My Boy Cracked the Code in an Atypical Method With a Concentrate On Phonics

When my three older children learned to read, it seemed to us as natural a process as learning to talk. We read to them every day and filled the house with children’s books and made regular trips to the library and sent them to a great preschool at our local Jewish Community Center that boasted language-rich classrooms. Nothing to it, right? 

It’s a gift to be so clueless.

Our fourth child is multiply-disabled, with a diagnosis of a genetic mutation called Fragile X Syndrome. At two and a half years old, when our other children had jabbered away, he was silent—except when emitting vowel-ish utterances when excited or upset, what his older sibs called “ee-ing.” At three, he was missing his milestones and attending a county program for preschoolers with disabilities where, during our first parent-teacher conference, his teacher looked dismissively at us when we asked about her approach to pre-reading skills—he was fascinated by books and loved when we read to him—and told us that not only would Jonah never decode sounds, but would likely never talk.

She was wrong. But let’s put a pin in that.

Over the course of four years, our three older children had the benefit of an amazing kindergarten teacher at our local elementary school. At the time, balanced literacy was all the rage, a trend Emily Hanford describes as “give kids lots of good books, and with some guidance and enough practice, they become readers.” In other words, learning to read is like learning to talk; it’s hard-wired and just comes naturally.

My kids’ teacher knew better, although she never spoke about it. Each week was a letter: “It’s ‘P’ week,” my then-kindergartner would exclaim, coming off the bus on a Monday. The whole week we’d look for items or pictures of items that began with the letter “P,” stuffing them into an ever-ready grocery bag. They’d dress in colors that started with the letter. They’d eat foods that started with the letter. 

This was direct instruction in phonics, based on the understanding that, as Hanford says, “while we use our eyes to read, the starting point for reading is sound.” Kids don’t crack the code intuitively; that’s not how our brains evolved. They need to understand how letters represent sounds, how combinations of letters represent different sounds and how those combinations form words.

When my oldest finished kindergarten we had 26 grocery bags and a fluent reader. She’d cracked the code, but only because her wise teacher ignored the received wisdom on balanced literacy (also called “whole language”) and expanded that narrow view of literacy with some actual science. Fifty-two grocery bags later, we had three readers.

And then there was Jonah. 

While it was devastating to hear his preschool teacher’s grim expectations for language development, we weren’t convinced she was right. Sure, he wasn’t talking—just a barely-intelligible word here or there—but I started teaching him some simple sign language, which he picked up pretty quickly. He could identify letters, numbers and colors by pointing to them. Something was going on in that head of his.

To supplement what we regarded as ineffective speech therapy at the county program, we hired a private speech therapist (bless my father—our insurance didn’t cover speech therapy) who diagnosed Jonah with severe apraxia, a condition where the brain doesn’t effectively tell the mouth muscles to move. I remember the first time he said “yes.” His therapist had been working on a “ya” sound, an “eh” sound, and an “s” sound. He had to master each sound and then combine them, a Herculean feat for our boy. But he did it!

That spring, we went into Jonah’s Individualized Education Plan meeting loaded for bear, with a recommendation from his private therapist for one-on-one speech therapy five days a week and the name of a private school that specialized in multiply-disabled children with communication disorders. Our district signed on. (New Jersey’s fragmented school infrastructure is such that out-of-district placements at district expense are not uncommon for students with moderate to severe disabilities.)

Jonah started the Rock Brook School that summer and stayed until he was 12, when he transitioned back to our district’s middle school. His teachers and therapists saw his potential and set high expectations. Early on, one of them told me, “Oh, he’s going to be a reader.”

He was. He is. How did that happen?

It happened through what a 2016 study from Vanderbilt University calls “a focus on systematic instruction in phonological awareness and phonics skills.” That systematic instruction in how sounds connect to written words can “lead to greater academic outcomes for children and adolescents with [intellectual disabilities] than previously thought feasible.”

In other words, just what my neuro-typical kids needed to learn to read, although with them we barely noticed.

But, boy, did we notice with Jonah. 

“To be able to read,” Hanford writes, “structures in our brain that were designed for things such as object recognition have to get rewired a bit.” For Jonah, they had to be rewired a lot. His extended speech delay, as well as his other developmental disabilities, meant that it took a long time for him to recognize that the sounds he (eventually) uttered were connected to letters on a page. I think he was recognizing those sounds aurally—remember, we read to him a lot and he identified letters—but there was a new dimension to that understanding, I think, when he started to be able to say the sounds himself. 

I remember one day at Rock Brook when parents were invited to visit. The class of about eight children sat on chairs in the front. One of the teachers displayed flash cards of colors—red, green, blue, brown—and, in unison, they called out the words, aided by the fact that the word “red” was written with a red marker. Then the teacher stood in front of our Jonah and displayed the same words, but without the hint of colored markers. He enthusiastically read each word. 

I practically cried: Jonah had cracked the code. Or, at least, cracked the code in his atypical way.

That’s the thing: Jonah will never be a typical reader, any more than he is a typical young adult. When he picks up a book—and he often does—it’s not what your typical 24-year-old is reading; it’s “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” or a cookbook or a “Little House on the Prairie” book. While he can read a few sentences to me if pressed, he doesn’t seem to process words the same way we do—less linearly and more holistically. But if it weren’t for our insistence on what Hanford calls “explicit and systematic” phonics and phonemic awareness instruction from teachers who understand the science of literacy, Jonah probably wouldn’t read at all.

You’re lucky if your children learn to read with ease. But for many children—not just those with disabilities but those who come from less language-rich homes or those who attend mediocre preschools or those who have teachers without a clear understanding of the science of reading—learning to decode requires intense phonics instruction. It’s as simple as A,B,C.

Photo by Mael Balland, Canva-licensed.

By: Laura Waters
Title: My Son Cracked the Code in an Atypical Way With a Focus on Phonics
Sourced From: educationpost.org/my-son-cracked-the-code-in-an-atypical-way-with-a-focus-on-phonics/
Published Date: Thu, 14 May 2020 16:14:53 +0000

Public-School Attendance Zones Violate a Civil Rights Law – by Tim DeRoche

The Covid-19 pandemic has drawn renewed attention to inequality in K-12 education in the United States. Some schools and systems have quickly transitioned to high-quality distance learning, while others have struggled to provide students with effective learning experiences.

While the context is new, these inequalities predate the pandemic. Even after decades of increases in per-pupil spending and ongoing waves of reform, there are huge disparities in the quality of public schools, even those within the same district and just blocks away from one another. And access to the best public schools is often restricted based on where you live.

Take two schools, for example, that serve the Old Town neighborhood of Chicago. Lincoln Elementary is one of the crown jewels of the Chicago Public Schools, with 80% of the students proficient in reading. Just over a mile south is Manierre Elementary, where not a single graduating eighth grader tested proficient in reading in 2019.

What keeps the two schools separate? An attendance zone boundary. Children who live north of North Avenue enroll in elite Lincoln Elementary. Children south of North Avenue are not allowed to enroll in Lincoln and are assigned to failing Manierre. For a child in Old Town, your fate turns on whether you live on one side of the street or the other.

This is an American phenomenon. In nearly every city the pattern is the same: State law allows (or even requires) the district to draw attendance zones showing who gets to attend which schools. Districts use the lines to determine who can enroll in these elite, high-performing public schools. Young families respond to the policies by cramming into the coveted zone, driving up home prices. Other parents lie about their address to gain access. The divide between the two schools, often just blocks apart, grows over time.

The Supreme Court ended overt segregation of the public schools with its 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Conventional wisdom says that school districts, in accordance with Brown, can assign children to schools in any way that they want, as long as they don’t discriminate based on race.

But conventional wisdom has forgotten about the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974.

The School Nearest Your Residence

In March 1972, President Nixon was feeling boxed in by the issue of desegregation. Many federal courts had signed off on busing plans that would force the integration of public schools in districts that had previously engaged in overt segregation. But members of both parties—including Joe Biden—opposed federal-court-ordered busing.

Nixon opposed busing, but he also wanted to express sympathy for children caught in failing schools that were divided along racial lines. So, on March 17, he delivered an address to the American people, offering a compromise. He proposed a moratorium on federally mandated busing but also a “companion measure” called the Equal Educational Opportunities Act, which would increase funding for inner-city schools, especially those attended by minorities.

