As usual the Haverhill School Committee would have you believe the previous administration has left them in the dark about this important issue. Feigning shock and dismay were the usual suspects, Wood and Bevilacqua, with Ms Danehy attempting to be the voice of reason. Unfortunately, while I do recall sitting in a school committee meeting where Dr Buchanan addressed our lack of Highly Qualified Teachers and the plan to change this – I have been unable to pinpoint the date of that meeting to provide video proof.
As a district we are behind in the percentage of Highly Qualified Teachers allowed by the state. They posted their numbers here.
What everyone’s forgotten in this fiasco is highlighted in this question by the Eagle Tribune:
Asked how many teachers are not considered qualified by the state to teach the subjects to which they are assigned, Scully told The Eagle-Tribune he did not have an exact number but said it’s “a small minority.”
There is a difference between “Highly Qualified Teachers” as laid out in the NCLB requirements and teachers qualified by the state to teach the subjects to which they are assigned.
Mr Sierpina outlines some of the challenges Haverhill faces in meeting this requirement:
School Committee member Ray Sierpina, who headed Tilton School before retiring two years ago, said yesterday that Haverhill is actually doing quite well to post a 91 percent compliance rate regarding highly qualified teachers. Typically, there’s a hold on hiring in June, so by the time Haverhill is ready to hire teachers, those who have all the credentials to be considered “highly qualified” have taken jobs elsewhere.
Further exacerbating the issue is the complex hierarchy of teachers based on tenure and dual certification where teachers are shuffled around to teach subjects they haven’t taught in a while because their current position is being eliminated. Therefore a “highly qualified art teacher” who suddenly finds themselves teaching math for the first time in a decade would lose their highly qualified status until they demonstrate competence in mathematics. This teacher would be covered by a temporary waiver.
Out-of-Field Teaching Though the Department allows teachers to spend 20% of their time teaching out-of-field, NCLB requires a teacher to demonstrate “a high level of competency in each of the [core] academic subjects” in which he or she teaches. Hence, a teacher who is certified but teaching out-of-field will not be considered highly qualified in the out-of-field subject area until he or she has demonstrated subject matter competency in that area.
So while the newspaper and parts of the school committee would have us believe our students are in the hands of completely incompetent instructors and no one knew. In reality the students are being taught by qualified teachers – and 91% highly qualified teachers! The 41 Haverhill teachers who are not currently considered highly qualified undoubtedly have waivers for the year in which they are completing Master’s Degree programs, taking certification courses or otherwise proving their competence in a subject they haven’t taught in some time.
Perhaps if we want 100% of our teachers to be Highly Qualified Teachers 100% of the time we need to restructure how education works in our state. Giving pink slips to a significant portion of teachers every year, constantly changing who teaches which subjects, cutting more and more programs and shifting responsibilities isn’t working.
With Education budgets slashed across the country and an ever increasing burden on parents to supply much more than pencils and glue sticks I cannot fathom how LA can justify this “taj mahal” school. The new complex sets a new bar of excess, for “With an eye-popping price tag of $578 million, it will mark the inauguration of the nation’s most expensive public school ever.”
Of course this extreme spending isn’t limited to California. Closer to home, Newton North High School has created controversy over its price tag as well.
With little fanfare on Tuesday, the city took ownership of the new Newton North High School. What started out in 2000 as a $39 million renovation mushroomed over the years to a $197.5 million new building that includes mold-free rooms, natural light instead of windowless halls and an HVAC system that actually circulates air.
Dimeo Construction is scheduled to take ownership of the old Newton North on July 1 to prepare it for demolition, according to city Chief Operating Officer Bob Rooney. While the new North will open to students in the fall, it will take two decades to pay for the project.
While I do understand that the physical conditions of a building do impact the ability of students to learn; I am not sure the exorbitant price tags on these buildings impact achievement by enough to justify their costs.
