| March 4, 2008 |
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| Written by Alan Gottlieb | |
| Tuesday, March 04 2008 | |
From the editorLast week in this space, I analyzed the Innovation Schools Act, one of the high-profile education bills floating around the current legislative session. Today, I am going to let others parse an early draft of another key bill - CAP4K, also known as Preschool to Postsecondary Education Alignment Act (quite a mouthful, that).
The bill hasn't been filed yet, and after the beating the draft took last week, it may be a while before it resurfaces. Since a draft started circulating early last week, the proposed bill has come under sustained fire from different quarters.
The goal of the bill is to align and upgrade the content taught in Colorado schools, and to guide all students to college or workforce readiness. A noble aim, to be sure. But it's too vague, some have said. And others have said that it's high-minded and won't lead to the intended outcomes - fewer dropouts, more kids succeeding in college. It pays lip-service to post-secondary options that aren't college, but then tries to steer everyone down a college path, yet others have said.
Last Friday, As Todd Engdahl wrote on our sister website, Education News Colorado, a group of "lobbyists and interest-group members gathered in a mass meeting with no agenda other than an invitation to say what they think about (CAP4K)." Here's Todd's summary of the meeting (read the full article here):
The atmosphere was low-key and cordial, but it was clear there are concerns about the draft bill. Here's a sampling of the comments:
"I'm getting increasingly concerned about pushing the fiscal impact off into the future," said Colorado Education lobbyist Tony Salazar, noting the draft bill doesn't have a price tag but seems to create new costs for school districts down the road.
"In a way you're creating another powerless bureaucracy," remarked Van Schoales of t he Piton Foundation, commenting on the 11-member standards-and-testing council that would be created by the bill.
"We've worked so hard on the CSAP," said Jennifer Landrum of the Colorado Children's Campaign, concerned that years of data might be worthless if the Ritter plan leads to new testing systems.
"If we really believe in multiple pathways [for students], we should provide multiple pathways," said Windels, noting that the proposal would require creation of "postsecondary and workplace readiness" programs for high school students but doesn't detail what would be available for kids who don't follow that track. (Several others echoed this concern.)
"I think there's still debate over whether all students should be at that [college prep] level," said Rep. Mike Merrifield.
"There is a concern about the timeline," said Geri Anderson, provost of the Colorado Community College System, noting that the new council would have only six months to come up with its first recommendations on standards.
The bill needs a more clearly articulated vision said Jane Urschel of the Colorado Association of School Boards.
For a particularly cogent critique of the bill's approach to one of its main goals - to prepare all kids for college or workforce readiness - see the article following this column.
The early travails of CAP4K underscore the challenges inherent in the legislative process. It often seems that the best and purest ideas get chewed like cud into a unappetizing paste, and only then do they become law. Ritter's education honcho, Matt Gianneschi, tried (pardon the tortured metaphor) to pre-chew CAP4K, presumably to control the direction compromises might take.
But few seemed to like the results. It will be interesting to see what emerges over the next week or so. Will the bill be further compromised, or shored up?
--Alan Gottlieb
The following piece was written by a Colorado educator with extensive knowledge of issues surrounding post-secondary options. But the educator asked to remain nameless for political reasons.
CAP4K prompts many questions, concerns So let me see if I've got this right. The "Pre-school to Postsecondary Ed. Alignment" bill "must take into account the fact that different students have different aspirations: some will seek higher education upon graduation; some will seek career or technical training to pursue a particular vocation; others will immediately seek to enter the workforce." (All quotes are direct citations from the unedited, unrevised draft of 2.25.08)
On the assumption that "there is little variation in the level of academic preparedness that a student must achieve in order to succeed after high school, regardless of the student's aspirations." The bill defines "post secondary and workforce readiness" to mean that "a student is able to demonstrate knowledge in identified subject matter areas at a sufficiently high level of comprehension or skill to successfully complete, without need for remediation, the core academic courses identified by the (Colorado) Commission (of Higher Education)". In other words, the goal is that all high school students be prepared for the academic expectations of 1st year college courses set by members of the college faculties.
In its opening sections, the bill pays lip service to the importance of "students' exposure to and involvement in activities that develop creativity, critical thinking skills, communication, social and cultural awareness, self direction, leadership and other skills invaluable to the 21st century workforce." The bill goes on to give as examples of the kinds of assessments that will identify levels of post secondary and workforce readiness: 1) a standardized, curriculum based, achievement, college entrance examination (in other words, the ACT or SAT); and 2) the basic skills placement or assessment test administered by institutions of higher education (most commonly, the Accuplacer exam.)
Repeatedly, the bill asserts that any standards set in this new system must be "comparable in rigor and scope to the most rigorous academic (emphasis is mine) standards adopted nationally and internationally;" leaving no possibility of rethinking the dominant academic paradigm of the current standards movement.