That law, the EEOA, wouldn’t be signed for another two years. Presidents Nixon and Ford would have to negotiate with lawmakers in order to get it through the Democratic Congress. The resulting law is a strange mix of high-minded goals and status-quo-ism. It’s all there in the first sentence of the law:

The Congress declares it to be the policy of the United States that—(1) all children enrolled in public schools are entitled to equal educational opportunity without regard to race, color, sex, or national origin; and (2) the neighborhood is the appropriate basis for determining public school assignments.

On the one hand, it promises equal opportunity.

On the other hand, it endorses neighborhood-based schools and district-drawn attendance zones. Given the existence of racially segregated neighborhoods, neighborhood-based schools would, by default, mean schools divided along racial lines. The EEOA also implicitly endorses the assignment of students to schools by the district or the state, rather than a more open system in which parents would play a more active role in determining which public school their child attends.

However, here is what Section 1703 of the EEOA has to say about the assignment of minority children to public schools:

No State shall deny equal educational opportunity to an individual on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, by . . . the assignment by an educational agency of a student to a school, other than the one closest to his or her place of residence within the school district in which he or she resides, if the assignment results in a greater degree of segregation of students on the basis of race, color, sex, or national origin…

The full implications of that language have not yet been widely understood. For minority children, federal law defines the neighborhood school as “the one closest to his or her place of residence within the school district in which he or she resides.” And Congress prohibits the district from assigning a minority child to another school, if it will result in “a greater degree of segregation.”

What is this peculiar, misshapen thing that we call an attendance zone? It’s an administrative service area. Government bureaucrats carve up the map and determine who gets preferred enrollment at what school. There are no elected officials at the attendance-zone level—and no political representation. The residents of a school zone are not subject to special taxes that go to the local school. An attendance zone is also a license to discriminate. If the school is full (most of the best schools are), then the attendance zone provides the school with the ability to exclude families who live within the district’s jurisdictional boundaries but outside of the arbitrary zone for that school as drawn by district staff.

Note here that I’m not talking about the boundaries between school districts, which are political subdivisions. Those lines are jurisdictional. As governmental entities, school districts are typically overseen by elected or appointed board members. School districts often have the legal authority to assess taxes on their constituents or issue bonds in order to fund the district’s activities. That’s not true at the attendance zone level.

Most attendance zones are irregular in shape, which means that there are many pockets where families whose closest school is highly coveted (and high performing) are assigned to another school that may be struggling or even failing. The existence of these pockets appears to be in violation of the EEOA.

Figure 1 shows the attendance zone for Mount Washington Elementary in Los Angeles and the seven elementary schools that encircle it. At highly coveted Mount Washington, 75% of the students were proficient in reading in 2019, while the surrounding schools have reading proficiency rates between 16% and 54%. As a result, families pay a premium of $200,000 or more for a house that falls on the right side of the Mount Washington attendance zone boundary.

 

Figure 1. Mount Washington Elementary in Los Angeles violates a federal civil rights law that prohibits minority students from being assigned to a school that is not the nearest to their home if it exacerbates segregation.

Source: California Department of Education and Los Angeles Unified School District.

 

For families who live in the striped areas of the map, Mount Washington is their closest school. Because Mount Washington is so much “whiter” than the surrounding schools, L.A. Unified School District is creating a “greater degree of segregation” by assigning minority students living in those striped areas to other, more distant schools. Any minority student living in those areas—black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American—could file a claim in the federal courts, asking the courts to force Mount Washington Elementary to allow them an equal opportunity to enroll.

Similar maps could be created for any number of public schools in American cities. P.S. 8 in Brooklyn. John Hay Elementary in Seattle. Lakewood Elementary in Dallas. Mary Lin Elementary in Atlanta. Lincoln Elementary in Chicago. Ivanhoe Elementary in Los Angeles. Chesterton Elementary in San Diego. Penn Alexander Elementary in Philadelphia. Each of these schools is a coveted public school showing above-average student performance, and each is surrounded by underperforming schools with high concentrations of poor, minority students.

Other sections of the law provide more clarity about exactly what is permitted and what is illegal. Section 1704 explicitly states that districts do not have to maintain a balance “on the basis of race, color, sex, or national origin.” Racially imbalanced schools are not in violation of the law, as long as minority students have not been assigned to schools farther from their home.

Also, it’s perfectly legal under the EEOA for the district to assign a minority child to a school that is not the nearest to their residence, if it does not exacerbate segregation. Take a Hispanic child whose closest school is Aragon Avenue Elementary, which has only 3% white students and only 16% overall proficiency in reading. The district is free to assign that child to attend Mount Washington Elementary, because such an assignment would alleviate segregation, rather than exacerbate it. And minority students are free to choose a school that is not nearest to their homes, regardless of its impact on segregation, because the district has not assigned them there.

Section 1705 says that “assignment on neighborhood basis [is] not a denial of equal educational opportunity.” On the surface, this appears to provide legal cover for attendance zones. But Congress, perhaps anticipating that districts could play games with the meaning of the word neighborhood, reiterates once again a very specific definition of a neighborhood school: It is “the school nearest [the student’s] place of residence.”

There is surprisingly little case law relevant to the EEOA. The major cases all deal with other provisions of the law, such as its requirement that states and districts take “appropriate action” to overcome obstacles to education that arise from language barriers. I’ve been unable to find any case law that interprets and applies the clause of the EEOA that governs student assignment.

Neighborhood map detail for P.S. 8 Robert Fulton in Brooklyn, N.Y.

 

Available to All on Equal Terms?

The harder you look at attendance zones, the more they appear to violate fundamental principles. Isn’t public education supposed to be “the Great Equalizer” providing equal opportunity for all children, regardless of race or income level? Aren’t we all supposed to be treated equally under the law?

In the landmark ruling of Brown v. Board of Education, Chief Justice Warren wrote:

In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.

Sixty-six years after the Brown ruling, public education is still not “available to all on equal terms.” In 1951, they used Linda Brown’s race to keep her out of Sumner Elementary School. In 2020, they use a meandering line drawn through the neighborhood to keep many local children out of Mount Washington Elementary.

After studying this issue for several years, I’ve come to the conclusion that attendance zones are—and should be—vulnerable to legal challenge. This vulnerability extends beyond an EEOA challenge to the shape of a particular zone.

Look first at the state constitutions. There are seven states in which the state constitution requires the legislature to establish schools that are “open to all”: Alaska, Arizona, Indiana, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Carolina, and South Dakota. This is the question for those state courts: If a school can decline to enroll a child solely based on his or her residential address within the district, is that school truly “open to all” the residents of the district? I don’t think that it is.

Similarly, five states promise “equality of educational opportunity.” Louisiana, Montana, and North Carolina mention this phrase (or something very similar) in their state constitution. The Supreme Courts of New Jersey and Tennessee have inferred that a similar constitutional right exists in those states. When a school-district official draws a geographic attendance-zone boundary assigning one child to a great school and denying enrollment to another child on the opposite side of the street, the district fails to provide the “equality of opportunity” that is promised by those five states.

 

Neighborhood map detail for John Hay Elementary in Seattle, Wash.

 

But those aren’t the only states where attendance-zone boundaries may be vulnerable. In 13 states (including three that also have an “open to all” requirement), the courts have already declared education to be a “fundamental right.” In these states, the courts are required to apply “strict scrutiny” to any classifications that create unequal access to public schools. What’s important about strict scrutiny is that it transfers the burden of proof to the government, requiring them to show that the discrimination was necessary to further a “compelling governmental interest” and that the policy was “narrowly tailored” to achieve that interest.

Enrollment exclusions based on geography are hardly “narrowly tailored.” Indeed, in most states, charter schools are forbidden from establishing geographic attendance zones. Defenders of geographic zoning would be forced to argue that the government has a “compelling interest” in setting up exclusionary boundaries for some public schools, while forbidding them for others.

An even bigger question is whether attendance zones are vulnerable to challenge in the federal courts under the 14th Amendment’s promise of Equal Protection. Don’t these exclusionary zones violate Justice Warren’s commitment to the idea that a public education must be “available to all on equal terms”?

