Franklin Schargel’s Blog

My latest Huffington Post is below:

Hunting season has begun and educators are the targets.

Governors, state legislatures, and the United States Department of Education want to hold educators responsible for low school performance. But are they the only ones?  Unfortunately, there is enough guilt to go around.

Let’s start with politicians who underfund education and therefore show that they do not value it even as they say they do.  We are told that America spends more money on education than other countries.  And while this is true, America spends LESS of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on education than many industrialized countries.

Current funding formulas used to fund schools is another major cause.  Using property tax assessments to fund schools deprives areas with low taxable property like shopping malls, fewer funds to operate their schools.  This causes low-income areas like Detroit and Newark to have less money to spend than Princeton, New Jersey or Bloomfield Hills, Michigan where median income is $200,000.

President Obama’s Race to the Top rewards successful schools and states.  Shouldn’t money be given to schools that need to improve?

Schools of Education need to fill seats and accept students who have low SAT scores who would not be accepted in business or medical schools.  Teacher education programs need a complete overhaul led by educational practitioners who understand what is taking place in America’s classrooms.  For many of those who prepare educators, the last time they were in a classroom was the day they graduated from high school.  Perhaps the answer is to simply better preparing teachers.  In many colleges, student teaching takes place in the last year of preparation so the individual being prepared has no expectation of what confronts them in the classroom.

Shortages exist in certain educational fields such as special education.  The present administration has put a major effort into the hiring of S.T.E.M. (Science, Technology, Engineering or Math) teachers, but is having difficulty in attracting enough warm bodies to fill classrooms.  They may be looking for highly qualified but not highly effective teachers.  Highly qualified teachers know what to teach; highly effective teachers know how to teach it.  We have all experienced teachers who knew the material but lacked the ability to teach it effectively.

Some individuals enter the classroom because they see it as an opportunity to get a job and plan to leave as soon as another opportunity opens up.  There exists a misunderstanding of what it takes to teach and for many, the preparation they receive at colleges or universities fails to adequately prepare them.

Politicians are trapped by simplistic views that educational outcomes are linear. Measurable outcomes of one human being (a student) cannot and should not be used to make evaluative decisions about the behavior of another human (a teacher) because the student may not be able to (out-of-school factors) or may choose not to learn.  For example, should teachers be held accountable for habitually truant students?

Why are educators being held to a higher standard than surgeons?  Do we expect lawyers to win every case, police to end crime?  Do we expect coaches to win every game?  No Child Left Behind and the Obama version, Race For The Top envisions that by December 31, 2014, ALL students will be reading at grade level.  And even though Arnie Duncan, the U.S. Secretary of Education has given states permission to be exempt, the regulation is still written into the law.

The governors of Wisconsin, Florida, New Jersey, and Ohio and the mayor of Providence, Rhode Island have determined that educators and public education make highly visible, easy to attack victims.  They are attempting to balance their budgets on the backs of public servants.  But not all “public servants” only those who are “not essential.” Educators did not cause this problem. But it is easier to target educators rather than the financial, insurance and banking industries that did.

• Education, in most states, is a major component in the makeup of state and local budgets.  Many states spend close to 50% of their budget on schools.  But politicians tell their constituents that education is expensive.  Ignorance is far more expensive.  Estimates of the percentage of prisoners who are school dropouts range as high as 82 percent. (Source:  cost of Dropping Out by Ben Brudevold-Newman found on www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyid=5300726  Alliance for Excellent Education “Saving Futures, Saving Dollars”)

Prisons cost taxpayers more than $37 billion a year. (Source: The nation’s 2 million inmates and their keepers are the ultimate captive market: a $37 billion economy bulging with business opportunity by Michael Myser, Business 2.0 Magazine, March 15 2007: 12:37 PM EDT

• https://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2006/12/01/8394995/index.htm
•  Every year that an inmate spends in prison costs almost $16,000 (Source: Using figures from Wikipedia and the above cited article, 2,418,352 prisoners divided into $37 billion = $15,299.68)
• An individual sentenced to five years for a $300 theft costs the public more than $75,000. (Source: 5 years at $15,299,68 = $76,498,40)
•  The cost of a life term costs almost $1 million. (Source: Wikipedia:  Of these, only the United States currently has minors serving such sentences.^[1] As of 2009, Human Rights Watch had calculated that there were 2,589^[2][3] youth offenders serving life without parole in the United States.^[4]
•  A minor sentenced at age 17 to life imprisonment, living until the age of 76 would cost $933,280.48)
•  Some states are spending more money on prisons than education. Over the course of the last 20 years, the amount of money spent on prisons was increased by 570% while that spent on elementary and secondary education was increased by only 33%. (Source: https://sites.google.com/site/educationvsprisoninamerica/facts-about-america-s-prison-sytem)

No school district in the country spends that much on education.

