It is tough to fire teachers

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For those people who still argue that the rules to terminate a bad teacher are fair, here’s a San Bernardino County Sun piece that reviews data from the Ontario-Montclair School District.

One teacher had a history of complaints dating back to 1993, but despite numerous reprimands and attempts by the district to dismiss him, he was not let go until 2008.

His credentials were revoked a few months ago, said Cynthia Byrd, district assistant superintendent of human resources.

The teacher was accused of inappropriately touching students and staff members for years.

The district also rated the teacher’s teaching performance as unsatisfactory and noted numerous shortcomings in his teaching practices.

“Part of the problem districts face is that although it’s easy for a board to take action to dismiss a teacher, the trial to appeal that they have after their dismissal is so teacher-friendly, so to speak,” said Cynthia Byrd, district assistant superintendent of human resources.

“You run the risk of having a teacher who has done something inappropriate returned to you and working for you for years on and feeling fairly untouchable.”

The teacher received a letter of reprimand in 2004 after complaints by students that he had inappropriately touched them or been in close physical proximity that made them feel uncomfortable.

Parents filed a complaint against the teacher in July 2001 claiming he asked students for food during lunch and made inappropriate comments.

A district official sent the state Commission on Teacher Credentialing a letter in September 2001 notifying it of an investigation into allegations against the teacher by a noon duty aide of sexual harassment and other misconduct The teacher was placed on leave pending a decision by the commission regarding the status of the teacher’s credentials.

The teacher’s credentials were suspended in January 2000 for six months and placed on probation for four years following a complaint in March 1999 alleging inappropriate touching of students as well as making inappropriate comments to students. The allegations were regarding events from 1996 through 1998.

The teacher was placed on leave in January 1997 pending an investigation of inappropriately touching a female student.

The teacher received a letter of reprimand in August 1995 for hugging and kissing students despite prior directives to refrain from such behavior.

He received a letter of reprimand in December 1994 following student reports that they witnessed the teacher hug a female student and “touch a girl’s butt.”

The teacher received a memorandum in February 1993 regarding interaction with students following reports from fellow staff members that they witnessed the teacher kissing a female student on the cheek and hugging a student in front of her mother.

“Our main concern is we just don’t want them with our kids if they behave like that,” Byrd said. “You don’t behave like that with kids.”

Byrd said one thing districts have to deal with is dismissing a teacher based on inappropriate behavior, only for the dismissal to be overturned and the teacher returned to work.

I don’t think anyone believes that teachers should be fired willy-nilly, but stories like this one, show that current procedures for terminating employees go much too far to protect the rights of teachers risking our students’ safety.

 

College Completion Rates Should Matter to K-12

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I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard both charter schools and traditional public schools brag about their “college going rate” and acting as if it proves that they’re a great school.  Just counting the percentage of your students who get accepted to college is basically a meaningless measure.  With sufficient effort, any students can be accepted to college.  In California, community colleges are forbidden by law from turning anyone away.

I thought this Huffington Post piece (yes friends, I read something on the HP) was interesting.  It discusses a shifting focus in K-12 education regarding its ultimate goal.

Recently, conversation around the goals of K-12 education has focused on college attainment — and not just high school graduation — since 60 percent of future jobs are expected to require postsecondary credentials. Many students take remedial courses once they get to college — a Manhattan Institute report found that only 32 percent of students graduate high school prepared for college. The Obama administration has encouraged states to adopt the Common Core, a set of uniform educational standards that aligns with college preparation. Meanwhile, public elementary and secondary schools are struggling to connect the disparate institutional dots — and to figure out to what extent they’re responsible for life outcomes.

Through the Harvard project, Avossa filled in the blanks about his students. He learned that while 72 percent of students attended college immediately after graduation in 2011, only 51 percent of Fulton County kids who attended college starting in 2004 have graduated. He found that 10 percent of students eligible for selective colleges weren’t attending at all. Avossa also learned through a national memo the project is releasing, titled “the High School Effect,” that academic performance in elementary school is not an accurate predictor of college enrollment.

This knowledge, predicts Avossa, a former principal, will shift more responsibility toward school administrators. “Our top priority used to be, let’s get them into college,” he says. “The question of whether they finished or not, we would say, that’s up to the university system, that’s up to the parents. But it’s clear that we have to play a role in that, that preparation in K-12 makes a difference.”

With the extremely high remediation rates at both 2-year and 4-year colleges, I believe it is critical that K-12 educators start looking beyond simply getting kids to college and start focusing on how we can prepare students to be successful in college.

I don’t think it requires major changes in K-12 instruction.  Let me share a story from my local high school.  The Language Arts teachers there spoke to faculty at the local community college to find out why their A students were ending up in remedial English courses.  From that conversation, they found out that the college professors (and the assessments used to determine the level of competence in English) expected students to have skills in expository writing.  Unfortunately, that wasn’t something that the high school teachers were focusing on in their instruction.  Now, several teachers from the school have participated in professional development and all of the language arts teachers are working to bring more expository writing into their curriculum.  As a result, they expect to see students better prepared for college-level work upon graduation.  It is a relatively small change that will hopefully have a big result.

 

Using Data to Keep Kids in School

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Even though the voice of the narrator reminded me of the sex education videos we saw as middle school students, I thought this video from the Center for Public Education raised some good points.  Interventions have more impact when they’re targeted at the students who need them rather than just applied to the whole population. School districts should be using the data they have to identify students early and use appropriate interventions to reduce the chance of them dropping out.