On the surface, it is an easy idea to dismiss. The federal courts only apply strict scrutiny to government actions when a “fundamental right” is restricted or a “suspect classification” is employed. But education is not a “fundamental right” under the U.S. Constitution, and classifications based on where you live do not create a suspect class as defined by the courts. Without strict scrutiny, such policies would face little risk of being overturned.

However, the Supreme Court’s original definition of Equal Protection, outlined in the early 1900s, appears to be at odds with the geographical enrollment preferences and attendance-zone boundaries that emerged in the mid-1900s and continue to be used today. In one of the first key cases that applied the concept of equal protection in a case that did not involve race (Royster Guano Company v. Virginia, 1920), the court said the following:

The classification must be reasonable, not arbitrary, and must rest upon some ground of difference having a fair and substantial relation to the object of the legislation, so that all persons similarly circumstanced shall be treated alike.

It seems clear that two children, living across the street from one another and within the jurisdictional boundaries of the same school district, are “similarly circumstanced” relative to the laws that establish the educational system. Are those two children “treated alike” when one is assigned to an elite public school and the other turned away because of where she lives?

No, they are not.

A case in the federal courts would focus on asking the judges to apply “intermediate scrutiny” to these discriminatory laws and policies, as they have done in other high-stakes cases involving equal access to public institutions of education. In Plyler v. Doe (1982), the Court overturned a Texas law that authorized school districts to deny enrollment to children who were undocumented immigrants. The Court applied the standard in Brown that education “must be made available to all on equal terms.” In US v. Virginia (1996), the Court struck down the male-only admissions policy at the Virginia Military Institute because the State had failed to provide a “substantially comparable” alternative to women who had been turned away. No court could fairly deem Manierre Elementary to be “substantially comparable” to Lincoln Elementary.

Some will argue that it is very unlikely that the courts will use the Equal Protection clause to strike down a policy that has such a long history in our country and that is so widespread. Could be. But we should all be troubled that attendance zones appear, at the very least, to violate the spirit of equal protection.

One Supreme Court justice, writing in 1992, saw the wisdom in focusing on equal access in the public schools. Justice Antonin Scalia argued that we should open up the public schools to all comers, imagining an educational system “in which parents are free to disregard neighborhood-school assignment, and to send their children (with transportation paid) to whichever school they choose.”

In a concurring opinion in the Freeman v. Pitts desegregation case, Justice Scalia argued that the Court could have taken a different approach in the years after the Brown decision. By overseeing complicated desegregation plans, the Court had waded deeper and deeper into the operations of school districts, prescribing all sorts of bureaucratic remedies that might in theory transform a “segregated” district into a “unitary” one.

Instead, Justice Scalia proposed that the court could have simply focused on school access:

An observer unfamiliar with the history surrounding this issue might suggest that we avoid the problem by requiring only that the school authorities establish a regime in which parents are free to disregard neighborhood-school assignment, and to send their children (with transportation paid) to whichever school they choose. So long as there is free choice, he would say, there is no reason to require that the schools be made identical. The constitutional right is equal racial access to schools, not access to racially equal schools.

To Scalia, equal access was a more justiciable question—a question more appropriate for the courts to weigh in on—than the question of what actions could be taken to transform a “segregated” district into a “unitary” one.

In the same opinion, Scalia predicted that the Court’s longstanding approach to desegregation was destined to make the courts irrelevant, as districts removed all remnants of overt (or de jure) segregation. And his prediction was right: Today almost all school districts are judged to be “unitary,” despite stark ongoing divisions of race and class, since they are far enough removed from any overt policies that segregated the schools by race.

Focusing on access, as Scalia suggested, would restore the courts’ rightful role as a guardian of equal opportunity in the schools. It would not mean that a child has a right to attend a specific school. Good public schools are scarce, especially in the inner cities. Great public schools are even harder to find. Not everyone will be able to attend the best school in the district. But all district residents should have an equal opportunity to enroll in the best schools in the district. In a public school lottery, for example, there are winners and losers. The results may seem frustrating or even tragic. But a lottery gives every district family a fair chance—an equal opportunity—to enroll their child at a coveted school that could dramatically change his or her life trajectory.

We may feel sympathy for people who might be harmed by rulings that would open these elite schools to all residents of a district. Take a family who has paid $250,000 more for a house because of its guaranteed access to an elite public school. Those parents wanted to secure the best education for their children, and that’s laudable. But that doesn’t mean we should continue to block open access to these public schools.

In some ways, these people are like the taxi companies in New York City. Taxi companies paid millions of dollars for “medallions” allowing them to operate taxis within the city. For years, these medallion owners fought off efforts to issue more medallions—and improve taxi service for millions of New Yorkers—because they wanted to be protected from competition. With the emergence of ride-sharing services such as Uber, the medallions lost much of their value. And taxi companies have attempted to use their political clout to block such services and retain their protected position.

But the courts have said no. Buying a taxi medallion does not mean that you are protected from disruptive competition until the end of time. Likewise, buying a house that gives you preferential access to a public school does not mean that you will be able to keep other families out forever.

If the courts look to open up the public schools, perhaps the most appropriate ruling would be a narrow one that simply forbade school districts from using a resident child’s address to determine their eligibility for any school within the district. Instead of being forced to implement a specific court-endorsed remedy, districts would be free to experiment with different allocation methods that don’t rely on geography.

Some districts would create a system of school-site lotteries, like most charter schools use. Others would implement a centralized lottery like the ones used in New Orleans, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. You could even imagine districts trying a system based on “first-come-first-serve,” as Los Angeles did for many years with highly coveted dual-language immersion programs. Each of these approaches has shortcomings and the potential for abuse. But, unlike the current system, they are based on a principle of equal opportunity.

Local school officials should not, and do not, have unlimited power to determine who gets access to what schools. They are constrained by civil rights laws passed by Congress, and they are constrained by the founding documents of our democracy, both the state constitutions and the U.S. Constitution. Those constraints need to be enforced if we want to see a world in which a child’s home address does not play such a critical role in determining his or her destiny.

Tim DeRoche is author of A Fine Line: How Most American Kids Are Kept Out of the Best Public Schools. Twitter: @timderoche.

By: Tim DeRoche
Title: Public-School Attendance Zones Violate a Civil Rights Law – by Tim DeRoche
Sourced From: www.educationnext.org/public-school-attendance-zones-violate-civil-rights-law-equal-educational-opportunities-act-a-fine-line/
Published Date: Thu, 14 May 2020 04:01:33 +0000

Literacy Needs to Be at the Forefront of Instruction When Schools Reopen

According to the most recent report by the National Association for Educational Progress, 64% of all fourth grade students in America are unable to read proficiently. The number increases to 78% in low-income areas. When children do not learn to read, they become illiterate adults, thus limiting opportunities in work and life. 

As schools are closed across the country in response to the Coronavirus crisis, teachers are tirelessly preparing and providing digital resources for their students and families who have now transitioned to remote learning.

However, current research shows that 35% of lower-income households with school-age children do not have access to the internet. Therefore, the students who are already significantly behind their peers in reading do not have access to these online learning tools. Many of their homes do not have any children’s books at all.

Research shows that students who are not reading on grade level by the end of third grade are more likely to drop out of school. Eighty-five percent of juveniles in the juvenile court system are functionally low literate. 

In many states, children will not return to school until the fall. So, what will happen when schools finally resume? Will every child be passed on to the next grade? Will every teacher receive the reading support they will need to effectively support these vast gaps while maintaining their designated grade level literacy objectives?

I have had the opportunity to teach in public education for over 15 years. As a national urban literacy specialist and consultant, I work alongside incredible inner-city school principals and teachers to help their students become successful independent readers and help turn schools around.  

This unprecedented event forces us to seriously think about how we are going to help all students and schools succeed in the next school year. It cannot be with the same practices that are in place today. We will need to support teachers as they learn how to balance the intervention, remediation and new instruction that students will need.

One to two hours of daily language arts instruction will not be enough in the fall. If remote learning continues we need to consider how to provide differentiated reading instruction for our students in small groups of students or if needed, one-on-one. Literacy needs to be at the forefront of instruction through all content from pre-K to fifth grade. This means we need to incorporate the five pillars of reading instruction or the “science of reading” into every lesson—including math, science and social studies. 

