by Matthew K. Tabor

At Weigand Elementary in Los Angeles, parents were so dissatisfied with the leadership of the school’s principal that they used the state’s parent trigger law to send that principal packing. It’s the third parent trigger victory in California, with two districts aided by Parent Revolution winning the right to be turned around by a non-profit charter network — but this is the first time a school’s administration has been singled out for change.

Matthew K. Tabor

Weigand parents claimed that the school’s principal fostered a culture of intimidation with teachers and was anything but friendly to parents. 61% of Weigand parents signed on to force reform that will see a new principal — and hopefully a more effective leader – step in.

This is a significant development because it testifies to how historically difficult it has been for parents and the community to change their schools.

Anyone well-versed in the dark arts of parent and community involvement in schools understands the ‘Parent Involvement Paradox’: Schools constantly ask you to be involved, but they make it very difficult to help in a meaningful way.

Schools tend to want parent and community help — as long as it’s on the school’s terms. They’re most welcome to offer their charity, whether it’s money or time, as long as their contribution matches up exactly with what the school will let you do.

Volunteers can generally serve refreshments at a dance or campaign for the passage of a school budget with the full support of your local school board, but try to involve yourself in the operations of a school or district — say, a finance expert wanting to weigh in on a fiscal plan, a tech entrepreneur offering to lend his expertise about digital media, or a CEO helping out on management or leadership — and in an instant a gauntlet of obstacles appear that would make an Olympic 3,000m steeplechase runner nervous. Personnel is a virtually untouchable issue, especially when it comes to specific school leaders.

When community members choose involvement that doesn’t fit a school’s modus operandi, a school becomes a bridezilla who screams at a guest for giving a wedding gift that isn’t from her registry. That guest tends not to be welcome at her future functions until they step in line and perform as commanded.

It’s not uncommon for a community to try to reform a school, though. Parents and community members unhappy with a school’s leadership frequently try to make a change, but they have little power and the deck is stacked against them. Parents worry about retribution against their kids for making an issue (and that happens); they clash with well-organized, well-funded unions; they can be labeled divisive members of their community, which can bring terrible fallout personally and professionally.

And that’s all for a years-long battle with an abysmal success rate. In the end they usually hear, “If you don’t like it, run for the school board” (which most folks aren’t able to do for a host of reasons). Sometimes these movements field a candidate or two who are successful — and who then clash with a board majority frequently backed by school loyalists keen to put down their rebellion.

As this happens, years go by as schools can be run into the ground. Performance declines, new and often expensive problems pop up, and thousands of students are ill-served.

Non-parents speak out here and there, but parents tend to grit their teeth and bear a bad situation, which can include high private tutoring costs and a tremendous investment of time (as they continue to pay taxes for an ineffective school), until their child is out of the system. Then they breathe a sigh of relief and wash their hands of school politics and a new generation of parents further down the road are left to kick the can.

Many years, tremendous personal costs, little hope of meaningful success. One can understand why community members don’t think of themselves as David and why they think it takes more than a sling and a stone to fell a school Goliath.

But the parent trigger, whether it’s used for addressing leadership problems or for forcing an overhaul of an entire school, is a game-changer. It allows parents and communities to organize and become involved in a way that a school has to take seriously — and on a reasonable timeline.

The parent trigger is a solution to part of that ‘Parent Involvement Paradox.’ It’s a shame that we need a law to force schools to take community input seriously, but generations of frustrated parents and taxpayers are reading about Weigand and Parent Revolution and saying, “Can you imagine if we had this so many years ago?”

Now more parents will be able to look across the dinner table and say, “Look what we did.”

Matthew K. Tabor is the editor of EducationNews.org. He can be reached at editor@educationnews.org.

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Language teacher turned consultant Joe Dale is convinced that it’s not necessarily the traditional techie types who are on the front lines of a digital revolution in schools — he thinks it’s the language teachers.

