As promised, I’m posting Carolyn Sharette’s response to a reader’s concern that regular public schools don’t have the option of adopting a “no excuses” policy for students who refuse to do their work, or even to show up to pretend to do their work.
Carolyn is the Executive Director of the American Preparatory Academy, a Utah charter school with campuses in Draper and West Valley City.
I feel it is important to point out that public schools truly could change their policies to implement “no excuses” as a school standard.
As long as they provide a school, any school, for students to attend they have satisfied the federal and state requirements for FAPE (Free and Appropriate Public Education). Determining what is “appropriate” has been the work of court cases throughout the decades and in my opinion, has shown that districts have the power to establish no excuses policies and enforce them.
Why do Districts choose to allow students to remain in school who don’t meet attendance requirements or academic requirements? Does it serve students? Clearly, no. Does it handicap teachers? Clearly, yes. Does it degrade the experience for all students? Resoundingly, YES. So why is it allowed to persist as policy?
Do students benefit from a “no excuses” approach? Yes. Do adolescents benefit from opportunities to “try again” or “do over” with meaningful consequences? Again, yes. Being torn from friends and forced to attend a different school for a term can be very effective for students in Jr. High and High School. So why don’t teachers and parents join together and require districts to pass “no excuses” policies? Perhaps because most parents and teachers are misinformed and believe it is impossible. Perhaps even the district leaders believe it is impossible. But it is not impossible and should be vigorously pursued by parents, teachers and even students.
Fortunately, charter schools are providing this opportunity for students and act as a model for what could be done in all public schools. As a charter school leader, I feel we are doing students a great service, even when they don’t meet our expectations and return to their public school. The student has an opportunity to meet a standard, and if they don’t, they live the consequences and have a very valuable learning experience.
You may be surprised to learn that we don’t “kick them out”. We do not have the authority to do so. We do apply many, many remedies, such as parent conferences for missing work (students must call home EACH and EVERY time they are unprepared for class), detentions, and ‘parent interventions’ where parents are required to come to school and sit near their student and assist them in becoming an able learner. Some parents give up and pull their student out so they don’t have to comply. Some get tired of the phone calls. Some don’t know how to “make” their student comply and aren’t interested in learning how to impose meaningful consequences at home. Some students convince their parents they really don’t want to have to do all that is required and the parents pull the student out. Some student fail courses and realize high school graduation from our school will be very difficult and choose an easier route.
In any case, it is GREAT for students to have to pay a REAL price for failure. It is in these chances for a “do-over” that students learn. And parents appreciate the support when they are dealing with a difficult adolescent. This change, establishing performance standards at public schools and enforcing them, would revolutionize public education.
In another comment, Ms. Sharette expanded on these points.
There is no federal or state law that I am aware of that requires public schools to allow students who refuse to participate in the programs or maintain standards of conduct to remain in them. District policies have been crafted to allow students to stay in schools even after they have demonstrated they are not going to attend class, do homework, or maintain behavior standards. The requirements of FAPE (a Free and Appropriate Public Education) have not, to my knowledge, been interpreted to mean that districts must allow students to remain at a particular school.
Districts could raise the standards for their schools quickly by making it a privilege to attend the best schools – a privilege maintained through effort, participation and attendance. If a student misses the mark, he or she can attend a different school in the district, which would likely have a different focus and less positive outcomes (because more time needs to be spent on remediating the students who have failed prior classes, or focusing on truancy etc). Parents could also lose their free transportation if the school the student qualifies for is not their boundary school. Being required to drive their student to school would increase the parents’ participation. While this may be unpopular, I don’t believe it is a violation of FAPE and would increase parent and student participation in schools.
We would be doing these families a big favor if there were some real consequences for failure to participate in school. It should be applied each quarter (not just at year’s end) so students have LOTS of opportunities for “do-overs” which, I believe, is the key for many students during adolescence. If they fail a quarter, or don’t meet attendance requirements, they transfer to a different school. They could earn their original placement back, but it would be difficult. As a parent I would have appreciated this, and I believe many parents would appreciate the support of the schools in not allowing their students to fail or misbehave without real, meaningful consequences.
So the fact that public schools are “required” to take all students is true, but HOW they determine they will serve students is completely up to them. At this point, they choose to ignore the failure to participate and bad behaviors and force teachers to try to deal with it, which greatly and negatively impacts the experience of all students.