There is a lot of work ahead for school and district leaders. When we instill a school culture that puts developmental reading practices, reading research, and literacy at the forefront of the instructional design for the 2020-2021 school year, it will make the greatest impact on the lives of every single child.

Photo by AnnaStills, EnvatoElements-licensed.

Colorado News

Senator Lamar Alexander on the Reaction to the Coronavirus-- by Frederick Hess

Sen. Lamar Alexander

Sen. Lamar Alexander, chairman of the U.S. Senate’s Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), has been at the center of Capitol Hill conversations about the coronavirus as it relates to health and education. Alexander previously served as Tennessee’s 45th governor, and U.S. secretary of education for President George H.W. Bush. I recently had the chance to ask Sen. Alexander about the coronavirus and how he’s thinking about the congressional role in education right now. Here’s what he had to say.

Rick: What are the most important things that Congress can do to help schools and colleges that are not fiscal?

Sen. Alexander: The best thing we can do for colleges and schools is help them reopen normally in the fall. We’ll need tens of millions of diagnostic tests to help parents feel it is safe to send their child back to school or for students to go back to college. The most recent coronavirus legislation provided up to $1 billion for a competitive shark tank to help accelerate some of the two-dozen early- stage testing concepts already underway at the National Institutes of Health.  We need a new technology to produce tens of millions of tests for when we have 50 million children going back to school and 20 million students going back to college.

Congress is also providing flexibility from education laws or regulations.  For example, Congress recognized the difficulty states were going to have meeting state testing requirements for K-12 this spring and gave the secretary the authority to waive those requirements.  In addition, there were waivers of Higher Education Act provisions for our colleges and universities in campus-based aid programs and for students enrolled in foreign institutions.

Rick: When it comes to fiscal aid, what’s the right way forward? What would you like to see Congress do in future coronavirus-aid legislation?

Alexander: We have already provided more than $3 trillion in bills related to the coronavirus and we need to see how well it’s working. We also need to be careful not to create funds that our schools or colleges become dependent on. So far, Congress has been careful to focus on broad authority, not funding specific solutions from Washington. This allows schools and colleges to decide what their needs related to the pandemic are and use the money for them.

Rick: A number of education interest groups have floated a proposal calling for at least another $175 billion in federal education aid to bolster state budgets. Do you have any initial reactions to that?

Alexander: We need to look at the enormous amount of money we’ve already spent and see what is or isn’t working and hear from governors about their state budgets. That said, another $175 billion doesn’t seem realistic or likely.

Rick: You were U.S. secretary of education under President George H.W. Bush. What do you think the U.S. Department of Education has done especially well? What else could they do that might be useful?

Alexander: We are in an unprecedented situation with this pandemic, and I think they’ve been able to get out a lot of information and guidance to our schools and colleges quickly and they’ve distributed funds from the bills Congress passed very quickly.

Rick: You’re a former governor. Wearing that hat, what do you think Washington can do to be helpful to states? What would you like to see states doing?

Alexander: I know that a one-hour flight to Washington doesn’t make you any smarter and I don’t think we need to come up with a bunch of big ideas up here and send them back to states to implement—especially in education. States working with other states usually come up with the best ideas—and Washington usually messes it up if they get involved, the way they did with Common Core.

Rick: What do you think are the most important or significant fiscal challenges that states and communities face when it comes to education? Realistically, how much of the anticipated budget shortfall do you think Washington can or should make up for?

Alexander: Our economy has basically been shut down, so states are going to have to make tough budget decisions—especially where communities were hit hard by the virus and can’t reopen as quickly. But the country certainly can’t afford for Washington to keep passing trillion-dollar spending bills—we are all going to have to make tough decisions.

Rick: Are there any particular lessons from past crises, like the Great Recession or 9/11, that are useful to bear in mind as we think about the federal response?

Alexander: New York City and the country recovered much more rapidly than most people expected after 9/11.  The lesson there is that Congress needs to do this year whatever we need to do to be better prepared for the next virus.  We’ve had scares before and taken steps afterwards to be better prepared but soon lost our focus.  Even for an event as massive as what we are now experiencing, our collective memory is short.  So to be better prepared with tests, treatments, vaccines, protective equipment, extra hospital beds, and health-care personnel for the next virus—which is surely coming—we had better make those decisions before the end of the year.

Rick: You’ve been a champion of civic education and political civility for decades. I’m curious, how are you thinking about the role these things play when America faces a challenges like this one?

Alexander: America isn’t a race or a region or a background, it’s a belief in shared principles, such as liberty, equal opportunity, and the rule of law. Those principles are always most evident and important in a crisis. Educators have a real teachable moment when they get students back in their classrooms this fall. These millions of students have just witnessed history, and they need context.

Rick: What do you think the role of schools and higher education is in a time like this?

Alexander:  Our educators should give students context, and I think can give students and families a sense of stability—even at a distance.

As the whole world looks for breakthroughs in testing, treatments, and vaccines, much of the most important research is happening at our colleges and universities. It’s a reminder again of how critical it is for our country to have the greatest system of higher education in the world.

Rick: Can you give us a sense of how things are working on Capitol Hill with the CARES Act and next big spending bill?

Alexander: I know I’ve been on the phone morning to night and getting a lot done. I’m sure we all want to see how the enormous amount of money we’ve spent so far is working before we start preparing to spend more.

Rick: OK, last question. Amid everything that is going on, what have you seen or heard that is most heartening?

Alexander: The most heartening thing to me has been the explosion of brainpower and effort to create tests, treatments, and vaccines for the virus.  It is a reminder that the United States still has most of the best research universities, finest national laboratories, and the fastest computers in the world. Two weeks ago, Congress gave up to $1 billion to a “shark tank” at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to create a competitive environment to find a new technology that would allow production of millions of diagnostic tests with quick results so that our country can go back to work and back to school. The NIH director, Francis Collins, once led the Human Genome Project.  His invitation for proposals attracted 400 in the first 24 hours. Hundreds more are expected. Searches for treatments and vaccines are on a similar fast-track.  The Oak Ridge National Laboratory supercomputers assisted by sorting through massive amounts of literature on coronavirus in record time. This response shows the wisdom of perhaps Washington’s best-kept secret: the decision by Congress to appropriate record levels for science and research. For example, the Appropriations Subcommittee I chair has provided five consecutive years of record funding for the Office of Science in the Department of Energy, including our programs for supercomputing. The Health Subcommittee on Appropriations has provided five consecutive years of increased funding, including record funding this year, for the National Institutes of Health.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Frederick Hess is director of education policy studies at AEI and an executive editor of Education Next.

This post originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

Read more from Education Next on coronavirus and Covid-19.

By: Frederick Hess
Title: Senator Lamar Alexander on the Response to the Coronavirus – by Frederick Hess
Sourced From: www.educationnext.org/senator-lamar-alexander-on-response-to-coronavirus-covid-19-pandemic/
Published Date: Thu, 14 May 2020 09:00:59 +0000

SAVING OUR PLANET FROM THE EXISTENTIAL THREAT OF CLIMATE CHANGE (LIVE AT 8PM ET) 2/2

SAVING OUR PLANET FROM AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT: We cannot lose sight of the climate emergency around us. Together, we must do everything we can to address this existential threat. Join the virtual town hall with Bernie Sanders, Varshini Prakash, Bill McKibben, Gov. JayInslee and David Wallace-Wells live now:

EdNext Podcast: Jeb Bush on Adjusting to Distance Learning During the Pandemic – by Education Next

The 43rd governor of Florida and the president and chairman of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, Jeb Bush, joins Education Next Editor-in-chief Marty West for the 200th episode of the EdNext Podcast. Governor Bush discusses his experience managing crises, as well as some of the best practices to continue education during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“This is the time for innovation to rise up,” Bush says, “an opportunity to also invest in the things we want more of rather than just invest in whatever was existing in the past.”

Listen to the podcast now.

Gov. Bush recently wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, “It’s time to embrace distance learning — and not just because of the coronavirus.”

The EdNext Podcast is available on iTunes, Google Play, Soundcloud, Stitcher and here every Wednesday.