It might not seem like as natural a fit for language teachers to embrace technology as it is for teachers of science, math and engineering-heavy subjects, but Dale has seen that developing tools like social media, video software and online conferencing translate well to the language classroom.

And the web, despite being full of video, graphics and glitz, is still primarily driven by words. Dale writes in The Guardian Professional’s Teacher Network that the “MFL Twitterati,” a collection of foreign language teachers, is a perfect example of a group of education professionals using technology to augment their practice:

The ‘MFLtwitterati‘ – a grassroots community of UK-based modern foreign language teachers on Twitter – has proved to be an invaluable testbed for ideas on using new technologies. Over time the group has developed a strong ethos of sharing innovative classroom practice, encouraging each other to experiment and feedback their findings for further discussion and reflection.

It’s hard to measure the precise impact of these online tools, says Dale, but the proliferation of forums and collaborative groups who constantly share up-to-date tools, apps and best practices is a testament to their value.

Language teachers have successfully used blogging, audio/video software and conferencing — from Google+ to Skype — to share expertise and to integrate unique language practice into curricula.

Not everyone is an early adopter, though. Traditionalists exist, and some language teachers are more reluctant to embrace new technologies than others.

The issue now is the widening gap between those who pro-actively use technology to promote creativity and collaboration, and those who only tick the ICT [education technology] box with the same old ‘drill and kill’ websites (that focus on excessive repetition of simple, isolated skills) and MS Office.

Being slow to hop on the ed tech train is a mistake, Dale argues, because it’s leaving the station whether teachers like it or not:

Technology is not going away and language teachers need to embrace its full potential to engage our 21st century learners.

Education technology and foreign languages aren’t a new marriage — as early as 1983 there was evidence that the discipline began to embrace tech. Vol. 1, No. 1 from June, 1983 of the journal for CALICO — Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium — reports the following:

One thing is manifest. Anything having to do with computers is a hot topic at foreign-language meetings these days. Computers were the subject of one of the Northeast Conference’s Winter Workshops in February of 1983, and the Pre-Conference Workshop on computers at the October 1982 meeting of the Massachusetts Foreign Language Association (MaFLA) was certainly not unique in being oversubscribed.

The post On Education Technology, Language Teachers May Be Leading appeared first on Education News.

The foundation of the school choice movement is a desire to empower parents with the ability to send their children to a high-quality school regardless of where the family lives. School choice advocates frequently charge that one’s zip code shouldn’t determine the quality of one’s education — as wealthy neighborhoods tend to have good schools and poorer neighborhoods do not — and that opening up great schools to all is democratic, egalitarian and will help drive education reform.

But critics of school choice argue that this leaves poorer and predominantly minority students left back in traditional public schools as families who put a premium on education flee using choice — and that those families who take their children out of public schools move them into less diverse schools.

Matthew Chingos of the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy has concluded that data shows it is unlikely that a relationship exists between school choice and segregation.

By comparing changes in charter enrollment with changes in minority students’ exposure to non-minority students using information from the Common Core of Data, Chingos found that there’s no significant relationship. He didn’t stop there:

I also used an alternative measure of segregation called a “dissimilarity index” and obtained similar findings: no consistent relationship between changes in charter enrollment and changes in segregation. Finally, I conducted a more sophisticated panel data analysis that uses all nine years of data to estimate the relationship between charter enrollment and segregation using only the changes within counties over time^. Once again, using both the exposure and dissimilarity indices, the results consistently indicated no meaningful relationship between choice and segregation.

Critics may not be completely satisfied, and Chingos recognizes that it’s still possible that school choice and segregation are related — but that it’s very unlikely:

The lack of any consistent relationship between charter enrollment and segregation does not eliminate the possibility that such a relationship exists, but suggests that it is unlikely. For there to be a relationship, it would have to be the case that counties where charter enrollment increased experienced an increase in segregation as a result but then adopted policies (or experienced other changes) that counteracted the increase in segregation. In my view, that is not a very plausible explanation for these results.

