David Brooks, the New York Times columnist who probably pleads for bipartisanship more often than the Center for Michigan does, is talking about innovation this week.
“People are asking anxious questions about America’s future,” Brooks writes. “Will it take years before the animal spirits revive? Have we entered a period of relative decline?”
Take those national questions, add a decade of manufacturing job loss, add a freight train full of local angst and a day or two of arctic blast and you pretty much have Michigan’s state of mind.
Brooks’ first solution to kick-start American innovation is to “push hard to fulfill the Obama administration’s education reforms. Those reforms, embraced by Republicans and Democrats, encourage charter school innovation, improve teacher quality, support community colleges and simplify finances for college students and war veterans. That’s the surest way to improve human capital.”
The Michigan Legislature, in its potentially most productive and forward-looking work of this year, is grappling with those exact policy issues as lawmakers seek to pass an education reform package to win more than $400 million in federal “Race to the Top” funds. The reform package and related education swirls raise all kinds of big-picture innovation questions for Michigan…
A CHANCE FOR BIPARTISANSHIP: The reform package includes numerous opportunities for across-the-aisle agreement. One example is the leadership of Senator Buzz Thomas, D-Detroit, on the charter school expansion bills. Republican Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop has offered vocal support for Thomas’ efforts to expand charters. And while administrators and teacher’s unions both have keen questions about charter school accountability that must be worked through, the motivation for new charter options received the largest exclamation point imaginable this week with news that Detroit Public School students had achieved the lowest scores in the 40-year history of a respected national standardized test. No matter whether you blame the teachers, or the school board, or the administrators, or even lead paint in old houses, there is just no denying the need for radical overhaul in what is left of the Detroit public schools. While legislators and interest groups calibrate reforms over how the bureaucracy to handle failing schools, all but those families trapped in Detroit’s deepest poverty and neglect are likely to continue to seek other options through charters and suburban districts to give kids a shot at a future. Are more charter schools a magic bullet? Probably not. But incredible success stories like University Preparatory Academy have grown out of the charter movement. Would some new charters fail? Probably. But is that any worse than the current condition?
ANOTHER CHANCE FOR BIPARTISANSHIP: For weeks, the Granholm administration has pitched a compromise to Senate Republicans. The compromise would find money to save the Michigan Promise scholarships by slowing a planned earned income tax credit for low-income workers. Granholm wants the scholarships. Senate Republicans want to slow the low-income tax break to free up funds to help pay for other programs and help balance the budget. There may be room for both sides to win on this one.
LOCAL BREAKING POINTS: The rigid capitol standoff over big-picture budget issues continues with Dems seeking higher tax revenues and Republicans continuing to push for cuts and reforms. Some Lansing insiders fear it’s all going to blow up at the local level before the end of the school year. Consider Washtenaw County, where voters last month trounced a poorly defined property tax increase for general, county-wide school operations. Millage opponents want a wide range of reforms. Teachers are refusing to re-open their contracts and take pay cuts. Something’s gotta give. If the end result is teacher layoffs, will parents stand by while class sizes balloon or electives are cut? Something’s gotta give.
A DIFFERENT SCHOOL TESTING IDEA: This one isn’t exactly headlining the reform agenda in Lansing this month, but the Michigan Association of Secondary School Principals has an idea to set aside a traditional school testing model on social studies so that precious dollars could be reallocated to a college readiness/assessment test for kids entering high school.
THE LABOR DAY NOISE: We took note in recent days as some legislators suggested lifting Michigan’s ban on starting the school year before Labor Day. It turned out to be a stalking-horse, a hollow bargaining chip in the reform debate. But we raise eyebrows anytime Lansing considers doing something about the fact that almost all Michigan schools now offer fewer than 180 days of instruction. We understand the tourism industry’s concerns about lost business, but, in the end, what kind of local summer traffic are they going to have if Michigan’s school systems produce graduates who are weakened by the prospects of less instruction than their national and international peers? There are about 200 weekdays between Labor Day and mid-June. That means a district with a full 180-day calendar has a four-week window for breaks. It’s doable. But it’s also true that students in more aggressive nations are going to school for 200 days a year or more.