— Education Next

By: Education Next
Title: EdNext Podcast: Jeb Bush on Adjusting to Distance Learning During the Pandemic – by Education Next
Sourced From: www.educationnext.org/ednext-podcast-jeb-bush-on-adjusting-to-distance-learning-during-pandemic-covid-19-coronavirus/
Published Date: Wed, 13 May 2020 09:00:56 +0000

Justices Hear Arguments in L.A. Catholic Schools Case – by Joshua Dunn

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas

The Supreme Court heard oral argument Monday on two of this term’s most highly anticipated cases: Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru and St. James School v. Biel. Both involve teachers who were fired from Catholic Schools (For background, please see “Justices Will Hear Cases About L.A. Catholic Schools”). The question was whether their firings were covered by the “ministerial exception,” which allows religious institutions to select their own ministers and, thus, exempts ministers from statutory employment protections.

When the Supreme Court first recognized the ministerial exception in 2012’s Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission it held that the First Amendment’s “free exercise” clause must allow must allow religious institutions to hire and fire ministers—otherwise the government could compel them to retain individuals that the institution believes are no longer suited to teach their faith. But it left the scope of the exception broadly undefined. Monday’s argument focused on how far it should go. While the court’s usual ideological divisions were apparent, the balance of oral argument seemed to favor the schools.

On one side, the liberal bloc of justices expressed concern that if these teachers were considered ministers then nurses or janitors in religious hospitals could be fired because they were considered ministers. On the other, the court’s conservatives were more concerned about protecting the rights of religious institutions to determine who should be considered a minister. Justice Gorsuch took perhaps the hardest line, indicating that he felt uncomfortable having a “secular court” second-guessing a religious institution and declaring that some employees’ activities were insufficiently related to religion to count them as ministers.

Perhaps the most interesting question came from the normally taciturn Justice Thomas. Others have noticed that the court’s move to a remote format has made Thomas almost loquacious. His ability to get to the core of the issue was illustrated by a question for the employees’ attorney, Jeffrey Fisher. Fisher was trying to argue that the employees’ job duties, which included teaching weekly religion classes and supervising students during Mass,  were insufficiently religious for them to be considered ministers. This led Thomas to ask if the employees performed the same religious functions in a public school that they did in the Catholic schools, would it “be a violation of the Establishment Clause?” Fisher responded that it would be. Thomas responded, “don’t you think it’s a bit odd that – that things that violate in the Establishment Clause, when done in a public school, are not considered religious enough for Free Exercise protection when done in a parochial school?”

The trouble did not end there for Fisher. Justice Alito asked him if a teacher in a Catholic school only taught religion classes, whether the ministerial exception would apply. Fisher responded that they “would not be a minister in that case” because the teacher would not be in a position of “spiritual leadership of the congregation.” At that point, Fisher might have also lost the vote of Justice Kagan. In response, she said she thought that such a teacher “is protected by the exemption” and that she understands that sometimes teachers might have to teach other subjects making it difficult to “draw the line” between a full-time religious teacher and a “half” or “quarter” time religious teacher.

The teachers had placed great emphasis on the fact that they were not in significant positions of leadership and were not required to be Catholic. Neither argument appeared to gain any traction with the court’s conservatives or to be compelling to either Justices Breyer or Kagan. On the question of leadership, Breyer expressed concerned that in some religions “everyone” has a position of authority. Who should count as minister for those faiths and how could the court provide guidance that wouldn’t require courts to “meddle” too much in religion? Likewise, Justice Kagan wondered why a yeshiva couldn’t hire a non-Jewish expert on the Talmud to instruct on what the Talmud teaches and not have that person qualify under the exception.

In the end, four justices—Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh—appeared willing to grant religious institutions broad discretion to decide for themselves who counts as a minister. Chief Justice Roberts also seemed to favor the schools. He, for instance, was worried about judicial entanglement and requiring titles common in one faith, Protestant Christianity, to be used by others to count employees as ministers. Justice Alito even said he would jettison the phrase “ministerial exception” because it was discriminatory.  However, given Robert’s distaste for 5-4 opinions, it would not be surprising to see him work to construct a 7-2 majority by bringing Breyer and Kagan alongside to craft a decision in favor of the schools but not going as far as the court’s conservatives would prefer. Regardless, you would rather be the schools than the teachers after Monday’s oral argument.

Joshua Dunn is professor of political science and director of the Center for the Study of Government and the Individual at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs.

By: Joshua Dunn
Title: Justices Hear Arguments in L.A. Catholic Schools Case – by Joshua Dunn
Sourced From: www.educationnext.org/justices-hear-arguments-l-a-catholic-schools-case-morrissey-berru-biel/
Published Date: Tue, 12 May 2020 14:41:17 +0000

The Grade-Level Expectations Trap – by Joel Rose

Imagine a 6th-grade math teacher with high hopes for her students. Let’s call her Ms. Rodriguez. She wants her students to find joy in the beauty and complexity of math, make connections to the world around them, and master the skills and content they’ll need to succeed in middle and high school, college, and beyond. She believes that each one is capable of rigorous study and is committed to doing all she can to prepare them.

But in a typical class of 25 students, she’s finding that as few as five can keep up with 6th-grade work. One day, after her students struggled with adding and subtracting decimals, she sensed that most of them hadn’t quite mastered decimal place value in the 5th grade. So she found a suitable lesson online and retaught place value—after all, you can’t hope to add decimals accurately if you can’t keep your tenths and hundredths straight. Her students caught on quickly and were relieved by the refresher.

By chance, the principal dropped in for an observation that day, and the feedback wasn’t good. Stick to the 6th-grade curriculum, he said. That’s what will be covered on the end-of-course exam, so that’s what students need to be taught. There won’t be time enough to cover much else.

Ms. Rodriguez believes in keeping expectations high. But she doesn’t see how students will ever meet 6th-grade standards if she can’t help them address unfinished learning from elementary school that is foundational to middle-school math. Gaps in learning lurk beneath the surface, and math instruction builds on itself each year. By only looking at the current year’s curriculum, how will her students ever master all they need to know?

This is what the organization I lead has identified as the “Iceberg Problem,” and it’s what inspired us to create a personalized-learning model for middle-grade math eight years ago. That program, Teach to One, provides students with individualized instructional programs each day that integrate teacher-led instruction, collaborative learning with peers, and virtual online study. Our goal is the same as Ms. Rodriguez’s: for students to access the right lesson, in the right way, based on where they are starting and where they need to go.

We expected to run into a number of barriers that we would need to overcome if we were to be successful. We would need to raise capital, hire top-notch academicians and technologists, find interested schools, and navigate the myriad of operational complexities that can arise in any school environment—unfilled staff positions, uneven teacher quality, frequent leadership transitions, politicized decisionmaking, and unreliable technology infrastructure, to name a few.

Then came another barrier that we did not anticipate, which has emerged as one of our most formidable challenges.

It is that in math, today’s assessment and accountability policies may be inadvertently working against the interests of the very students they were designed to help.

High Expectations  Matter, And…

The shift to more rigorous college- and career-ready standards has been one of the biggest policy developments in recent decades. Federal education legislation adopted in 2001 under No Child Left Behind and amended in 2015 under the Every Student Succeeds Act requires each state to administer annual math and reading tests aligned with grade-level standards for grades 3 through 8 and at least once in high school. The cumulative impact has set more consistent expectations for students based on benchmarks pegged to a college- and career-readiness trajectory and yielded progress in several areas, including greater transparency into achievement gaps between student subgroups, increased clarity for teachers on what students need to stay on a college- and career-ready path, and more objective information for families on whether students are reaching key educational milestones.

But in math, the subject our organization knows best, these well-intended standards and measures don’t always consider the diverse needs of individual learners to encounter material and progress at an optimal pace. To be sure, keeping expectations high for all students is critical—and for students from historically disadvantaged communities, there is ample evidence that many schools do not expect nearly enough. But within an individual class, an on-grade lesson for one student may be far out of reach, while that same lesson for another student may be too easy. Assuming that grade-level content is what’s best for everyone fails to acknowledge the reality that individual students have different levels of background knowledge.

When students miss key steps along the prescribed grade-level path, or learn at a pace that is faster or slower than state standards anticipate, the standards alone do not provide guidance to teachers on where to focus instruction. Instead, policies signal to a 7th-grade teacher, for example, that all 7th-grade students should be taught 7th-grade content—whether students happen to be performing at grade level or not.

