Thursday, August 02, 2007
LIteracy, Progress and the American Way
Another installment from my time at the Hechinger Institute seminar for New Education Reporters in July. Figured I'd wrap this up since we'll likely be blogging about the seminars we attend at NABJ next week.The notes below -- some are story ideas, others are sites to check out, still more are concepts. Enjoy and ask questions if you have them. I'll be happy to clear up any confusion.
- Get comfortable with the good folks at the National Center for Early Development and Learning (http://www.ncedl.org/)
- Same with the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (http://www.nichd.nih.gov/)
- When you observe a class, describe the emotional, organizational and instructional support to kids – that’s how you accurately assess a class. Check the tone of voice, physical distance that is maintained and eye contact.
- Tips for judging preschool classrooms (http://www.classobservation.com/): check the degree of engagement between kids and teachers – increased interaction shows comfort, security; look at other kids, not just hose close to the teacher – how are they engaged? Everything should be intentional – kids should be interacting, engaged and learning
- Tips for assessing high schools: what hits your eye when you walk through the door: that’s the image the school wants to project ( pictures of top 5 percent of graduates or athletic trophies)
- Test scores are akin to box scores in sports: you can’t describe a team accurately by scores (tests) alone; you have to look at the entire game (classrooms)
- Good principals can’t be found in the office; if they’re in their office, they don’t know what’s in their schools. Principal job is to get everything out of the say so the teachers can teach and students can learn
- How to Increase Access in Public School
- distrust is earned. By nature, news is things that are out of the ordinary.
- Don’t say schools have a “drug problem.” Society has a drug problem. That’s just reflected in the schools.
- Educators are legitimately protective of students (pedophiles, privacy issues, etc)
- Educational writers should write with context (ex: “It’s not easy to educate when parents are unemployed…instead of focusing only on ailing test scores, what factors outside of school building impact learning?)
- You won’t get in where there’s no personal access (get to know people)
- Let them know that the better look we get at the school, the better it is for kids – we can’t see how the school looks unless we get in. - Interviewing questions an educator always asks: How do you view teaching? Is it a calling or a job? Have you played competitive sports? If so, you’ve learned teamwork.
- who gets left out in this age of boutique schools -- are boutique schools tracking for the new millennium?
- The American High School system is obsolete – it needs reinvention and redesign, not reform (that is one take on it)
- Theory of Change: schools have no idea what the problem is or how to fix it because they don’t know what good teaching is supposed to look like. - Who actually gets fired because of the evaluation system? A pro forma system doesn’t foster improvement.
- Relevance and Relationships = how you motivate students. What is the value added? Extent you expect more from a student in the 10th grade than a student in the 4th grade?
Ask teachers what you want students to know and be able to do as a result of their lesson assessment? There are higher standards, yes, but are they performance or content based? Are those standards clear? What does excellence look like for a student? - Have political leaders take the NECAP (your local assessment) and then have them evaluate it.
- What do you mean by rigor and how will you assess it. IS content all you want to teach or do you want to teach competencies? Being able to memorize facts vs. being able to logically defend an argument.
- What does it mean to be a competent high school grad? What do they know? What don’t they know? What is the standard for excellence?
- Talk to people 2-5 years out of high school. What ways has high school prepared or not helped you for the career you’re doing now? What could they have done differently or better? What could they have done to help you? What could they have done to help you stay in school?
- There is no such thing as a grade level. What a 3rd grader in Atlanta learns is different than what a 3rd grader in Detroit learns: states set the grade levels of what students should know – it’s not regulated.
- Check out the Trial Urban NAEP -- http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/reading/results2003/districtresults.asp -- did a major city assessment and found that environment was one of the things that impacts a student’s learning.
- Walk to school with a kid. What do they see? Libraries, businesses and clean parks? Or abandoned houses, graffiti and blight? What they see makes a difference?
- Look at old proficiency tests and see if the after school programs are effective and if it matters if they are cut or not. Compare NECAP (or other state tests) to former assessments.
- What safety nets are there for kids who can’t read in high school? How many kids can’t read? Define their plan of action for fixing things. What teacher training is there to help older learners? What are students reading? What is the class size? How do these learning classes impact their graduation credits?
Labels: education, seminars/workshops, tips and tricks
continue...Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Education 101: Testing
When it comes to covering education these days, it's likely you'll come across an alphabet soup of acronyms you'll need to use in daily reporting. But Drew Gitomer, from Educational Testing Service, and Daniel J. Losen, of UCLA and Harvard Law School, told Hechinger attendees that it's more than just NCLB, IEPs and HSPA***.