Education affects parents, businesses, as well as law enforcement.  But as importantly, it affects our future and our global competitiveness. It was not long ago that the president, businesspeople and state governors who were decrying the fact that our schools were not “globally competitive”.  But since children don’t vote, they are easy targets.

States need to spend money on education and job programs in order to attract economic development.

Is it possible that the attack on education and the vilification of educators a gender issue?  Police, fire, sanitation and prison guards are not being subjected to the cuts being made in education.  Could it be that since the majority of educators are female they are less likely to complain when jobs and salaries are reduced?

 

Teen births are at their lowest level in almost 70 years, indicates  a Federal  data report. Birthrates for ages 15-19 in all racial and ethnic groups are lower than ever reported.

“Young people are being more careful,” says Sarah Brown, CEO of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. She attributes the declines to less sex and increased use of contraception.

The report by the National Center for Health Statistics says the actual number of teen births in 2010 was the lowest since 1946. It credits “strong pregnancy prevention messages” and says contraceptive use “may have contributed.”

The analysis comes at a time when contraception is a hot political debate, from a congressional investigation of whether federal money pays for abortions to concern among some church leaders over an Obama administration mandate that all health insurance cover birth control.

The new numbers elaborate on federal data released in November that found the teen birthrate dropped 9% from 2009 to 2010, to a historic low of 34.3 births per 1,000 teens. That’s down 44% from 61.8 in 1991. The all-time high was 96.3 during the Baby Boom year of 1957.

The new analysis, based on 2010 preliminary data, shows a range in birthrates among racial and ethnic groups, from 10.9 for Asians to 23.5 for whites, 51.5 for

Laura Lindberg, a senior research associate with the non-profit Guttmacher Institute in New York in her analysis of the data found no change in the percentage of sexually active teen girls but significant increases in use of contraception, which suggests contraception is driving the numbers.

Contraceptive use the first time a girl has sex “has gone up dramatically,” she says.

That December report also noted a decline in the percentage of teenage girls “who said they wanted to get pregnant,” Lindberg says.

Mississippi has the highest teen birthrate in the nation while New Hampshire has the lowest, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.  Mississippi reported 55 births per 1,000 teens aged 15 to 19 in 2010, more than 60 percent above the U.S. average, according to state data released on Tuesday. New Hampshire’s rate was less half the national average at 15.7 births for the same age group.

Teen birth rates were higher in the South and Southwest and lower in the Northeast and Upper Midwest, the CDC said, noting that Hispanics and blacks had the highest teen birth rates.

Last fall the CDC reported that the U.S. teen birth rate dropped 9 percent from 2009 to 2010, reaching a historic low of 34.3 births per 1,000 teens aged 15 to 19. It attributed the drop to several factors, including strong pregnancy-prevention messages aimed at teens and increased use of contraception.

 

Most schools already supply breakfast and lunch for poor students. With the increased impact of the recession and layoffs, many children have no other alternative than to get their only meals in schools.  Thanks to the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act signed into law by President Obama in December 2010, children are able to get dinner in after-school programs where at least half the students qualify for free or reduced-priced lunch.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that almost 21 million supper will be served by 2015.  In Oakland, California 70 percent of its 38,000 students qualify for subsidized meals.  In Memphis, Tennessee about 84 percent of the district’s 110,000 students qualify.  In Kansas City, 86 percent of the students qualify.

The meals consist of entrees such as Cobb salad and ham and cheese sandwiches.

Conservatives question whether schools should feed kids three meals a day.  Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh asked on-air in November, “Why even send the kids home?”

With all due respect to Mr. Limbaugh, is the option of having these children go hungry better than feeding them?  How obscene is that comment?  Mr. Limbaugh, don’t you have any shame?

• 30,000,000,000 pieces of content are shared every month on the Internet.
• 127 Trillion emails were sent on the Internet in 2010.
• There are 255,000,000 websites on the worldwide web.
• 48,000,000,000 apps (applications) have been downloaded
• By 2013, there will be one trillion devices that can connect to the Internet.  That’s 140 per person.  In 2007, there were 500 million.
• In February 2011, eBook sales reached 90,300,000.  Paperback sales at the same time were 81,200,000
• 1 out of 8 couples met on the Internet.
• Personal MySpace pages are visited 30 times a day.
• There are 2.7 trillion searches on Google each month.
• The number of text messages sent each day is greater than the population of the world.
• The average teenager sends 2,272 text messages per month.  That is almost 76 per day.