For students who never fell behind, 7th-grade materials may be perfectly appropriate.  But for those who may have missed key concepts along the way, trying to cover 7th-grade material when key concepts from 5th or 6th grade weren’t quite mastered can cause learning gaps to accumulate. The pattern repeats, year after year, as they fall farther away from the college- and career-ready track.

Few can credibly argue that a policy orientation focused on annual grade-level mastery is working. Only 34 percent of American students in 8th grade met the proficiency level or above in math based on the 2019 administration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, with historically disadvantaged student groups hitting this target at less than half the rate of white students. These middle-grade math woes are often rooted in the elementary years, where one in five 4th graders fell into the lowest tier of math performance, well below grade level.

What are middle-school math teachers like Ms. Rodriguez to do when the grade-level material they must teach depends on foundational knowledge students do not have? How exactly are teachers supposed to deliver an impactful lesson on quadratic equations when many of their students do not understand exponents?

There is an acute tension between an instructional program that is best for each student to ensure they are ready for college and career and an underlying policy context rooted in grade-level expectations. The mathematical skills required for students to engage with grade-level material in middle school and high school are built on a deep, conceptual understanding from previous years. And although many students arrive at middle school without these foundational skills, state and federal policy systems incentivize teaching to grade-level standards to curtail low expectations and inequitable outcomes.

We do not see strong evidence in the field or in research that, in math, strict adherence to grade-level content is best for all students.

There is a path for far more students to achieve college and career readiness, but it requires systematically addressing students’ unfinished learning from prior years. Simply demanding that teachers somehow figure out both how to address students’ unfinished learning from previous years and how to cover all grade-level material may be causing some students to fall farther behind.

 

 

Math: The Jenga Game of Subjects

Math is cumulative, with new learning resting atop earlier mastery. Year by year, students learn interconnected concepts in a coherent progression, building a foundational body of knowledge that undergirds new understanding in the grades ahead.

For example, 7th-grade math typically includes performing basic operations with rational numbers. For students to know how to do that, they need to have mastered several key skills and concepts from 5th and 6th grade, including understanding integers and rational numbers and performing basic operations with decimals and fractions (see Figure 1).

When a student starts the school year with unfinished learning from prior years, the challenge of both covering grade-level material and addressing unfinished learning can be daunting. For example, 8th graders are expected to learn about multistep equations during the course of the school year, even though some students begin the year not having mastered critical predecessor skills such as solving simple equations, operations on rational numbers, or adding and subtracting algebraic expressions.

Imagine being asked to solve 2(x + 1) – x = 5 without understanding the order of operations or how to work with x. It can’t be done. And lessons focused on multistep equations would be lost—alongside the foundational lessons missed the first time around.

So would precious instructional time.

Of course, high-performing math teachers and thoughtful curriculum materials build in opportunities to revisit important concepts, including through “spiraling” questions that reinforce recent skills and topics throughout the school year. But what happens when the missing knowledge is from several grade levels ago? In the example above, each of these component skills could take three to four days to cover sufficiently—and they are only the predecessors for one grade-level skill. For many students, the learning gaps they are expected to bridge in one year in order to attain grade-level proficiency are so substantial that meeting that benchmark in that time period is highly improbable.

Longitudinal studies of individual students over time can show more precisely how students who fall behind are likely to stay behind. In a 2012 study conducted by ACT, researchers tracked math test results from tens of thousands of students to calculate their math skills and relative chances of reaching grade-level expectations in the 8th and 12th grades. Students below grade level in math in 4th grade had just a 46 percent chance of reaching grade-level expectations in 8th grade; those below expectations in 8th grade had a 19 percent chance of reaching 12th-grade expectations (see Figure 2). These figures were even more daunting for the lowest-scoring students, whose chances of meeting expectations for the 8th and 12th grades were 10 percent and 3 percent, respectively. This same study also found that the lowest-scoring students were much more likely to attend high-poverty schools.

 

 

There are multiple reasons why it can be so hard for lower-performing students to catch up in math. In some communities, there are particular challenges in recruiting, developing, and retaining high-quality math teachers, many of whom have more attractive employment opportunities in other sectors. In other communities, ongoing leadership transitions at the school or district level can lead to continual shifts in organizational direction. Poverty-related issues such as trauma, violence, and nutrition are all highly relevant to student academic performance. So, too, are the expectations that adults have for students.

While the impact of these and other factors are well documented, an underlying policy landscape that incentivizes grade-level instruction may also be playing a key role in preventing students from getting back on track.

 

When Policy Meets Practice 

Under federal law, all students in grades 3 through 8 must take a statewide summative assessment in math that is aligned to their enrolled grade level to form the basis of states’ accountability systems. All 6th graders take the 6th-grade test, all 7th graders take the 7th-grade test, and so forth, with only a narrow set of exceptions.

These exams are used as key components across many evaluation and decisionmaking activities. All states are required to set goals based on test results, including to increase the share of students who meet standards in reading and mathematics, accelerate progress of underperforming subgroups, improve graduation rates, and identify low-performing schools for varying levels of support and intervention. Some states have opted to include tests among measures of student growth in teacher-evaluation systems. Local communities review their test performance closely, and many district and school administrators believe their career success is dependent upon success on annual assessments. For many charter schools, meeting test-based goals for proficiency and student growth can mean the difference between closure and continued existence.

States have discretion to choose which test to use. All the tests, though, are required to be aligned to grade-level standards that reflect a college- and career-ready academic trajectory. Few, if any, of the actual test questions relate to anything other than the standards that match each student’s enrolled grade level. The idea is to have the equivalent of an educational “dipstick” so that decisionmakers and the public can have an objective, comparable view of where each student performs in relation to state expectations.

The combination of grade-level tests and high-stakes accountability interjects reliable data into the decisionmaking process of administrators, teachers, parents, and policymakers. It ensures that school communities remain focused on measurable student outcomes and highlights profound inequities across and within schools and districts that can require public response. But as currently constructed, there’s a significant tradeoff: Teachers face pressure to focus instruction on the grade-level material appearing on the end-of-year test, regardless of students’ background knowledge. And in math, for those students whose incoming preparation is poorly matched to standard grade-level expectations, these incentives can produce the opposite of their intended effect.

When a 6th-grade student is taught 6th-grade material, some of those skills will be learned and some will go “unlearned” for a variety of reasons (e.g., lack of predecessor knowledge, uneven teacher quality, student absences). The next year, as the focus of accountability shifts to the 7th-grade assessment, the unlearned skills from 6th grade remain unaddressed, even though those skills may be essential to mastering 7th-grade content. By 8th grade, even more learning gaps accumulate so that by the time a student enters high school, the student is simply unprepared for more advanced mathematical topics.

In middle-grade math, while the gaze of policymakers is focused on how students are performing relative to grade-level assessments, learning gaps continue to accumulate below the surface, making longer-term success harder to achieve. This is the “Iceberg Problem” illustrated in Figure 3.

The authors of the Every Student Succeeds Act likely foresaw the value in measuring growth outside of grade-level standards, as the law permits states to adopt assessments that also “measure academic proficiency and growth using items above or below the student’s grade level.” However, subsequent guidance from the U.S. Department of Education specifies that if states design tests to include additional measures of off-grade performance, they must still measure and score students’ on-grade performance accurately. Any off-grade measures would not satisfy the law’s accountability provisions for student performance. As a practical matter, due to the broad set of standards at each grade level and pressures to reduce test time and length, most summative state assessments are almost exclusively focused on grade-level content.

The federal policies that undergird statewide assessment and accountability systems send an unmistakable signal to middle-grade math teachers: focus your instruction on the grade-level standards.

 

 

Putting Personalization to the Test

Teach to One is just one approach schools use to meet the unique needs of each student. It is designed around 300 mathematical skills and concepts that connect basic numerical understanding to college-readiness benchmarks.

The program uses ongoing assessments of students’ competencies to tailor instruction. A customized software program assesses individual skill levels and creates customized skill libraries, units of study, and tests and quizzes. Day to day, students learn in extended class periods that include instruction from teachers, group work, individual practice, and a brief daily assessment of progress called an “exit slip.” Up to three times a year, they take the Measures of Academic Progress, a computer-based adaptive test that measures learning growth over time.