“The commissioned report found “poor environments in schools, …, adversely influence the health, performance, and attendance of students.”(Building Minds, 2006, p. 1) Factors such as poor lighting, inadequate ventilation, crumbling walls, damaged ceiling tiles, and inoperative heating and air conditioning systems were reported in AFT’s 2006 research results. The results also included the factors of noise, overcrowding, and air quality, recognizing their link to student learning (Building Minds, 2006).
Many researchers have categorized building factors as either cosmetic or structural. The cosmetic factors, those that can be seen, consistently are linked with improved student performance. Structural factors, including heating and air-conditioning, also are linked to student achievement. Factors that have been noted repeatedly o influence student achievement include natural lighting, paint colors and paint cycles, general cleanliness, air quality, temperature control, acoustical enhancements, safety features, absence of graffiti, and air conditioning.”
But does providing that truly require:
“At RFK, the features include fine art murals and a marble memorial depicting the complex’s namesake, a manicured public park, a state-of-the-art swimming pool and preservation of pieces of the original hotel.”
Or (from later in the article):
Nationwide, dozens of schools have surpassed $100 million with amenities including atriums, orchestra-pit auditoriums, food courts, even bamboo nooks.
We have districts so cash strapped that educators are forced to justify the validity of art class and students share battered textbooks and need to pay fees for all of their extra curricular activities. We also have districts across our nation with talking benches, parks and bamboo nooks. There’s a serious divide in public education made more stark when you compare the opulence in one area to the austerity next door. When do we place the focus back on education instead of excess?
In this opinion piece by Massachusetts Education Secretary Paul Reville he explains that the manifesto titled “Every Child A Winner!” inspired the 1993 Ed Reform: “We meant that all students — each and every one — should be able to succeed at high levels. By adopting the Common Core, we’ve set a clearer, higher target for educational success.“ His opinion seems to revolve around achieving said success by repeating such non specific ideals as:
We should accelerate the implementation of our new “Innovation Schools” model, which has already resulted in the creation of two cutting-edge schools just six months after the passage of the governor’s legislation. We need to continue implementing our six regional “Readiness Centers,” which bring educators, school districts, colleges, and other partners together to address core educational priorities. In short, it’s time to move beyond setting standards to implementing educational strategies which will help our students achieve our high expectations.
Just reading that gives me a headache. We can implement and innovate on the cutting edge all we want but without textbooks, teachers, supplies and facilities all the innovation on the planet can’t implement learning.
Looking at the results of almost 20 years of reform I can’t say any child has come out of this a clear winner. Now the Massachusetts Department of Education is backpedaling and attempting to spin its adoption of Common Core Standards as raising the Ed Reform bar to the next level. According to the Mass DOE press release last month: Launched in June 2009, the Common Core State Standards Initiative is designed to develop and implement a single set of national standards in ELA and math to define what every student should know and be able to do in order to be fully ready for post-secondary education or a successful career. Massachusetts played a leading role in the development and review of the standards over the past 13 months. Curriculum experts and educators from across the Commonwealth reviewed and submitted comments on drafts that were incorporated throughout the development process to ensure that the expectations set in the final versions met or exceeded the state’s strong standards for students.
Here we are taking our broken system (much like the health care debacle) and inflicting it on the rest of the country. Then we adopt this new version of what we already do and call it innovation and reform.
The real motivation behind adopting these standards is monetary. Just six days after announcing the adoption of Common Core Standards the Governor also announced Massachusetts earned a finalist position in the second round competition for Race to the Top funding.
What will Massachusetts do with this money? The last time I read their RTTT application their primary focus seemed to be data warehousing. The link t0 the most current application at the bottom of Governor Patrick’s press release is broken. Of course receipt of this money is set to be revealed in time for the new school year in September – just in time for the government to use it to supplant existing funding as they did with the previous stimulus monies.
Data warehousing would be a great tool if we were giving our students every opportunity and yet they still weren’t successful. Until we no longer have classrooms without textbooks, sports teams without equipment, schools sharing nurses and class sizes in the mid 30′s it doesn’t take someone with a PHD in education to tell you why students aren’t achieving. So while our Ed Secretary wants us to believe every child is a winner… I believe the real winners are sitting on Beacon Hill hoping for more money to waste in the name of education and innovation.