The growth of charter schools and school choice has been consistent over the last 15 years, with ~1% of students enrolled in charters in 2000 and more than 3% by 2010. Arizona — and cities such as Washington, DC and New Orleans — has been aggressive in promoting school choice, with Florida, Ohio, Georgia, Illinois and others making up a total of 17 states with school choice programs.

The post Does School Choice Increase Segregation? No, Says Brookings appeared first on Education News.

Both Republicans and Democrats are working hard to fix a flawed Federal student loan system as a July 1 deadline approaches that would see interest rates doubled from 3.4% to 6.8%. The rate was cut in half in 2008 as the recession hit and the increase is a return to its previous level.

But the current interest system is problematic because the rates are fixed and not tied to the market. It’s a difficult balance for legislators to work out a system that’s sensible and cost-effective without being too friendly or too punitive to borrowers, and there’s common ground between Republicans, Democrats and the President on solutions.

As the legislative efforts continue, a bill has been introduced in the Senate to freeze interest rates at 3.4% for 2 years as a solution is forged — but the funding to continue high Federal subsidy for loan interest will come from :

The Student Loan Affordability Act of 2013 (S. 953) would freeze need-based student loan interest rates for two years while Congress works on a long-term solution to slow the rapid accumulation of student-loan debt, and is fully paid for by closing three egregious tax loopholes.  Specifically, the bill would: limit the use of tax-deferred retirement accounts as a complicated estate planning tool; close a corporate offshore tax loophole by restricting “earnings stripping” by expatriated entities; and close an oil and gas industry tax loophole by treating oil from tar sands the same as other petroleum products.

Student loan debt, which has topped $1 trillion in the United States, is behond only mortgages for total consumer debt, having outpaced credit card debt and automotive loan debt. Research by FICO Labs showed that the average student loan debt in 2005 was around $17,000, and in 2013 that number grew to over $27,000 for an increase of nearly 60% in 7 years.

The bill would also draw funding from closing a tax loophole in individual retirement accounts. As Sen. Patty Murphy’s (Democrat, Washington State) office explains:

Under current law, holders of IRAs and 401(k)-type accounts are required to begin taking taxable distributions from those accounts once they reach age 70-1/2.  However, a loophole in the tax law allows taxpayers to stretch those distributions over many years if they leave their account to a very young beneficiary.  When the account holder dies, the taxation of the account is then delayed as it is spread over the life of the beneficiary.  The Student Loan Affordability Act would require the retirement savings accounts to be distributed within five years of the death of the account holder, unless the beneficiary is within ten years of the account holder’s age, an individual with special needs or disabled, a minor, or the account holder’s spouse.  This provision saves taxpayers approximately $4.6 billion over ten years.

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Student demographics at private schools and traditional public schools are different, but after controlling for variables — income, race, gender, parent involvement — William Jeynes found that private school students performed 7 months ahead of public students.

Ron Matus of redefinED points out that this research could have a tremendous impact on how the growing school choice movement views itself. By focusing on charter schools, which are funded like public schools but have autonomy over their management, curriculum and overall operation, Jeynes says that school choice advocates could be ignoring an effective model:

“It really seems in terms of school choice that this nation has decided to throw all kinds of resources at developing charter schools but has really overlooked the broader approach to school choice,” Jeynes said in a phone interview. “We really ought to include private schools.”

The reasons for private school success seem to derive from the schools’ culture. First, a belief in seriousness of purpose and self-worth seem to drive private school students in a unique way — as Jeynes puts it, they think that “God doesn’t make junk.”

“You can’t say, “God doesn’t make junk” in a public school,” he said. “There’s something about that. It’s not just saying, ‘You can do it.’ It’s that ‘Hey, you have a creator who made you, and he made you well, so you can do this.’”

And there is a marked difference in a sense of belonging and caring in a private school, which Jeynes cautiously summarizes as “love.” In short, private school students tend to believe that teachers and the school care about their lives and academic outcomes. That bears fruit on academic performance, as students thrive in such a welcoming, comfortable atmosphere compared to a less-personal traditional public school model.