The idea is to ensure that students are continually learning within their “zone of proximal development,” where the material they are expected to learn is appropriate given what they already understand and where they need to go. With the right support, students working in the “zone” can master content that was previously out of reach. This approach can fill knowledge gaps and catch up students who are lagging, as well as accelerate learning and engage students ready to advance beyond grade-level material. Of the students in grades 6 though 8 who have participated in Teach to One over the past three years, about two thirds started the school year at least two grade levels behind, and 9 percent were four grade levels behind. Just 2 percent were ahead of their grade level.

In its eight years, Teach to One has operated in districts and schools with different philosophies regarding the role of grade-level material, notwithstanding federal signals. In schools where accountability systems imposed at the district or school level are based on growth measures that cross multiple grades, the program can tailor a personalized curriculum for each student that includes a mix of pre-grade, on-grade, and post-grade material, depending on his or her unique starting point. By contrast, in schools focused on students’ performance on annual state assessments, leaders have often asked us to weigh students’ personalized curricula more heavily toward grade-level content for the year. This can mean leaving important pre-grade gaps unaddressed.

Our preference would be to help schools fill pre-grade gaps and cover grade-level material. But a 180-day school year is often not enough to make up for multiple years of unfinished learning. Absent clarity on how to reconcile this tension, schools can struggle to make hard choices about what to prioritize.

This challenge was highlighted in an experimental study of Teach to One at five schools in New Jersey published in 2018. During the study period of 2015 to 2018, different schools requested a variety of program adjustments that either emphasized or deemphasized grade-level content. As a result, researchers were unable to draw any conclusions on the overall impact of the program as it was designed.

What can happen when schools make a clear choice to prioritize learning growth over grade-level exposure?  A 2019 study looking at progress on the Measures of Academic Progress assessment compared the growth of Teach to One students at 14 schools over three years to national averages. It found that Teach to One schools whose accountability systems focused on growth made stronger gains than schools whose accountability systems focused on proficiency (see Figure 4). The study also found suggestive evidence that schools tended to see stronger gains when the math content presented to students matched their tested grade level from the beginning of the year.

 

 

While firm causal evidence of the impact of grade-level assessment and accountability has yet be established, these findings should be viewed as an important contrast to the evidence base for what policy currently promotes: providing all students with grade-level content, regardless of their starting point.

Researchers explored the effects of giving students content far outside their current skill level after a policy push in the early 2000s placed many 8th-grade students in Algebra who would have otherwise taken a pre-algebra 8th-grade math course. In 2008, Tom Loveless found that very low-achieving math students enrolled in Algebra courses performed about seven grade levels below their peers on the National Assessment of Educational Progress and struggled with questions that tested elementary-level understanding. Another study found that low-achieving students pushed into algebra did less well in subsequent math courses throughout high school, especially in geometry (see “Solving America’s Math Problem,” research, Winter 2013).

There is little evidence to suggest that in math, low-performing students pushed into grade-level content without appropriate support and attention to prerequisite skills will be better off in the long run. Yet today’s policy landscape incentivizes just that.

Fixing the Iceberg Problem

This is not a call to reverse the principles of standards, accountability, rigor, transparency, and equity that form the basis of education policy and practice today. These are essential elements for building a school system worthy of the students it serves. The historical roots of our inequitable education system run deep, and the need for guardrails within federal policy to mitigate and, ultimately, reverse this pernicious legacy is essential.

But it is a candid acknowledgement of the tradeoffs and costs that a focus on annual grade-level expectations creates.  In math, preparing students for college or a career requires honestly confronting any gaps in learning that lie beneath the surface. That does not mean lowering expectations for students; rather, given the inherently sequential nature of mathematics, it means designing viable paths that can connect students from where they are starting from to where they need to be.

Today’s policy landscape is constraining these kinds of innovations.

I have seen in our work that individualized instruction and high expectations can go hand in hand, and that if we are able to identify and address unfinished learning from prior years, students can advance more quickly and successfully toward their goals. I hope our experience can help to spur the development of more innovative learning models that seek to address individual students’ learning needs. Teach to One is by no means the only way for schools to do that. Ensuring all students can access a tailored path to college and career readiness will require the development of a variety of innovative learning models with different philosophies and pedagogical approaches underpinning them.

There are several steps states and districts can take to address students’ unfinished learning while working within the current framework of federal law. They can measure learning growth more comprehensively by using adaptive assessments that adjust in difficulty based on student responses. They can also adjust their accountability systems to emphasize proficiency at key grade levels, as opposed to annually. States might also create space for innovation (as Texas has done with its Math Innovation Zones program) so that new learning models can be properly implemented and tested in ways that operate largely outside of the current grade-centric system.

But in the longer term, policymakers and advocates will need to develop and advance a shared vision for what one day might be a new assessment and accountability system. It will need to be one that preserves our current values and commitments without promoting instructional practices that prevent students from accessing academic paths that might better enable their longterm success.

Joel Rose is co-founder and chief executive officer at New Classrooms, which published The Iceberg Problem, from which this essay is adapted.

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Education Reform and the Coronavirus – by Martin R. West

The corner of my suburban Boston bedroom, where I write this letter, has by necessity become a hotbed of education innovation since mid-March, when the Covid-19 pandemic closed Harvard’s campus and confined most Massachusetts residents to their homes.

It was the venue for the first defense of a doctoral dissertation at the Harvard Graduate School of Education to be conducted virtually, with the student, my fellow committee members, and me in separate locations. (The student was brilliant—and the fact that dozens of her friends and family from around the world were able to “attend” more than offset our inability to congratulate her in person.) And it is where I’ve worked to convert my spring 2020 courses, designed for in-person consumption, into equally productive online learning experiences—an aspiration as yet unfulfilled.

The pandemic has affected every last corner of the American education system, forcing system leaders to attend to an unprecedented array of logistical and technological challenges, educators to teach in new and unfamiliar ways, and parents to adjust their routines to supervise their children’s learning at home.

The closure of schools and much of the economy, however necessary it may be, will have enduring consequences—in learning lost during the crisis and in diminished resources to devote to education in the years ahead. The task facing policymakers, and the rest of us, will be to do what’s needed to ensure that the tragic loss of life the coronavirus has caused does not bring with it a loss of opportunity for the next generation. It won’t be easy.

On the Education Next website, we have already sought to provide a forum to anticipate those consequences and how education leaders might best respond. Executive editor Michael Horn warned that online learning is “about to get a bad reputation at many campuses” as hastily built Zoom-based courses prove to be poor substitutes for the originals. As early as March 25, when only three states had announced that their schools would remain closed through the end of the school year, John Bailey of the American Enterprise Institute advised educators to prepare for a “series of rolling, targeted school closures over the next 18 months.” Robin Lake and John McLaughlin debated whether Congress should waive protections in federal law for students with disabilities as school districts shift to serving students at a distance. And Paul von Hippel of the University of Texas at Austin assessed how the coronavirus crisis is likely to affect student learning; his conclusion, in a word: “unequally.” Readers can expect similar content on a nearly daily basis in the months ahead.

The articles in this issue of the print journal, in contrast, were all conceived, reported, and filed well before the extent of our current crisis became clear. One of them, however, has special relevance for our present moment. In “The Grade-Level Expectations Trap,” Joel Rose of New Classrooms vividly illustrates how gaps in students’ skills can interfere with their subsequent progress—especially in subjects like math that are “cumulative, with new learning resting atop earlier mastery.”

Such skill gaps are certain to result from the school closures, notwithstanding all the valiant attempts by schools, teachers, and parents at distance learning. When schools reopen physically in the fall—if in fact they do—it will be important to start with a clear-eyed picture of how big those gaps are.

The best tactics and strategies to help students catch up are already a topic of intense debate. The remedy may require, as executive editor Michael Petrilli has urged, that many more students are asked to repeat a grade. Others are proposing to extend the school year into the summer to make up for lost time.

Whatever approach is chosen, the work is urgent. The next pandemic will require scientists to devise cures, epidemiologists to track, project, and slow outbreaks, economists to weigh costs and benefits, ethicists and religious leaders to provide moral guidance, doctors and nurses to heal patients, and politicians to provide leadership. The students in today’s classrooms, both physical and virtual, open and closed, will fill those roles. In that longer-term sense, at least, the tasks of education and education reform, of teaching and learning, are every bit as life-and-death as anything happening in a hospital emergency room or intensive care unit.