I ran across this site “Education Terminology Every Parent Must Understand” in my reading and wanted to share. Jargon exists in every field. For those within the sphere, jargon serves a useful shorthand to assist in communication. For those outside the sphere jargon is exclusionary and intimidating. Sometimes people will hide behind jargon when their position on an issue is threatened.
While I recognize that the definitions in this list are incomplete and are tinged with the author’s personal bias – I’m happy to pass along the link to spark conversation and thought regarding these topics.
I especially liked their take on “Drill and Kill.” Practicing a skill is not the end of the world. Apparently we’ve all forgotten that “practice makes perfect!”
Drill and kill. A perjorative term used by educators to diminish the importance of drill and practice. It is meant to suggest that practice will kill a student’s interest in the subject. Educators will likely suggest that it is better for students if they use “discovery learning” or the “project method.” Hirsch suggests that this idea is contradictory to the fact. For example, athletes, pianists, ballerinas, and others must go through repeated practices to achieve their goals. Cognitive psychologists and neurophysiologists agree. Note the following: “Development of basic knowledge and skills to the level of automatic and errorless performance will require a great deal of drill and practice. Thus drill and practice activities should not be slighted as low level. They appear to be just as essential to complex and creative intellectual performance as they are to the performance of a virtuoso violinist.”
And competition is not the end of self esteem. If anyone thinks kids don’t naturally want to compete and win even when the school isn’t keeping score they are deluding themselves. I’ve written about this before on this very blog.
Competition. Many progressive educators see this word in negative terms. They disagree with grading because it “forces” students into higher and lower tracks. They believe students will learn for the sake of learning if their self esteem is not deflated by competition. This does not bear out, however, because “evolutionary psychologists have argued that all humans retain a residue of competitiveness.” Competition still exists in the classroom no matter how hard a teacher tries to stifle it. It is a basic part of human nature. Hirsch suggests that “well-devised tests during a course of study has been shown to improve learning. This suggests that instead of trying fruitlessly to abolish competition as an element of human nature, we should try to guide it into educationally productive channels.”
Take a few minutes, do some reading, form your own conclusions about which side of the education philosophy you’re on and be ready the next time jargon rears its ugly head in an attempt to exclude your input.
If I had read this:
“We shouldn’t just jump into this thing, but we do need to look at it,” Martin said. “The American Civil Liberties Union and even some of our principals would not be pleased with us, but we shouldn’t worry about the ACLU. It’s more important that we do the correct thing for the children we educate.”
And the subject matter in question was an accurate and comprehensive Sex Ed program, or if they were discussing changing the biased treatment in our history books of slavery and American Indians, or looking to abolish “fuzzy math” I would endorse their bravery wholeheartedly.
What were these brave school committee members trying to incorporate into their curriculum that has caused me wipe Louisiana off the list of states I’m willing to live in? Creationism – as science. They feel it is important because “you don’t have to be afraid to point out some of the fallacies with the theory of evolution. Teachers should have the freedom to look at creationism and find a way to get it into the classroom.”
I’m not a religious person. I’m not raising the children to be religious. Public School should be secular and it isn’t. I already deal with the Pledge of Allegiance and various concerts throughout the year instilling the concept of god and religion into my children’s lives. I will be greatly relieved when they no longer believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy so that we can have more philosophical discussions on religion. The thought of creationism being taught next to evolution in a science class fills me with dread.
Many of my friends are religious – deeply so – and while I don’t understand it; I’m not looking to convert them away from their religion either. My religious friends run the gamut from traditional Judaic and Christian religions to Wiccan and Pagan. I wonder how many creation stories these science classes will be required to cover? Would a devoutly Catholic family really appreciate little Joe coming home from school talking about the Mayan creation story Popol Vuh?