Because Colorado is a local control state, where curriculum and graduation requirements rest in the hands of local school boards, the bill cannot mandate state graduation requirements. Instead it establishes a state level "endorsement" which, beginning with the class of 2015, will be added to high school diplomas to testify to the fact that students receiving that endorsement have scored sufficiently high on the previously mentioned assessments, or others like them, to meet the criteria of post secondary and workforce readiness. Any school district may require that all students meet the standards of the endorsement in order to earn a high school diploma.
The bill requires that all students, with the exceptions considered below, be tested on their level of mastery of these standards beginning in 10th grade. Every student who is not yet sufficiently adept will have an annual meeting with their parents and a teacher or counselor to identify the areas in which they are in need of additional learning.
Any student may choose to opt out of the curriculum which is aligned with these new standards and every student in special education is allowed to be exempt from these requirements.
Those students reaching the endorsement level of mastery will be guaranteed admission to open admission or non-selective four year colleges. Selective Colorado public colleges will be able to add further entrance requirements. It is not clear if these institutions will be allowed to enroll students who do not earn the post secondary and workforce readiness endorsement.
The body of the bill elaborates on the various ways in which the new post secondary and workforce readiness standards, aligned to freshman courses, will work their way through the K-12 system affecting standards, curriculum, state level assessments and college admissions. Schools are expected to create a postsecondary and workforce readiness program to prepare students for these new standards and assessments.
Let me state this proposal in simpler terms: Colorado will identify scores on the ACT, SAT, and Accuplacer exams, which highly correlate with college readiness and make the achievement of those scores the condition for earning the state's post secondary and workforce readiness endorsement for diplomas and the condition for guaranteed entrance to Colorado public schools. ACT has already established these cutoffs and it is worth noting that they are significantly higher than current Colorado ACT averages.
Stated this clearly a number of concerns become evident, which I pose as questions:
Blog highlightsOn think tanks and research biasMonday, March 3, 2008 Written by: Captain Haddock Last week's EdWeek features a guest commentary by CU School of Ed professor (and sometimes HeadFirst blog contributor) Kevin Welner. Co-written with Alex Molnar, an Arizona State ed policy prof who, like Welner, maintains a dependably anti-market position, the piece reviews the policy work of education think tanks such as the Friedman Foundation and the Cato Institute. Their review of 18 think tanks concludes that these organizations are heavily biased on the side of market solutions:
... [A] phalanx of "one-armed" policy analysts are plying their trade in free-market-oriented think tanks. For these analysts and their think-tank sponsors, privatization is the preordained solution for each new educational problem. Indeed, time spent reading their reports leaves the unmistakable impression that the public nature of public education is the root problem for all that ails schools. Everything else is just a symptom.
Welner and Molnar's analysis sheds light on one of the eternal elephants in the education policy research room: the conclusions of such research are highly correlated with the researchers' ideologies and previous research findings. (Put less delicately, this means that much education policy research is biased). The trend is most obvious in politically charged areas like vouchers and charter schools.
Though Welner and Molnar identify a market-oriented bias to the think-tank research they survey, they would do well to extend their investigations to research organizations of all political persuasions. I'm willing to bet the work of, say, the American Federation of Teachers might be just a wee bit "one-armed", too.
One Response to "On think tanks and research bias"
"Their review of 18 think tanks concludes that these organizations are heavily biased on the side of market solutions." Quite the astonishing conclusion they reached, huh?
"Though Welner and Molnar identify a market-oriented bias to the think-tank research they survey, they would do well to extend their investigations to research organizations of all political persuasions. I'm willing to bet the work of, say, the American Federation of Teachers might be just a wee bit ‘one-armed', too." I'm glad to hear someone else make this point.
Bias, bias everywhere. Can't we just measure each individual study on its scientific merits?
More evidence on what works for poor kidsWednesday, February 27, 2008 Written by: Alan Gottlieb The new Profiles of Success study that got some good ink today is notable in a couple of respects.
First, it reinforces what we already know about what makes schools work for low-income kids. I suppose a less charitable way of saying this is that the report offers nothing new, but there's great value in hammering home these points time and again until they begin to sink in where it matters.
Second, the study demonstrates just how hard it is to close achievement gaps. Only 39 of the roughly 1,750 public schools in Colorado have demonstrably closed achievement gaps in some grades for three consecutive years. That's just over 2 percent - pretty lousy odds.
The study finds that schools closing the gap are engaging in a common set of practices, or have common attributes. Among them are a culture of high expectations and accountability, targeted assessments and intensive use of data to guide instruction, individualized support for struggling students, stable and consistent leadership, small learning communities, and so forth.
We've heard all these before, and for good reason: They work. But it takes exceptional leadership, in place for many years, to make these things happen.