The research doesn’t condemn public schools as soulless factories of pain and disinterest, but it does identify and contrast two general models that can be very different.

Some charter and public schools have adopted bits of the culture and environment that have proved effective in private, faith-based schools, but there continues to be resistance to learn from religious institutions. Jeynes thinks this is a shame:

“If there is a certain group of schools that is reaching inner city kids and doing a better job at it, we should rejoice at it, no matter our religious affiliation,” he said.

The post Study: Private, Faith-Based School Students a Year Ahead appeared first on Education News.

Chancellor of New York City Schools Dennis Walcott says that reaching a deal with unions on a teacher evaluation system is a critical part of improving education in the city — and policy detailing teacher evaluation will be forged one way or another. If the current impasse continues to June 1, the State of New York will step in and arbitrate the process.

In an op-ed in the New York Daily News, Walcott writes that the city has been trying to negotiate with the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) for some time, but progress has stalled. The UFT, as described by Walcott, is both historically and famously hostile to change. In his view, the union has protected its own interests, and those of its members, as the city’s education system suffered.

That approach has driven teacher evaluation policy — or lack thereof — leading to a system in which professional evaluations have lost meaning and that makes management inefficient.

No organization, public or private, can survive if its managers cannot reward good employees or replace poor ones. Under the current rules, though, principals are virtually prevented from assessing their teachers, much less removing them if they fail at their jobs. The evaluation process is widely regarded as a farce.

Walcott points out that other cities have fared better on evaluations and have massaged the approval of unions. But that’s not always what it seems, he says — in Buffalo, the deal unofficially includes an agreement not to take the policy seriously:

Some districts, like Buffalo, submitted their proposals with union approval and received their state aid. But they also signed secret side deals with their unions pledging not to enforce the tough new evaluation rules. Mayor Bloomberg and I refused to engage in that charade. Instead of being rewarded, the state withheld a quarter-billion dollars in education funds [from New York City], punishing our schoolchildren.

He and NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg won’t do that, as Walcott says the stakes are too high for the city’s 1.1 million students to warrant compromising such a critically-important policy.

Critics of the city’s position on the issue have argued that teachers should drive a plan that evaluates teachers — who could be better-positioned to forge teacher evaluation policy than teachers themselves? Walcott and Bloomberg answer that question by pointing to the status quo in New York as evidence that the union has had their chance for decades and that the dismal results are a testimony to that.

With two weeks left to the deadline, there’s little indication that the UFT will find a proposal appealing enough to endorse. When the state takes over the process, they won’t have a choice.

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Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent John Deasy came under heavy fire in the wake of a sex abuse scandal that revealed elementary teacher Mark Berndt’s years of sexual misconduct in an LAUSD school. After February, 2012′s revelation that the district had a serious problem with identifying and dealing with potential abuse, LAUSD increased its efforts to remove offending teachers from their classrooms.

And now approximately 600 Los Angeles teachers are seeing those efforts bear fruit. Barbara Jones of The Mendocino Beacon reports that LAUSD has fired 100 teachers, forced 200 to resign and removed 300 more from the classroom as allegations of abuse are investigated.

The mass effort appears to be the result of a culture change in LAUSD. In the past, as in nearly all major school systems nationwide, dealing with allegations of misconduct in Los Angeles were difficult and expensive. It could take several years of hearings and appeals — all of which cost the district — to fire a teacher. Principals who took the necessary steps to remove teachers from classrooms rarely had their requests honored by boards, which meant that teachers would be returned to the school and often instigated a negative professional climate.

But now that administrators have the support of LAUSD, they’re coming forth in droves to deal with complaints about teacher misconduct that include sexual contact, emotional/mental abuse and corporal abuse — and some of the allegations are nothing short of outrageous:

“God, how do I even explain this?” Deasy asked, before recounting that a Westside elementary teacher in his early 60s “trained” his students to give him a full-body massage for 20 minutes every day while he “rested.” Youngsters, including some special-education students, later told officials that he shouted profanities, spanked them and hit them with rolled-up papers when they misbehaved.