If it is not a level playing field for public schools, it is due to the districts’ lack of expertise in organizing their schools and implementing policies that effectively train students with real consequences. This is completely under the districts’ control. Therefore I believe it is not a valid argument against holding public schools accountable. Just because they CHOOSE to disadvantage themselves through ineffective policies that set up a system that doesn’t work very well, does not excuse them from being accountable. If the playing field isn’t level, it is under their control to make it so.
This makes a lot of sense to me. If we want to “level the playing field” for all public schools, including charter schools, wouldn’t we better accomplish this (and better serve our kids) by adopting a no-excuses policy across the board?
What do you think?
Sometimes the comments on my blog are so much better than my original post that I hate to see them buried down in the comments section.
My postings about the Romney education plan and long waiting lists for New York City charter schools generated the not uncommon complaint that charter schools cannot be fairly compared to traditional public schools. I responded with a link to a Harvard Center for Education Policy Research study comparing students who won admission to charter schools and those who did not not win admission to the same schools (in other words, presumably students with equally involved and dedicated parents.)
http://economics.mit.edu/files/6493.
One of my frequent commentators in turn replied:
I read the study. I think the problem is that we always want to find one variable and have that be the answer for our educational “problems”, we want one magic pill, that will cure all our educational ills. Right now for the far right that is charter schools. In the summation of the study I read “Longer school days, more instructional time on core content, a “no excuses” philosophy, and other structural elements of school organization appear to contribute to the positive results from these schools.” The authors of the study were right on and they pointed out some of the most important differences between charter and traditional schools. The “no excuses” philosophy is a huge difference between charter and traditional public schools. But then they lost me with the next sentence: “Perhaps most importantly, many of these elements could be implemented in traditional public schools, providing us with potential models for improvement across the Commonwealth”. Those elements cannot be implemented in traditional public schools because federal and state laws do not allow for it. I can speak for myself as a traditional public school teacher and tell you that I would love to implement a “no excuses” philosophy, but we can’t. When a student at a charter school doesn’t comply what happens? They are sent back to their neighborhood traditional public school. What happens if that student doesn’t comply in the traditional school, can we kick them out? No, we must invest ridiculous amounts of our very scarce resources in trying to get them to comply. We can’t we kick them out? The federal and state government won’t let us. We need to quit trying to compare apples to oranges and pretending that charters and traditional schools will ever be the same. Think about it, why do we call them Charter Schools? Because they get to write their own rules. Who rights the rules for traditional public schools? The state and federal government.
This commentator has more to say. You can find the entire comment at http://educatingourselves.blogs.deseretnews.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=860&action=edit
But I’m stopping here because I wanted to respond to the notion that regular public schools cannot adopt a “no excuses” policy. My first reaction was that maybe we SHOULD think about changing the rules for all schools. Before I had a chance to write a post about this, however, charter school principal Carolyn Sharette beat me to the punch. I thought her comments and proposal were so sensible that I wanted to give her a post of her own. That’s coming up next.
If you’re interested in learning more about Governor Romney’s education proposals, take a look at this thoughtful analysis by Michael Petrilli, the director of the Fordham Institute.
Here are the opening paragraphs:
Governor Mitt Romney’s long-awaited education address happened on Wednesday, but the most telling news broke Tuesday, when we learned that Margaret Spellings is no longer one of his education advisors. She quit on principle, I assume, because Romney decided to turn the page on No Child Left Behind. As his campaign’s education “talking points” read, “Governor Romney’s plan reforms [NCLB] by emphasizing transparency and responsibility for results. Rather than federally-mandated school interventions, states would have incentives to create straightforward public report cards that evaluate each school on its contribution to student learning.” (Read his thirty-four-page education policy white paper here.)
Presidential candidate Mitt Romney gave his first major address on education yesterday. Blasting President Obama’s and Senate Democrats’ repeated efforts to shut down the District of Columbia’s enormously popular (at least with parents) voucher program, he called for expanding school choice.
If you’d like to read the speech, delivered at the Latino Coalition’s annual economic summit, you can find it here:
Educational choice remains a controversial topic in Utah, and my frequent favorable comments on the charter school movement invariably draw some readers’ ire. But I think Governor Romney may have picked a winning issue, especially with minority voters.