I was happy to see that one of the common attributes of these schools was an economically integrated student body. In fact, the study
found that no elementary or K-8 school qualified that had more than 70% of their enrollment made up of free or reduced lunch students. For middle and high schools, no school with more than 45% free or reduced lunch enrollment qualified for our study...
...the fact that no schools qualified for our study that had higher concentrations of economically disadvantaged students, indicate the difficulty involved with closing the achievement gap when there is no enrollment balance in terms of student economic background. Instead, our work indicates that having a more balanced mix of students is more desirable.
And one of the study's recommendations echoes what I have been advocating for many years now:
Districts can create
enrollment policies that encourage economic integration through
Vilifying test-based accountability is ludicrousTuesday, February 26, 2008 Written by: Uncle Charley From time to time I read education pieces with which I disagree but find to be thought-provoking. Then there are those that border on the laughable, like this opinion piece in yesterday's Denver Post written by liberal activist and former state legislative candidate Angela Engel. It begins as follows:
In 2000, Citizens for Quality Public Education published "Senate Bill 186 and The Truth About Colorado Educational Reform," a report warning about the consequences of grading schools based solely on standardized test scores....
Since then, everything the report cautioned concerning high-stakes testing has come to pass: narrowing curriculum, negative school climates, disenfranchised teachers, frustrated parents, and children who quickly losing sight of the value of their own education.
One blog post doesn't allow enough space to refute this catalog of dire prognoses. But one might pause to ask what else state and federal school accountability laws are responsible for: Childhood obesity? Bullying? School gun violence? Attention deficit disorder? Male-pattern baldness? Global warming?
It's bad enough that this opinion piece touts a publication nowhere to be found on the Internet, apparently published by a former political committee registered with the Colorado Secretary of State (unless there's an eponymous organization without a Google listing). In the few traces of its record, CPQE is financing the same candidates backed by the teachers union. Okay.
Yet perhaps the most absurd sentence in the entire piece is a characterization of Denver's Cole Middle School pre-SB 186 as "a thriving school for the performing arts." In other words, this suburban liberal activist believes everything was just fine with this troubled inner-city Denver school before the state started measuring its performance. Hmmm....
Then Engel adds this description of one of the alleged ills caused by accountability:
Students now have fewer course electives. A survey by the Center on Education Policy found that since the passage of NCLB and high-stakes testing, 71 percent of the nation's school districts have reduced the hours of instructional time spent on history, music and other subjects.
One can only imagine how upset Engel might be to hear news from Albuquerque, N.M., about a proposed policy that would disallow students who do poorly on state tests from taking electives (H/T Intercepts). Some local middle school students didn't react too well, either, sending their opinions to a local newspaper:
Of eight letters published, seven of them are full of grammar and spelling mistakes:
"I know I wont wont my eletive tooken away. wht about the sped kibs? Hae you thought about that!"
The students are responding to the possibility of APS taking electives away from students who fail state tests for math and reading.
Another student writes, "I dissagree with your oppion. If students dont have there electives we will have no reason to come to school. And if kids start not coming to school it will be your fault."
Read the story and watch the accompanying video. Quite disturbing, but not as surprising as I wish it were. While it may seem like an irreverent and unscientific response to Engel's sketchy opinion piece, the New Mexico story does raise some pertinent questions, such as: Are these students' literacy skills being harmed by No Child Left Behind and school accountability? Will they be better off taking electives and not able to read and write?
State and federal accountability policies are far from perfect, but they aren't the cause of all the academic ills Engel suggests. In many cases they have highlighted the problems that were already there, and in a few cases have actually provided motivation to enact effective reforms. Maybe Albuquerque has something to learn, too.
3 Responses to "Vilifying test-based accountability is ludicrous"
I'd have to totally agree with Charlie, I laughed and then almost cried reading Angela's evidence free argument.
Angela Engel always has been single-minded in her dislike of CSAPs, but I'll agree (for once) with Uncle Charley that she's really gone too far in attributing everything that's wrong with education to standardized testing. The column was a recap of testimony she recently gave in the House Education Committee, complete with her garbled history of Cole Middle School.
In fact, a decade ago, part of the Cole building was home to the Denver School of the Arts, before it moved on to an unused building and then to its current snazzy site. None of that, of course, had anything to do with Cole's troubled history as a middle school.
Apropos electives, the new "Profiles of Success" study by Donnell-Kay found that a broad range of classes, including arts and humanities, including arts and humanities, is one of 10 successful practices of eight Colorado schools that have been consistently successful in raised achievement of low-income students. See the full story at www.ednewscolorado.org.
Thanks for your comments. I think the "Profiles of Success" study is especially instructive here, since the highlighted schools have found ways to thrive under high-stakes testing while preserving the arts and humanities focus. And these schools aren't alone, either.
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