— Martin West

Read more from Education Next on coronavirus and Covid-19.

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Former Vice President Joe Biden is running for president to restore the soul of the nation. He believes it’s time to remember who we are. We’re Americans: tough and resilient. We choose hope over fear. Science over fiction. Truth over lies. And unity over division. We are the United States of America. And together, there is not a single thing we can’t do. Join Team Joe today:

The Education Exchange: "Some Worry and Some Anxiety"-- by Education Next

The Director of the Public Policy Research Lab at LSU’s Manship School of Mass Communication, Michael Henderson, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss Louisiana’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and how the public is responding to the state’s stay-at-home order.

Listen to the podcast now.

The full survey results are available here.

Follow The Education Exchange on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher or here on Education Next.

— Education Next

By: Education Next
Title: The Education Exchange: “Some Fear and Some Anxiety” – by Education Next
Sourced From: www.educationnext.org/education-exchange-some-fear-some-anxiety-survey-louisiana-residents-response-covid-19-coronavirus/
Published Date: Mon, 11 May 2020 11:00:19 +0000

Happy Mother’s Day | Joe Biden For President

To the extraordinary mothers everywhere, like Catherine Eugenia Finnegan Biden, my wishes for a safe and happy Mother’s Day.

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Former Vice President Joe Biden is running for president to restore the soul of the nation. He believes it’s time to remember who we are. We’re Americans: tough and resilient. We choose hope over fear. Science over fiction. Truth over lies. And unity over division. We are the United States of America. And together, there is not a single thing we can’t do. Join Team Joe today:

5 Ways School Leaders Can Begin to Better Equip Themselves to Deal With the Challenge We’re Facing

One of my mentors begins each interrogative problem-solving conversation with the same question, “Who knew what, when, and what did you do about it?” The question pushes us to think and rely on our morals, integrity, judgment and common sense in order to act, and ultimately to lead.

Amidst the Trump era and current Coronavirus pandemic, organizations, school districts and citizens at large are looking for solid leadership. We are searching for leadership that offers honesty, hope, guidance, direction and motivation as we all rally to get through the next several months. Many leaders are unsuited and ill-equipped to deal with the level of challenge we are facing as a country. The current health crisis has disrupted everything about our way of existing. For some, the adjustments have been inconvenient, but for others, the adjustments have been life-altering.

We could list a series of cliché terms and attributes that help define solid leadership, but that wouldn’t be helpful. Instead, we need to discuss the ways in which we operationalize those skills and attributes to execute the kind of leadership necessary to save lives.

Below, I offer a non-exhaustive list of thought-points that offer leaders a place to begin, and most importantly, ideas for each of us to reflect upon no matter where we find ourselves in the leadership structure. 

Be antiracist: At all times. Not just now.

First, we need school leaders who are actively and aggressively working to be antiracist. Dr. Ibram Kendi defines an antiracist as one who is supporting an antiracist policy through actions or expressing an antiracist idea. Antiracism is a powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity, and are substantiated by antiracist ideas.

School leaders must have deep knowledge, or be committed to developing an awareness and understanding of the history of race and racism in order to disrupt racist leadership practices that further disenfranchise Blacks and other groups of color that are treated unjustly.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, physician, immunologist, and now famous Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, asserts that “health disparities have always existed for the African American community.”

Coronavirus, coupled with these inherent and systemic disparities, are causing the Black community to suffer and die at alarming and disproportionate rates. Many of these same social determinants are shining a light on gaps that exacerbate inequities in schools. All leaders must be antiracist, or at least be deeply committing to becoming antiracist. 

Be clear bout your core values: Articulate and live them out each day.

School leaders must place humanity above all else. Get clear on your core values. What centers you? What drives your decisions? For this to happen, we must know and name our core values. Far too often leaders don’t do the hard work to identify and live in their core values. If leaders are unaware of their core values, they will be easily blinded by competing distractions, noise and insurmountable criticism that, in many ways, can be debilitating.

While there are several values and value statements, it is the clear communication of these values that inspire others to follow, support and work alongside you—or not.

It is also important to note that we only have a single set of values and that these values ultimately shape how we show up to this work. You don’t have a personal set and professional set. As Brene Brown argues, “We don’t shift our values based on context.” Further, Brown argues that we only have two core values.

When selecting your values, continue pruning your list until you have two. For example, my core values are courage and justice. I believe in trying to be brave and vulnerable at all costs and telling the entire story of inequity in schools and in this country. I also value justice. If I am asked to participate in an inherently unjust policy that will lead to inequitable outcomes for any group, I assert myself and offer an alternate solution.

School leaders can’t fake their values, and they will be challenged and often in conflict with those of friends, family members and colleagues in the workplace. You’ll know you’ve selected the right core values when behavior and decisions are very closely aligned to the values you have selected. If your behavior and decisions are not consistent, then your core values are aspirational. If you keep working and keep them top of mind, and you will eventually live them out. We cannot hide what drives us.  

Be an effective communicator: Clear, compassionate, empathic communication is the key.

Communication is successful when the message the speaker sends is the same message the listener hears. Exceptional school leaders are clear communicators. Communication is both an art and a science, and the balance is delicate and complex. It is necessary for leaders to craft a complete message that includes all relevant information. Additionally, the messaging should be clear and brief, conveying information that is plainly understood and concise.

Lastly, the information needs to be timely and valid. This can be done by offering and requesting information in an appropriate timeframe, verifying authenticity and validating information. We are in the era of mistruths, omissions and outright lies. Leaders must communicate effectively, early and often, and above all, truthfully.

The ability to communicate is one of the most valuable skills we could acquire. On April 9, 2020, referring to the COVID-19 pandemic, former President Barack Obama argued that “the biggest mistake any of us can make in these situations is to misinform.” He went on to say, “Speak it clearly, speak it with compassion, speak it with empathy…” During this time of uncertainty, confusion, and conflation of reality and rumor, it is paramount to serve as leaders who are clear in their communication, compassionate in their words and candid at all costs.

Mayors have been working hard to help us get through this pandemic, and they’ll have just as big a task to help people through hard times ahead. I spent some time with many of them today to thank them for their efforts, and asked them to keep up the good work. https://t.co/YzqPMPo8m2

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) April 9, 2020

Be data-driven and learning-focused: Facts and data matter now more than ever.

School improvement efforts should include a problem of practice and data. Two catchy slogans guide my thinking when I support school teams: “The data made me do it” and “In God we trust. All others? Bring data.” In the face of the current pandemic and leading through crisis in general, leaders must work aggressively to scrub data and commit to deep learning about the challenge to safely respond to and ultimately eradicate the pandemic.

Examining data, both historical and current, helps to ensure leaders work to understand causes, trends and possible outcomes. For example, from a critical race perspective, every current inequity in education and society writ large can be illuminated by historicization, or historical contextualization. COVID-19 has uncovered disparities in access to technology, internet access, food, healthcare, affordable childcare, and myriad resources that many middle-class educators take for granted.

Even a cursory study of the history of African American and Latinx achievement reveals longstanding struggles for equity in education and access to basic needs. Further, a commitment to data triangulation and study guides leaders away from repeating mistakes and closer to solutions. Leaders must do the hard work of daily study to get smart about the context and complexities of the multitude of scenarios their stakeholders bring. Lest we not forget, the opportunity gap remains a major crisis. 

Be about the big “Cs”: Don’t just talk about them. Be about them.

Collaboration is better than competition. School leaders must resist the temptation to compete against other leaders and members of their teams. This sense of collaboration must be fostered and baked into the fabric of the organization or institution. Collaboration makes space for kindness, critical thinking, problem-solving and collective efficacy.

We also know from a wide swath of research that diverse, collaborative teams with ample perspectives and expertise, life experiences, racial and gender identities reach solutions to complex problems more effectively. Therefore, crisis leadership not only calls for additional collaboration, but inclusive collaboration if possible.

This list is a place to start as we seek sound leadership. 

By: Heidi Oliver-O’Gilvie
Title: 5 Ways School Leaders Can Begin to Better Equip Themselves to Deal With the Challenge We’re Facing
Sourced From: educationpost.org/5-ways-school-leaders-can-begin-to-better-equip-themselves-to-deal-with-the-challenge-were-facing/
Published Date: Fri, 08 May 2020 22:00:26 +0000