Not everyone is pleased with the crackdown, though. United Teachers Los Angeles, the city’s teachers union, has called it a “witch hunt” and charged the district with hasty, poorly-conducted investigations and a mood of guilty until proven innocent. A lawyer for UTLA summed up the union’s position:

“Every case must be judged on its own merits,” Schwab said. “But in a number of cases, the nature of the charges haven’t been appropriately investigated or have been too vigorously pursued and the evidence never supported such allegations.”

44 teachers have been investigated and cleared of allegations.

Legislators have also worked to streamline the process of investigating allegations, filing charges and dismissing teachers. AB 375, a bill introduced to the California Assembly, could fare better than previous attempts:

Assembly Bill 375 would set a deadline of seven months for the administrative appeal, start to finish. It has the support of UTLA and the California Teachers Association, which last year lobbied strongly against a bill that would have given a school board the final say in firing a teacher. Under heavy lobbying by the unions, that measure died in committee.

Despite the uncertain future of LAUSD’s aggressive project to end teacher misconduct, Deasy has expressed a solid commitment to deal with the issue. Of the prior practice of paying accused teachers to drop their appeals, Deasy said, “Not on my watch.”

The post Housecleaning in Los Angeles: Hundreds of Teachers Shuffled Out appeared first on Education News.

For the first time in the history of the SAT, the test has been canceled for an entire country.

On May 1st — three days before the May 4th test date — Educational Testing Service (ETS), the company that administers the SAT, discovered that questions from the upcoming exam were being passed around test prep centers in South Korea. Countless test-takers were exposed to actual exam questions for the May 4th test, which compromised the exam for the entire country.

So, ETS shut it down.

Jeyup S. Kwaak writes in The Wall Street Journal that the cancellation has caused chaos for South Korean students hoping to attend a college or university in the United States, sending them scrambling for a solution — including leaving the country:

The cancellation has thrown college-entrance preparations for thousands of students into disarray. Some students now plan to travel to other countries in the region to ensure they are able to take the next test in the summer.

In the 2011-2012 academic year, nearly 73,000 South Korean students went to college in the United States, the third most in the world behind China and India.

The blame seems to lie with South Korea’s famous culture of academic pressure, which exists in part because high academic achievement is a necessary stepping stone to securing the most sought-after jobs:

In modern-day South Korea, the academic environment is ultra-competitive because obtaining qualifications from the best institutions has long been critical to winning the most-desired jobs. Almost two-thirds of South Koreans between 25 and 34 years old have college degrees, the highest ratio in the world, according to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.

South Korea has in recent years been rife with academic scandals as government officials have been found to have misrepresented credentials or plagiarized dissertations.

Those in South Korean education are worried that the scandal will have lingering effects on American schools’ perceptions of their academic credentials. ETS, however, has reassured the public that there will be nothing to worry about in the future:

U.S.-based Educational Testing Service is the SAT’s developer, vendor and scorer. Thomas Ewing, a spokesman for ETS, declined to comment on the investigation, but in a written statement called the security measures for tests taken in South Korea “among the most stringent of any country in which the SAT is administered,” adding that a security review for the country is under way.

ETS has also made it clear that if there are more problems, the test will be canceled nationwide again rather than administer a potentially-compromised exam.

It isn’t the first time SAT cheating has rocked South Korea — in 2007, roughly 900 scores were canceled when officials discovered that the exam may have been invalid.

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In a political environment that has seen growing conflict between Republican opposition and President Barack Obama — from the September 11, 2012 Benghazi terrorism scandal to last week’s revelation that the IRS targeted Conservative non-profits for special scrutiny — Republicans have signed on to the Obama administration’s plan to keep student loan interest rates from going up.

Philip Elliot writes for the Associated Press that this “rare win” for Obama depends on the GOP-led Education and Workforce Committee’s endorsement of a plan that would tie student loan interest rates to market rates. As student loan rates are set to double on July 1, this will provide significant relief for borrowers.