Here are a few of the tips, tricks and story ideas they offered:
- Get a technical advisor – someone from a local university to help explain things to you
- Weigh significance over meaning. It can be statistically big but mean nothing in the classroom. Numbers can mean different things to different people.
- Total definitions are wrong: there is no silver bullet or magic wand. It’s likely a combination of things that made the scores come out as they are.
- Testing became the solution, when really, all testing should be is a thermometer.
- Seek confirmation of what the tests say. Compare the test scores to tests that cover the same topics, graduation rates, grade retention, other trends over time. Are low achievers leaving the testing pod? What are your dropout rates?
- Look at the raw data. Has the test changed? What is the enrollment vs. the number of students who were tested? Who was left out?
- Dig beyond your state information: National Assessment of Educational Progress – shows no change in reading progress since NCLB began
- Other factors to focus on: graduation rates, attrition (and English language) mobility, grade retention/advancement (kids being held back to pass test?), suspension/attendance/lost instructional time (suspensions new ‘class trips’ for poor performing kids on test days), teacher quality retention
- Look at 9th graders and see how many actually get their diplomas
- What are the costs of dropouts: Cost of incarceration, welfare, etc?
- If a child receives multiple suspensions, the likelihood that they will drop out before they reach the 10th grade triples.
- Do your own math
- Look at data over time
- Disaggregate data by race, gender, special needs, etc
- Look for data loopholes
- Proficiency means different things in different states. What is the proficiency in your state? How does your coverage area hold up against other students? If I’m not proficient, what’ can’t I do? If I’m proficient, what can I do? What can’t I?
- Contact NAEP – are the tests dumbed down? Are they increase graduation to decrease the number of dropouts? Teachers staying on the job longer? Equating study.
- Get off message: When tests are good, administrators chalk it up to good teaching or new programs (FYI: always wait for a few years to pass before extolling the effectiveness of a program. Anything before then is just conjecture). When results are bad, they blame the budget, special needs students or other factors beyond their control. Ask them this: What did you do differently? That gets to the heart of the results. Evaluate from there.
***NCLB = No Child Left Behind
IEP = Individualized Educational Plan
HSPA = High School Proficiency Assessment
Labels: education, seminars/workshops, tips and tricks
continue...Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Honey, what you don't know could fill a book
This weekend, I attended the McGraw Seminar for Reporters New to the Education Beat at the Hechinger Institute in New York City.The information was really good. The sessions were really dense. Really.
In less than 72 hours, I - along with about 40 other journalists from across the country - got a crash course in No Child Left Behind, Teacher Pay vs. Student Achievement, Literacy and the all elusive Rigor, among other things. I believe I learned more about education in these past few days than I learned in 16 years worth of real education.
I have to say that attending the seminar was enlightening. Really, I suppose humbling would be a better word. By any account, I was a crasher to the conference. Sure, I applied and was accepted, but this seminar was for EDUCATION reporters.
In case you've been living under a rock, I cover the town of West Warwick. All of it. Cops. Courts. Sewers. Municipal Government. Everything. The reason I got in is because a good portion of my coverage is devoted to my local school district. I'm glad they made the exception.
Honestly, I thought I'd been doing a good job covering my school district. I wrote about the budget crisis. I've been following their soon to materialize legal woes. I've spent days observing special needs programs so that I can highlight them. I attend school committee meetings. What else could I do?
Apparently a lot.
Listening to the questions the other attendees asked with such authority, I felt downright ashamed. While they talked about achievement gaps, merit based pay and a whole bunch of acronymns I dare not repeat, I realized that there was so much more to education that I didn't know.
So much more of a story that I was missing.
I stayed relatively quiet during the weekend. Honestly, I felt that my questions would only serve to halt the conversation - not advance it. As a friend of mine once told me, I didn't feel like I knew enough to ask a question. So I listened. And took a lot of notes.
Over the next few days, I'll begin combing through my notes (half a stenopad's worth, front and back) to bring the information I learned to the wonderful readers of Ten95. (Sorry for not blogging sooner -- I didn't have my computer with me at the conference.)
If you get nothing else, I hope you'll be able to pull some story ideas that you can use in your district. Stay tuned.
Labels: education, seminars/workshops, tips and tricks
continue...