Data First Training: Keeping Kids in School from Center for Public Education on Vimeo.

More information about preventing dropouts is available here on the Center for Public Education’s web site.

 

Just what we don’t need

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As if we needed more incentives to let students languish in ELD classes, this column by John Fensterwald suggests that if the Governor gets his way in moving California to a weighted funding system, that’s exactly what could happen.

“Just to give money based on characteristics of one type or to an ambiguous program with little or no program goals is to court disaster because (the money) will just go on and on and on forever,” Sen. Jean Fuller, a Republican who was a superintendent of the Bakersfield City School District, testified at a hearing on the potential impact on English learners of a weighted student formula. “And the kids lose. They don’t get the proficiency they need fast enough.”

There appears to be a consensus that some English learners are already stuck in the system, although there’s disagreement as to why. Nearly one in four students in the state are English learners, with 70 percent in elementary school. In some districts, like Santa Ana, more than 80 percent of English learners were born in the United States. If parents, filling out a four-question survey, responded that they most often speak to their children in a language other than English, their children were required to take the California English Language Development Test, or CELDT, often as kindergartners.

In a study issued last year, the Center for Latino Policy Research at UC Berkeley concluded that CELDT is prone to misidentification, with only 6 percent of kindergarten students taking it in 2009-10 being classified as English language proficient. Since CELDT has never been administered to English-only kindergartners for comparison, it’s hard to know if the test is an accurate language measure or is a proxy for poverty and other deficits at home.  The language survey is not able to distinguish students who are truly bilingual, says Associate Professor Lisa Garcia Bedolla, co-chairwoman of the Center for Latino Policy Research.

But once identified as an English learner, a student is likely to stay an EL for years; an average of only 11 percent  are redesignated annually as fluent in English and no longer needing extra help, which can include pulling a child from regular class for extra English support.

We need more reasons to get students to proficiency in English, not fewer.  As bad as our public school finance system is, any changes can lead to unexpected results just like this one.

 

 

Great Debate on Teacher Unions

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A friend turned me on to the Intelligence Squared Oxford-style  debates.  They had a debate with the motion “Don’t blame teachers unions for our failing schools.”  They had some great panelists.  Supporting the motion were Randi Weingarten (AFT President), Kate McLaughlin (Union Local VP) and Gary Smuts (ABC Unified Superintendent).  Opposing the motion were Gary Moe (Hoover Institution), Rod Paige (Former US Secretary of Education) and Larry Sand (Teacher/Anti Union Activist).  If you’re interested in education reform, it isn’t a bad way to spend a couple hours. You can find the video here or you can watch it below.

DON’T BLAME TEACHERS UNIONS FOR OUR FAILING SCHOOLS (Full Debate) from Intelligence Squared U.S. on Vimeo.

 

More evidence kids should write more

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I thought this Education Week piece was interesting.  A Florida International University study for the Children’s Trust found that:

preschoolers’ early writing skills did predict both their grades and standardized test scores in second-grade reading and math.

The results were “very significant,” Dinehart said Tuesday from her university office. Her study is expected to be published this summer in the journal Early Childhood Education and Development.

Dinehart’s study examined the grades and standardized test scores of 3,000 second-graders in Miami-Dade County public schools and linked them back to information about the kids’ skills as preschoolers.

“Students who received good grades on fine motor writing tasks in pre-k had an average GPA of 3.02 in math and 2.84 in reading—B averages. Those who did poorly on the fine motor writing tasks in pre-k had an average GPA of 2.30 in math and 2.12 in reading—C averages,” according to a report on the university’s website.

Also, preschoolers who performed well on fine motor writing tasks “scored in the 59th percentile,” or just above average, on the Stanford Achievement test (SAT) for reading in second grade and in the 62nd percentile on the Math SAT. Preschoolers who had performed poorly “scored in the 38th percentile on the Reading SAT in second grade and in the 37nd percentile on the Math SAT.”

I guess it shouldn’t be surprising.  Pre-K students who have writing skills are likely those whose parents are spending the time with them so they are better prepared for kindergarten than their peers.  As other research shows us, most schools aren’t real great at helping students catch up when they get behind.

 

Parents don’t like the budget either

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I thought this post from Crystal Brown, board president of Educate Our State, a parent-led school reform organization did a decent job of addressing some of the biggest flaws in Governor Brown’s January budget proposal.

Parents from around the state have reviewed the governor’s proposed 2012-13 budget, and we would like to say, loud and clear, we are disappointed. We were hopeful that the Legislature and Gov. Brown would put together a budget that would ensure that schools, at the very minimum, would have stable funding for next year. We are still hopeful.

But the proposed budget doesn’t even come close. The main issues are 1) depending on an initiative passing after the school year has begun, and 2) moving the debt service into the school fund. There is a silver lining, however, in the form of the newly proposed weighted student formula. Such a system would be a huge improvement over the existing convoluted scheme, although there are many specifics as yet unresolved.

 

By making the November ballot measure a key part of the funding the budget, it once again leaves school districts with little choice but to plan for the worst case and make an additional $370/student in cuts, laying off teachers and further cutting programs.  I believe the Governor’s intent is to coerce parents into voting for his tax increase measure in order to spare schools from these additional cuts.  The reality is that because of the timing, the cuts are going to happen and school districts won’t know until half way through the school year how much they’re really going to receive from the state.