4 Comments
EXPLORE assessments. Data derived allegedly in a more timely manner that will improve the ability to assess the effectiveness of curriculum, readiness for college (more ACT), NCLB goals, yadda, yadda, yadda. Data without context is meaningless, useless, misleading and a waste of time. Getting the garbage faster is of no help at all, especially when the crisis it addresses does not exist.
Unfortunately standardized testing, at $8.00 to $9.00 per student, is a waste of time and money since the whole concept that some form of uniform “one size fits all” testing is the answer to our alleged educational crisis is, to use Henry Ford’s word “Bunk.”
It certainly won’t help the children in the city of Detroit since the language and cultural framing of the “test” is from a culture unknown to them. I suspect the grammar, language and syntax are totally foreign to their life environment.
Fact is, all this testing and talk of standards is destroying education. Since 1983 (A Nation at Risk) uninformed pundits have been claiming a crisis in education. Please look around for the products of this long standing crisis. Where are they? Where is the crisis in the growth of the middle class? Where is the crisis in innovation (Please ask Google, Yahoo, Ford and its Ecoboost engine, Fuel cell research, Stem cell research – despite political barriers – the crisis in medical treatment (innovation not insurance))?
Why is America still the leader in patent generation? Foreign lands graduating more engineers and scientists? Define scientist or engineer in the foreign land and compare it to an Engineer graduated by Michigan Tech. Why is it that all the PhD candidate positions at U of M are being gobbled up by students from, that land of engineers and scientists, China.
Stop this inane and misguided drive to destroy education – the kind of education driven by teachers in charge of the curriculum assessing each individual student with a building managed by a principal, not a school board, a district, state government or Washington. If they were stupid, incompetent and untrustworthy why did you hire them?
Look around at the real innovation and progress in education – it’s not being created by a major push to top down one size fits all curriculum and bogus standardized testing.
It exists, and should be nurtured and supported, in schools where teachers are allowed to teach and children are allowed to learn.
Better yet, just sit down and read “Catching Up or Leading the Way” by Zhao from MSU.
Gee, am I angry or upset? No, I’m enraged at the ignorance of such intelligent people.
Back in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, it was reasonable to teach in ways that allowed some children to have successful learning experiences and others not to. Those students who did not experience academic success, whether because of academic talent, learning experiences in the home, or individual rates of development, eventually became frustrated and dropped out. At a time when good jobs were available for anyone with a solid work ethic or a strong back, dropping out of school did not compromise a person’s opportunity to earn a living, support a family, and build a life.
Today, things are different. The future of our children depends on their ability to be successful learners throughout life, yet schools continue to operate without a genuine commitment to helping every child possible establish a foundation of early learning success.
In a recently released report based on an extensive study of students in the San Diego public schools (Zau & Betts, 2008), students at risk of failing the California state-required high school exit exam (administered in 10th grade) can be identified almost as well in 4th grade as in 9th grade, adding to mounting evidence that success in the early grades is a good predictor of ongoing learning success. Children who struggle with literacy, numeracy, and behavior in the early years of school are far more likely to struggle as learners throughout their school careers (Vellutino, Scanlon, & Tanzman, 1998), more likely to drop out, and more likely to engage in substance abuse and other risky behaviors (Barnett, 1996; Blum, Beuhring, & Rinehart, 2000; Currie & Duncan, 1995).
Early Vigilance Pays Off
A comprehensive and systematic program of early intervention can identify and help at-risk students and reduce the need for special education by offering K–3 supports and services to general education students. One of the crucial elements of the Early Learning Success Initiative is vigilant monitoring of the skills key to elementary students’ ongoing learning success. Using a concise list of skills, most of which can be monitored through teacher observation, teachers are asked to develop a baseline profile of student skills during the first month of school and then use a one-page classroom inventory for daily monitoring of student instructional readiness in all the crucial areas of development (Sornson, 2009).