How are you using the Internet in your classroom/school?  How are your students?

Because of the mild winter, schools have been able to save “snow makeup days”.  So a number of them have decided to shorten the school year in order to save money.  This has been taking place in Westmont, Illinois, Warren Count, Kentucky and Burlington, Vermont.  In Marion County, West Virginia, students will not go to school on 6 scheduled Fridays.

While this may sound like a good idea, it leave parents searching to find day care or taking off from work or finding outside help.  How much money can schools be saving?  They still have to pay for salaries?  It’s not that children need the additional instructional time, it must be about saving money.

The results are now public from the 2011 federal testing program known as NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. And once again, schools on the nation’s military bases have outperformed public schools on both reading and math tests for fourth and eighth graders.

At the military base schools, 39 percent of fourth graders were scored as proficient in reading, compared with 32 percent of all public school students.

Even more impressive, the achievement gap between black and white students continues to be much smaller at military base schools and is shrinking faster than at public schools.

On the NAEP reading test, black fourth graders in public schools scored an average of 205 out of 500, compared with a 231 score for white public school students, a 26-point gap. Black fourth graders at the military base schools averaged 222 in reading, compared with 233 for whites, an 11-point gap.

In fact, the black fourth graders at the military base schools scored better in reading than public school students as a whole, whose average score was 221.

How to explain the difference?
Military schools are not subject to former President George W. Bush’s signature education program, No Child Left Behind, or to President Obama’s Race to the Top. They would find that standardized tests do not dominate and are not used to rate teachers, principals or schools.

At military schools, standardized tests are used as originally intended, to identify a child’s academic weaknesses and assess the effectiveness of the curriculum.

Under Mr. Obama’s education agenda, state governments can now dictate to principals how to run their schools. In Tennessee “” which is ranked 41st in NAEP scores and has made no significant progress in closing the black-white achievement gap on those tests in 20 years “” the state now requires four formal observations a year for all teachers, regardless of whether the principal thinks they are excellent or weak. The state has declared that half of a teacher’s rating must be based on student test scores.

Principals at military bases have discretion in how to  teachers. For the most effective, she does one observation a year. That gives her and her assistant principal time for walk-through visits in every classroom every day.

“We don’t micromanage,” said Marilee Fitzgerald, director of the Department of Defense Education Activity, the agency that supervises the military base schools and their 87,000 students. “Individual schools decide what to focus on.”

The average class in New York City in kindergarten through the third grade has 24 students. At military base schools, the average is 18, which is almost as good as it is in the private schools where leaders of the education reform movement “” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York; the former education chancellor in New York City, Joel I. Klein; and Bill Gates of Microsoft “” have sent their children.

A 2001 study on the success of the military base schools by researchers at Vanderbilt University cites the importance of the smooth relations between the teachers’ union and management, and Ms. Fitzgerald said that continued to be true.

Helping children succeed academically is about a lot more than what goes on inside the schools. Military parents do not have to worry about securing health care coverage for their children or adequate housing. At least one parent in the family has a job.

The military command puts a priority on education.

A family’s economic well-being has considerable impact on how students score on standardized tests, and it is hard to make exact comparisons between military and public school families. But by one indicator, families at military base schools and public schools have similar earnings: the percentage of students who qualify for federally subsidized lunches is virtually identical at both, about 46 percent.

What is clear is that the base schools have made impressive progress in narrowing the achievement gap.

In the last decade, the gap in reading between black and white fourth graders at base schools has decreased to 11 points this year (233 compared with 222), down from a 16-point difference in 2003 (230 compared with 214), a 31 percent reduction. In public schools, there has been a much smaller decrease, to a 26-point gap this year (231 compared with 205) from 30 points in 2002 (227 compared with 197), a 13 percent reduction.

The military has a far better record of integration than most institutions. Almost all of the 69 base schools are in the South. They were opened in the 1950s and ’60s because the military was racially integrated and did not want the children of black soldiers to attend racially segregated schools off base.

I have mixed feelings about No Child and the Race for the Top.  As in life, there are good things and bad things in both.  What is for me a major problem, is the emphasis on testing.  Testing is one way of measuring achievement.  It is not the only way!  Educators use tests to determine what to do next not to place blame on students, parents and educators.  In the present political-educational enviornment, we have people who would rather fix the blame than fixing the process that causes the failure.