If the board were suggesting a series of philosophy classes on religion that would be wonderful. Even lessons on religion as they shaped history would be enlightening and valuable. But to add creationism into science curriculum because: “We let them teach evolution to our children, but I think all of us sitting up here on this School Board believe in creationism. Why can’t we get someone with religious beliefs to teach creationism?” is not acceptable. People used to believe the Earth was flat and the center of the universe. People believed women shouldn’t be allowed to vote and that one’s value as a person could be determined by skin color alone. People believed cocaine wasn’t addictive, bloodletting cured many ailments and X-rays were benign. My children believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny!
Believing doesn’t make it so. And belief shouldn’t dictate curriculum.
We spend a lot of focus during our children’s k-12 education on preparing them for college. A Bachelor’s Degree used to be the key to opening so many doors for gainful employment. Students graduated college with multiple job offers to consider in the fields they were truly interested in pursuing.
According to this New York times article those days are over:
The study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that 24 percent of 2010 college graduates who applied for a job have one waiting after graduation, up from 20 percent last year. But the average salary offered to graduates with a bachelor’s degree has slipped 1.7 percent from last year, to $47,673.
The flip side of that statistic is that 76% of graduates come away from college without a job in their field. Generally, if they are working at all, they are still working at whatever job they held to pay for their college expenses. If that job was on campus those students will be unemployed. Now that they have graduated those expenses will rise to include loans and living expenses.
There’s an interesting breakdown of loans by degree earned at this site. I had been wondering what percentage of students used loans to pay for their education.
Few students can afford to pay for college without some form of education financing. Two-thirds (65.6%) of 4-year undergraduate students graduated with a Bachelor’s degree and some debt in 2007-08, and the average student loan debt among graduating seniors was $23,186.
If we look at the graduating senior with employment in the first quote and a graduating salary of $47,673 and assume he has the average 4 year accumulated debt in the second quote of $23,186. If they repay their loans on the 10 year schedule that is the default loan repayment schedule from this calculator they will have a payment of $266 per month and have paid an extra $8,832 in interest. Motivated graduates who can afford to reduce their term to 5 years can pay $456 per month and reduce their interest to $4,229.
But the lifetime benefit after the loans are paid will certainly make all of the time in school and the scrounging to pay off loans worth it right? The answer isn’t as simple as you would think. This article, although from 2007, brings up many points that have intensified in the last three years. College graduates are entering the workforce later and with ever increasing amounts of debt into an uncertain future. For the 24% who have gainful employment in their field upon graduation the benefits are clear. Unfortunately the 76% who are unemployed or underemployed upon graduation face looming interest accumulation on their student loans and lower earnings overall leading them into a spiral towards poverty.
The above statistics only apply to those who earn a degree during their time in college. Students entering college do not finish at all or take far longer than 4 years according to this article about the US lagging behind other countries in percentage of college degree earning citizens. If a 4 year degree takes 6 to complete the student will accumulate higher debt and enter the workforce later thus decreasing the lifetime value of their degree.
While almost 70 percent of high school graduates in the United States enroll in college within two years of graduating, only about 57 percent of students who enroll in a bachelor’s degree program graduate within six years, and fewer than 25 percent of students who begin at a community college graduate with an associate’s degree within three years.
Perhaps I shouldn’t stress the issue of college with my children as fervently as I had planned? Their childhood dreams of being a cake decorator and a construction worker don’t look as economically doomed as I had previously thought.
I’m certainly not a fan of the MCAS but I can’t say that adopting the Obama’s Common Core Standards will make me any happier about the current state of education for our children. Massachusetts currently has one of the highest standards in the US so it is surprising that Governor Patrick would acquiesce to the national standards and give up this piece of local prestige. I’m also disturbed by the willingness of states to give up their rights on such an important issue for the opportunity to compete for an ever smaller piece of funding. This is just selling out the education of our children for table scraps from Washington!
The political posturing up on Beacon Hill will probably take much of the summer. My guess is this is a deliberate attempt to take focus off the budget issues that plague our state and let everyone pretend they are doing the best they possibly can for the children. I especially love this little gem mid way in the article:
Reville sought to tamp down worries that the adoption of national standards would mean an end to MCAS. He said whether the state adopts a new assessment to match the national standards is a “separate” discussion and that Massachusetts is “under no obligation” to do so.