For example, kindergarten teachers develop a daily awareness of whether their students have learning needs in the following essential skills:
Shapes
• Identifies basic shapes
• Draws basic shapes
Visual
• Uses hands and eyes at close range
• Maintains visual focus at close range
Letters
• Identifies uppercase letters
• Identifies lowercase letters
Phonologic Skills
• Identifies if sounds are the same or different
• Identifies rhyming words
• Produces rhymes for a given word
• Identifies beginning or ending sounds of words
• Blends given sounds into words
• Segments words into sounds
• Listens with interest to stories
• Identifies a letter sound associated with each letter
Language
• Asks questions when appropriate
• Follows two-part oral directions
• Uses age-appropriate vocabulary
• Uses language to solve problems
Motor Skills
• Demonstrates throwing and catching skills with a small ball
• Can balance on one foot with eyes closed for six seconds
• Skips well for at least 10 yards
Literacy
• Understands concepts of print
• Recognizes personally meaningful words by sight
• Prints 10–20 personally meaningful words
• Uses letter–sound knowledge to write words
• Prints full name
Numeracy
• Demonstrates counting to 100
• Has one-to-one correspondence for numbers 1–30
• Recognizes number groups without counting (2–10)
Behavior
• Perseveres to achieve a task
• Respects basic rules/procedures in the classroom
By using a manageable progress monitoring system (K–3), which focuses on the crucial skills that predict readiness for the demands of the following grade, teachers are able to differentiate instruction daily to meet student needs and ensure that students receive appropriately challenging instruction.
Children with gaps in these basic skills and behaviors are at a disadvantage for ongoing learning success. Children with significant gaps by the end of 3rd grade are at a disadvantage for life. The San Diego public schools study (Zau & Betts, 2008) highlights the inefficiency of waiting until 12th grade to help students who are at risk when we clearly know who they are and in which areas of learning they are at risk.
It is time to abandon the wait-to-fail model altogether. Rich, poor, urban, suburban, or rural—all children in the information age deserve a real opportunity to build the solid foundation of early learning experiences that make lifelong learning possible.
References
Barnett, W. S. (1996). Lives in the balance: Age-27 benefit-cost analysis of the High/Scope Perry Preschool Program. Ypsilanti, MI: High/Scope Press.
Blum, R. W., Beuhring, T., & Rinehart, P. M. (2000). Protecting teens: Beyond race, income and family structure. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, Center for Adolescent Health.
Currie, J., & Duncan, T. (1995). Does Head Start make a difference? American Economic Review, 85(3), 341–364.
Vellutino, F. R., Scanlon, D. M., & Tanzman, M. S. (1998). The case for early intervention in diagnosing specific reading disability. Journal of School Psychology, 36, 367–397.
Sornson, Bob,(2009) Essential Skill Inventories, Peterborough, NH: Crystal Springs Books.
Zau, C. Z., & Betts, J. R. (2008). Predicting success, preventing failure: An investigation of the California High School Exit Exam. San Francisco: Public Policy Institute of California.
Well said, Chuck.
(I had not proofed my earlier post before accidentally hitting the “post” button.)
One cannot validly deduce from the current post-Labor Day school start legislation that there is less time available for classroom instruction. You can schedule either the same or even a greater amount of mandated classroom time, but still have the second half of the school year start after Labor Day.
More importantly, we should all be more concerned with the quality of educational engagement that can and should occur in every classroom, rather than counting how many days, or minutes during the day, our kids spend in school. That’s an appropriate measure for the incarcerated.
The post-Labor Day School start requirement is a straw man in what should be a reasoned and focused argument about real educational reform. I offer this perspective as a member of the senior management team of an institution that is both nationally recognized as a leader in effective and successful education innovation, and Michigan’s leading cultural tourism destination, whose visitors’ spending has a DIRECT economic impact of more than $120 million on Michigan’s economy, including nearly $9 million annually in State sales tax revenues which become available to fund Michigan’s public education system. Michigan has enough real problems to address without being distracted from that necessary business by false dilemmas and artificial dichotomies.