Any regular reader of this blog knows my affection for Diane Ravitch’s work.  Ms. Ravitch who was an Under Secretary of Education in the US Department of Education has admitted she was incorrect in supporting “No Child Left Behind” and the charter school movement.  I find it fascinating that so few individuals will admit to their mistakes.  Below are some of her comments in a keynote that she delivered at the Opportunity to Learn Summit, in Washington, D.C.

“I thought testing would help diagnose the problem and help teachers identify kids’ needs and that charters would serve the underserved and collaborate with public schools. I was wrong on all accounts.

• 80 percent of charters in Michigan are for-profit.
• In Ohio, cyber charters get full funding with no facilities and 100:1 student-teacher ratios.
• In Colorado, virtual schools have a 25 percent graduation rate.
• Florida pumps billions of dollars into vouchers that support deregulated schools with terrible conditions.
• After 21 years of vouchers and competition, black students in Milwaukee have the lowest scores across nation.
• Under mayoral control since 2002, market reforms and choice have left the achievement gap virtually unchanged in New York City public schools.
• In Washington, D.C., Hispanic, black, and low-income students have the largest achievement gap (a 65-point difference) of any city in the nation.
• Chicago closed 100 neighborhood schools but is still one of the lowest districts in the nation. There have been no gains for black students since 2002 and none for Hispanics since 2005.
• By 2014, all public schools could be labeled failures.

Profits and punishment seem to be the point of current education policies. Although NCLB documents gaps, it does nothing to address the conditions causing these gaps, she added. “Congress is still patting itself on the back for identifying a problem (that we already knew) but doing nothing meaningful to solve it,” she said.

Ms. Ravitch attempted to inject some common sense into the education reform agenda:

• NCLB is based on a phony claim: the “Texas miracle.” In reality, dropouts soared and Texas was in the middle of the pack on assessments.
• Tests should only be used for diagnostic purposes, such as determining whether a student can read.
• No achievement gap was ever closed by closing schools.
• In high-achieving countries like Finland, testing takes a backseat to creativity, innovation, and whole child education.

She also asked some key questions:

• Why are we racing to the top? (A: The top is occupied by the children of the 1 percent; they’re not going anywhere.)
• Why would we give more credibility to standardized tests than to the judgment of educators and parents?
• Why is there not enough money to provide the basic public services that every child needs?

When asking who gets left behind, Ravitch said we must look at the two gaps of race and income and consider what policies directly address disparities between these groups. Simply raising the bar and punishing those who do not clear it will not help kids already struggling to do math or speak English, she said.

“We need to start investing in children!” Ravitch declared. She reminded the audience that the racial achievement gap was cut in half in the ’70s and ’80s, with gains largely attributed to desegration and expanding federal assistance like Head Start, Title 1, and early childhood programs.

Ravitch added that change won’t be easy or cheap, but we can make the first step by doing one simple thing: “Realizing that what we’re doing now is not working and never will.”

 

As a former history teacher, I am upset with the fact that only about a third of American adults can name all three branches of government, and a third can’t name any. Fewer than a third of eighth graders could identify the historical purpose of the Declaration of Independence. And that a Republican presidential candidate, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who recently misstated the number of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor developed iCivics, an  online program aimed at middle school students.  This free curriculum includes lesson plans and games that are linked to subjects and skills that various states require students to master. The program also promotes public service projects.

Civics education involves explaining the structure of U.S. government, including the meaning and influence of the Constitution and its evolution over time.   Limited knowledge about the three branches of government “” executive, legislative and judicial “” emerges starkly in Annenberg surveys, which also found that 15% of adults correctly named John Roberts as United States chief justice, but almost twice as many (27%) could identify Randy Jackson as a judge on the television show “American Idol.”

The iCivics effort avoids ideological battles, but its games delve deeply into government process. In one, a player can take on the role of president, addressing Congress, choosing policy priorities, managing federal departments and selecting legislation to sign or veto.  Another game allows students to step into the role of advocate on famous Supreme Court cases, many of which resonate still, such as Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, which outlawed segregation but failed to accomplish full integration.

Part of the problem is that No Child Left Behind Act, which emphasized reading and math instruction with required testing and omits the testing of history and science.  The failure to emphasize history will result (and is resulting) in a less knowledgeable electorate.  But maybe that is the aim.