Really? So we’re planning to adopt the national standards and then make the children still test to the old standards? We’re under no obligation at all to see that we’re actually teaching to the standards we’ve promised to adhere to? Then why make the change at all?
While we’re discussing the new Common Core Standards and how Massachusetts fares maybe we should also look at some of the other states. Perchance we can learn something from California as their standards are “clearer, more thorough and easier to read than the common core.” Or use Pennsylvania as a cautionary tale of where we could be.
What isn’t discussed in the debate about education is the way our school rating system is structured in Massachusetts and if this will change. If a charter school fails to meet its charter then the charter is not renewed and the school is closed. If a public school fails to meet its obligations to students and is failing then we toss more money at the school and allow it to restructure. The schools which are performing the worst get extra resources and then when the scores improve the resources are taken away. What exactly is the benefit of success under this model?
RTTT has attempted to push this in the other direction by rewarding those schools with the best plan going forward for achievement and rewarding the schools with the highest achievements. Unfortunately education doesn’t work this way either. As long as we are required to educate all of the students in our state regardless of their capacity or desire for such formalized education it is impossible to apply a one size fits all assessment of the success of such a system. We need to stop treating the education of our children like the herding of cattle!
I’ve been talking to a lot of people about education since I started this blogging project and thinking about my own education and the goals I have for my children’s education. People are constantly baffled by my lack of a college degree despite my apparent scholarly successes. They are equally baffled by the amount of things I’ve taught myself along the way. One of the reasons I’m such a self taught person is because I cannot follow traditional instructions at all. I’ve hidden this from almost everyone in my life because I’ve always been ashamed of my shortcomings. Looking at my amazing adaptive skills through different eyes I should not be ashamed but proud of the creative coping mechanisms I’ve discovered.
This concept of creativity has always been downplayed by those around me as less important than being smart or strong or competent. For example, I have never liked poetry because despite poetic writing being a wonderfully creative outlet – interpreting poetry is a lesson in academic tedium. No matter how much I documented and explained my interpretations to my instructors the only answers they wanted were the cliff notes versions of events. I could never convince teachers, and later professors, that no matter what the author intended as the meaning behind their writing the reader’s relationship with the written piece would always be viewed through the lens of their own experiences. If so many teachers had never asked me to write about what the stories meant and simply explained the lesson more accurately as “write about what the author intended the stories to mean” – I could have coped better with years of literature classes.
Now as I am left to decide the course of my children’s education; I am frustrated by the knowledge that the majority of what I’ve learned in life did not happen in a classroom. Do I want to waste so much of their formative years leaving them in a classroom where they learn to return the answers to MCAS questions without any underlying understanding of the concepts and consequences of those answers? And now as the Federal Government looks to set nationwide education standards – all set on lowering the achievement gap – their education prospects look even more grim.
Just last week I came across this article about the lowering of creativity scores in children. The creativity and innovation which has served America so well for generations has been budgeted out of our educational system and de-emphasized to the point where our newest educational models remind me of the video for Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” where the children are marching over the edge into a meat grinder. I’m not the only one who sees this backwards trend in education as this comes from the linked Newsweek article:
Around the world, though, other countries are making creativity development a national priority. In 2008 British secondary-school curricula—from science to foreign language—was revamped to emphasize idea generation, and pilot programs have begun using Torrance’s test to assess their progress. The European Union designated 2009 as the European Year of Creativity and Innovation, holding conferences on the neuroscience of creativity, financing teacher training, and instituting problem-based learning programs—curricula driven by real-world inquiry—for both children and adults. In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.
Plucker recently toured a number of such schools in Shanghai and Beijing. He was amazed by a boy who, for a class science project, rigged a tracking device for his moped with parts from a cell phone. When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”
When you’re done reading over there take the 20 minutes to watch this TED video where Sir Ken Robinson discusses how schools kill creativity. Then spend the time to watch his followup from this year’s TED talks.
