Rather, the big factors are subtle differences in rather arcane rules that each state chose during the implementation process. These decisions received little attention, yet they had a dramatic impact on the outcomes of NCLB during this time period.

  • America’s Union Suppression Movement (And Its Apologists), Part Two

    This is part two of a two-part post. The first part can be found here.

    As the war against American unions reached a fever pitch in recent years, there emerged a small group of right-wing academics and think tanks that have taken up the anti-union cause in intellectual circles. Of particular note for our purposes are Terry Moe’s book, Special Interest, and a recent study, How Strong Are U.S. Teacher Unions?, which was jointly sponsored by the Fordham Institute and Education Reform Now. [6]

    Since I’ve already written a critique of Moe’s book for the American Political Science Association’s journal, Perspective on Politics, my focus here is mainly on the Fordham/ERN report.

    Both publications tell a very similar story (all the more remarkable given the political and economic context I discussed in Part I of this post), in which incredibly powerful teacher union Leviathans invariably win the day in all manner of educational and public policy fights. The Fordham Institute’s Michael Petrilli offered a ten-second sound bite for this meme, when he recently wrote that teacher unions "were the Goliath to the school reformers' David."

    How does one find one’s way to such an unfounded conclusion? With an ideological analysis that has only the thinnest veneer of social science.

  • America’s Union Suppression Movement (And Its Apologists), Part One

    Last week, in "Is There A ‘Corporate Education Reform’ Movement?", I wrote about the logic of forming strategic alliances on specific issues with those who are not natural allies, even those with whom you mostly disagree. This does not mean, however, that there aren’t those – some with enormous wealth and power – who are bent on undermining the American labor movement generally and teachers’ unions specifically. This is part one of a two-part post on this reality.

    The American union movement is, it must be said, embattled and beleaguered. The recent passage of the Orwellian named ‘right to work’ law in Michigan, an anti-union milestone in the birthplace of the United Auto Workers and cradle of American industrial unionism, is but the latest assault on American working people and their unions.[1] Since the backlash election of 2010 that brought Tea Party Republicans to power in a number of state governments, public sector workers have faced a legislative agenda designed to eviscerate their rights to organize unions and bargain collectively in such states as Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Iowa, New Hampshire and Virginia.

    Fueling these attacks is an underlying organic crisis that has greatly weakened the labor movement and its ability to defend itself. Union membership has fallen from a high point of 1 in 3 American workers at the end of WW II to a shade over 1 in 9 today. [2] At its height, American unions had unionized basic industries – auto, mining, steel, textiles, telecommunications – and had sufficient density to raise wages and improve working conditions for members and non-union workers as well. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics report for 2012, organized American labor has fallen to its lowest density in nearly a century. Today, American unions have high density in only one major sector of the economy, K-12 education, and in that sector unions are now under ferocious attack. [3]