Consider this year’s applications to New York City charter schools, many of which serve poor and minority students. From the New York Times:
Applications to New York City charter schools continued to grow this year, the New York City Charter School Center reported on Tuesday.
An estimated 133,080 applications were submitted for 14,600 available seats in this spring’s random admissions lotteries, according to the center, a nonprofit group that supports charters.
Because many families apply to multiple schools, the center estimates there were really 67,500 individual applicants.
“Approximately 4.6 students applied for each available seat,” said James Merriman, the Charter Center’s chief executive officer. “I think last year there were five applications for each available seat. So we see there’s just a strong demand for charter schools across New York City.”
He estimated that 52,900 families were wait-listed citywide, up from 51,100 last year, based on the Charter Center’s annual survey of charter schools. The city’s Department of Education doesn’t collect this information directly.
http://www.nytimes.com/schoolbook/2012/05/22/charter-school-group-reports-steady-demand-for-seats/
Yes, I know that charter schools have mixed results, though I’d note again that successful charters outperform public schools, especially with disadvantaged kids – and, perhaps more significantly, that unsuccessful charters shut down because parents don’t chose them. Since I’m always inclined to give parents the benefit of the doubt when it comes to choices about their own children, I think these numbers are significant. Obviously candidate Romney (who has an army of pollsters at his command) thinks so too.
I wanted to share one of the best articles I’ve read recently on the vexing issue of “teaching to the test.”
Admittedly, I probably like this Washington Monthly article so much because it defends a point I’ve made repeatedly in this blog. Opponents of teaching to standardized tests should not rejected testing. They should insist on better tests.
The article begins with a telling indictment of standardized tests: a description of how a clearly talented and dedicated English teacher abandons her best educational practices in the weeks leading up to standardized testing:
Working within a tight agenda, with five-minute intervals marked by a stopwatch, Voskuil began drilling the group. Together, the students read aloud an eleven-paragraph text called “Penguins Are Funny Birds.” Then they answered multiple-choice questions such as “According to the article, how do penguins ‘fly through the water’? A .) They use their flippers to swim. B.) They dive from cliffs into the sea. C.) They are moved by ocean currents. D.) They glide across the ice on their bellies.”
And why, Voskuil asked, is it important to read the italicized introduction that always accompanies such text passages? Because it’s a summary, the group responded.
Finally, Voskuil handed out her students’ scores from previous exams—eliciting reactions that ranged from apathy to sighs to celebration—and asked them to write down their “score goals” for the upcoming test. Remember, she told the sixth graders, “we are working toward a 3/3 on our DC CAS writing rubric.”
Voskuil hates teaching like this. It’s not that she fails to see the point, exactly. She knows that all this narrow drilling has, in fact, helped elevate her students’ scores (though they are still very low) in the three years since she has been teaching. And she recognizes the test’s value as a measure of some essential skills, and as a guarantor of her school’s and her own accountability. But the assessments confine and dumb down her teaching. “You are not even allowed to be a teacher when they are testing,” she says. “You are a drill sergeant.”
Yet the article goes on to contrast this approach not with a test-free educational environment . . . but instead with teaching to a better test:
In my recent series of blog postings on the common core standards, I expressed concern about what would happen if and when states adopted more stringent and meaningful assessments tied to the new standards.
Well, Florida just offered us a glimpse of what could happen.
From yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:
On Monday, the Florida Department of Education released preliminary scores on the writing test that showed a drastic falloff in student performance, with only 27% of fourth-graders receiving a passing score of 4, on a 6-point scale, compared with 81% last year.
The drop prompted the State Board of Education to call an emergency meeting on Tuesday. At that session, board members decided to lower the passing score to 3, boosting the percentage of those who passed back up to 81%. That threshold is significant, since it is used to calculate the grades that the education department awards to schools in Florida, from A to F.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303879604577412582163862906.html?mod=djemITP_h
I wanted to pass along a report on the progress made by students attending schools run by Los Angeles charter provider Green Dot. The study has the virtue of comparing these students with what sounds like a pretty comparable control group.