I encourage my children to learn in any way they want to. I give them the materials to experiment with their world and try to answer as many of their “why?” questions as possible. I encourage them to discover and learn and grow and then I send them off to school to undo much of what we’ve worked on. I don’t know that I can continue to do this to them any more!
At one of the last school committee meetings it was noted by a commenter that perhaps families should pay an extra tax while they had children in the education system. This sounds interesting on the surface – pay for what you’re using – but without the coinciding credit when you don’t have children in the education system its simply an extra burden on families.
I got my very first job at 15. I paid my taxes every year to the federal government. I shopped at stores around town and paid those taxes to the state government. I owned a car at 16 and paid the required fees and taxes that accompanied that privilege. When my husband and I got our first apartment together we paid rent that included our share of the property tax the complex paid to the city. Later when we purchased our home we paid the property taxes directly along with all the other items that include a tithe to the governments.
We did not add little tax burdens to the education system until 2005 – when our oldest started kindergarten. At no time before 2005 did we go to any of the tax people and clamor that we wanted our taxes back for the infrastructure we did not currently use. Our youngest will graduate high school in 2022. I will still be paying taxes towards an education system I will no longer be using. To add extra taxes over and above for having children in a system I’m already paying taxes to fund is asinine.
Yet that is exactly what we have. I had been discussing this with my husband a week or so ago and we were adding up all of the dollars we send in support of the schools in supplies, cash, and time. The supply list we get each September, the fundraisers for various activities, the ticket prices for various events, the donations we give to the school raffles, the fees for field trips and activities, the dinners we attend and the time we spend helping out add up significantly by June.
This brings me to the issue of sports fees. Once upon a time after school competitive team sports were held without fees for the players. Due to budgetary constraints those times are over and most communities now have sports fees. What I’m curious about is why the hyper focus on sports fees to the exclusion of all the other extra fees parents pay during the course of an academic career. We never see articles about the unfair fees to rent instruments or purchase band uniforms. There are no scathing editorials about the fee to join the National Honor Society. No one balks at the dues to join the Chess Club or the Academic Bowl or the Key Club. Yet there is a clear line in the sand that sports fees are unfair and need to be eliminated. So while I agree in principal with this editorial about sports fees being a tax I say the writer doesn’t take the issue far enough. Sports fees aren’t the only fee I see as a tax on parents.
While we’re discussing sports fees I’d like to weigh in on the article that prompted the editorial linked above. Apparently a mother is upset that her child’s report card has been withheld due to lack of payment of sports fees. I feel badly for the child because he has irresponsible parents. I don’t feel badly that his report card is withheld. The school has exactly one piece of collateral in this bartering system and I see it as a failure of the School Committee that there is no official policy authorizing the withholding of one’s report card for failure to pay the fees. If the mother in question had gone to speak with Mr Veris when she was first assessed the sports fee for spring track this whole issue would have been solved then with a waiver form. I wonder how mom will spin this issue once her son is in college. They withhold grades for unpaid fees and there is no School Committee to complain to.
As you head for your new post in Hamilton Wenham I just wanted to say good luck and thanks for your time here in Haverhill.
I would like it duly noted that as he leaves Dr Buchanan has been far more gracious about this process than our illustrious School Committee has been. At almost every opportunity we have heard about how “Dr Buchanan is leaving Haverhill – Haverhill hasn’t left Dr Buchanan” and that he shouldn’t be making decisions because he “won’t be around to deal with the aftermath.” I was especially disappointed in how Mr Bevilacqua tried to twist the Futures audit into something that happened solely at the whim of the superintendent – I listened to the debate on this matter and the committee was both informed and involved in the process.
Go forth, Dr B, and enjoy your time in Hamilton Wenham. I’m amazed you stayed as long as you did and I hope your new district appreciates your efforts. I fear for the process of replacing you – any candidates following your departure will surely think twice if they know the School Committee will turn on them as soon as it is politically prudent to do so.