But there’s more to the plan including an adjustment of subsidized and unsubsidized loan rates as Republican John Kline has brought forth:

Kline’s proposal also would end different interest rates for subsidized and unsubsidized undergraduate loans. Both would pay the same rates, which would be linked to 10-year Treasury notes.

There is popular confusion about student loan interest rates ‘doubling.’ In December, 2007 Congress lowered student loan interest rates to 3.4% in the beginning of the United States’ economic recession. That rate is set to return to its previous level of 6.8% in July, 2013 — which doubles a rate that was halved.

Both Democrats and Republicans have proposed a plan that would tie interest rates to the market rather than setting a hard value independent of the financial sector’s ebbs and flows. It’s a double-edged sword, though; as the US Treasury increases its rates, variable student loan rates would rise, too.

Rep. George Miller, a frequent player in education policy and the ranking Democrat on the Education and Workforce Committee, isn’t sold:

“This is just another classic bait-and-switch scheme: lure you in with a short-term lower rate but then charge you higher rates in the long-term. A lot more,” said Rep. George Miller, the top Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee.

According to the US Department of Education, there are ~36 million borrowers with student loans, with individual student debt averaging ~$26,000 and the nation’s combined student loan debt topping $1 trillion — a total that has for the first time overtaken consumer credit card debt.

Proposals will be analyzed and discussed by the Committee some time next week and a vote is expected shortly after.

Kline, a Republican Representative from Minnesota who has served since 2003, is pleased to find common ground with the Obama administration and Democrats:

“This coming up with a market-based student loan interest rate for the long term, I like it. I am very happy for the president on this one.”

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Chapter II of Nigeria’s Constitution guarantees an education for every child, but over 10 million children in the country have been left wanting.

A UNESCO release called the 2012 Education For All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report shows that ~61 million childen worldwide are denied the opportunity to receive a basic education. Approximately 1 out of 6 of those children are Nigerian.

At AllAfrica.com, Kayode Komolafe writes that this should be a source of national shame, as it’s an unacceptable statistic for as advanced a year as 2013. Komolafe is worried that Nigeria’s struggles could be for naught if the populace is unable to take advantage of improvements, and that the country’s political leaders’ aggressive goal of being a Top 20 economy by 2020 is a pipe dream given the state of public education:

How will the army of 10.5 million illiterates be players in such an illusory political economy? Development theorists tell us that we are in the age of knowledge economy, yet policy-makers of a country that aspires to be among the most developed are not losing their sleep that 10 million children are denied basic education.

Nigeria has a developing economy rich in resources — it provides ~11% of the United States’ oil imports — and is an emerging player in telecommunications.

As the rest of the developed world talks constantly about an education relevant to the needs of the 21st century, and as Nigeria’s economy increases its share of that economy, it’s a valid concern that a populace denied any education at all will hinder development — or worse.

The Education for All initiative would see countries eliminating the access gap by 2015 — but Komolafe writes that Nigeria has a long way to go.

Nigeria’s education minister seems not to take on the responsibility of fixing the system, though. She’d like to see Nigerian society take the burden upon themselves, from families to community organizations to businesses:

In responding to this report, the Minister of Education, Prof. Ruqayyatu Rufa’i, said the responsibility for education should not be that of government alone. She challenged stakeholders- the civil society and development partners – to enlist in the war against ignorance. And that is where the officialdom often misses the point at issue. The best the “stakeholders” can do in the circumstance is to nudge the government to wake up to its responsibility of ridding this land of the scourge of illiteracy.

The most pressing issue, says Komolafe, is funding — and the interplay between national and local governments — and the current model of passing the financial torch on to families further broadens Nigeria’s gap between the education haves and have nots:

There should be a policy rethink; the official mentality that government cannot fund basic education for the poor must change. When you leave a parent on the minimum wage at the mercy of a private school entrepreneur who charges many times the income of the parent as fees, you are sentencing that child to illiteracy. That is not the path to development.

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