From today’s Education Week Update: Continue reading
We may be hurtling toward implementation of common core educational standards for Language Arts and Mathematics standards . . . but when it comes to social studies and science, the hare’s not even in the race. The National Research Council is working on science standards, and various social studies organizations are talking about the idea, without (it seems to me) a lot of enthusiasm or urgency. No one relishes the inevitable squabbles over evolution, or state’s rights, or whose history’s on first. And frankly, school districts and teachers are still struggling to chew and swallow the standards they’ve already signed on for.
Do these still missing pieces matter to implementing the common core?
I wanted to continue posting on some of the implementation issues posed by the Common Core. My subject for today is assessment, or rather more accurately, lack thereof.
Returning to the Education Week article that I cited in my last post.
One of the biggest questions hanging over common-standards implementation is what will be on the tests designed for them. Some educators have reported reluctance to move ahead with curriculum because they don’t yet know what the assessments, scheduled to be fully operational in 2014-15, will look like. Others feel confident enough to move ahead based on what they can glean from the standards themselves.
I’d like to move past the subject of how quickly most state school boards adopted the common core, and tackle what is now probably a more important question: How quickly should we move forward to implement these standards?
As I started to research this topic I ran across an Education Week issue that addresses most of the issues I intended to raise. Since this article may not be available to non-subscribers, I’m going to include fairly large chunks of the article, which struck me as balanced and not hostile to the common core standards, in my posts. I plan to stretch these comments out over more than one post, by the way, so that each post doesn’t get too long . . . and so that readers can comment on individual issues.
In some ways the title says it all: “Advocates Worry Implementation Could Derail Common Core.”
“The biggest potential pothole, by far, is failed implementation,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington think tank that has been tracking the standards and counts itself as an advocate. “It’s a huge, heavy lift if we are serious about teachers teaching it, kids learning it, curricula reflecting it, tests aligned with it, and kids passing those tests.”
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/04/25/29cs-overview.h31.html
Let’s break those “heavy lifts” into sets, beginning with “teachers teaching it.” The article continues,
Math teachers face having to teach skills to which they’re unaccustomed, since some concepts have been moved to lower grades in the new standards. They’re also being asked to focus longer and more deeply on fewer concepts and to emphasize conceptual understanding and practical applications of math. In many places, such as Howard County, Md., that has resulted in a flurry of activity as teachers brainstorm about how to design curriculum and pedagogy that embody the standards.
The English/language arts standards present challenges of their own. More than most states’ own standards, they insist on students building content knowledge and reading skill from independently tackling informational texts. They demand better analysis and argumentation skills, and they involve teachers from all subjects in teaching the literacy skills of their disciplines. Teachers in Kentucky, among other places, are experimenting with new templates that attempt to capture these key shifts.
It’s quite possible that these shifts will move us in the right direction. What I’d like to emphasize here, again, is the speed at which states are attempting to implement these changes. Utah’s goal is to have the core standards in place by 2014. Does that really offer teachers enough time to adapt their lesson plans and learn to use new materials? Especially when (subject for an upcoming post) that new textbooks may not yet be ready . . . and there may not be money in the budget for whole new sets of textbooks anyway.
Perhaps many teachers aren’t all that concerned about making this switch. In what I found perhaps the most disturbing section of this article, the author (experienced education journalist Catherine Gewertz) cites an email exchange for an education professor:
Most current teachers have read the standards for their grade level, think highly of them, and are willing to teach them, but few understand the profound changes in teaching that they will require, according to William H. Schmidt, a Michigan State University professor widely known for his studies of mathematics curricula. He is currently conducting research, through the university’s Center for the Study of Curriculum, on districts’ preparedness for the common standards.
“A majority of the teachers indicate that they think the new common-core standards are pretty much the same as what they have been doing,” Mr. Schmidt said in an email. “The difficulty I foresee is that, in spite of this openness toward their implementation, the data suggests that most teachers do not recognize how difficult that process will be.”
I’m guessing that many veteran teachers, who’ve seen any number of new programs come and go, figure they can ride out the common core storm, too. But let’s give core supporters the benefit of the doubt, and assume that these really are new, much tougher standards that are going to ask teachers to impart, and students to master, a new set of skills. Wouldn’t the claim that the common core will usher in a new education era gain credibility if we gave teachers more time to adapt?
What do you think?