ASCD Inservice

Does Tracking Keep High Schools in Black and White?

Last school year Cloonan Middle School in Stamford, Conn., began detracking and implementing mixed-ability classrooms to address pervasive achievement gaps. Interest in detracking remains high; in the current most-clicked ASCD SmartBrief story, NPR follows the effects of tracking at Columbia High School in Maplewood, N.J.

Columbia High tracks students by considering a combnation of grades, test scores, and teacher recommendations. This leveling restratifies a diverse student population into groupings that cut primarily along color lines: mostly white kids in high-level classes, mostly black kids in low-level classes.  

NPR reports that school leaders at Columbia High are researching alternatives to tracking. Past efforts to detrack have been shot down by well-organized parent groups who feared their higher-tracked children would be shortchanged by mixed-ability groupings. Teachers are not totally on board either. The NPR story quotes one veteran teacher who thinks organizing intruction in a widely mixed-ability classroom is frustrating (and maybe even unrealistic).

While Cloonan Middle moves forward with detracking, Columbia High hits a wall. Is tracking harder to break at the high school level? If tracking perpetuates achievement gaps, will detracking minimize gaps?

Platooning Ballooning at the Elementary Level

Platooning, or departmentalizing instruction according to content area, is on the rise in elementary schools, according to last week's most popular SmartBrief story. High-stakes tests that target subject areas and grade levels are cited as the big motivator in this pedagogical shift.

Critics of platooning say young students benefit from the continuity and stability of one teacher year-round, and that one teacher can more easily make connections among multiple content areas. Advocates say its a cost-neutral way to focus teacher training to meet and exceed heightened content standards. Evidence that platooning is better or worse for learning is unclear, because definitions of content specialists vary from school to school.

Is the one-teacher-per-classroom model inadequate for elementary students? Does platooning in the early grades have a silo effect on learning? Or do young students benefit from being assigned subject-specific teachers?

Duncan Puts Ed Schools on Blast

Last week saw the most clicks landing on coverage of Arne Duncan's speech at Columbia University's Teachers College, where the Education Secretary criticized U.S. education schools for ill-preparing K-12 teachers. High enrollment programs like education bring in the bucks, but often, universities choose to spend that money on smaller, more prestigious programs like physics, Duncan said. The government has also been remiss in setting the licensure bar too low and disinvesting in high-quality mentoring programs, he added.

In his speech, Duncan cited former Columbia Teacher's College President Arthur Levine's 2006 report Educating School Teachers, which warned education schools to raise their standards and align program goals or prepare to be totally replaced by alternative certification programs. Duncan said the teachers he's talked to say education schools fall short on two main points:

Can Focusing on Student Needs Bring Peace To Ed. Wars?

Last week's most-clicked ASCD SmartBrief story lauds schools who side-step the politics of pedagogy and adapt teaching practices to meet their students' needs.

Career and college preparation, skills and content--education writer Karin Chenoweth editorializes that good schools do both by starting with the clear goal of educating all students, and then doing whatever it takes to make that happen.

It sounds simple: When students don't learn, change your practice based "not on a preset philosophy, or a set of program prescriptions, but on what would best help students learn."

Is this maxim at work in your schools? If not, what complicates curricular decisions?

Weighing Enthusiasm vs. Experience of Alt. Certified Teachers

Transition-to-Teaching, Teach for America, and New Teacher Project Teaching Fellows--in the past few years, the path to the classroom has dramatically changed, particularly in urban districts. In Indianapolis, a city that has long struggled to fill teaching vacancies, school officials are eager to enlist these energetic new recruits, saying the new teachers' enthusiasm offsets their inexperience. Programs like TFA are also highly competitive and select candidates that average higher test scores than their ed. school peers.

As Stephen Sawchuck reports, Indiana is a flashpoint state in the debate over licensure. Notably, the New Teacher Project recently studied human resources policies in Indianapolis Public Schools, and made recommendations that would give principals more autonomy over staffing decisions.

Critics of the trend to prefer alternatively certified teachers over those who take a traditional four-year route to the classroom claim that students pay the price for expediting the teacher training process. Reading instruction, especially, has been identified as a weak spot for alternatively certified teachers. While these programs ratchet up literacy training, the federal government last week stepped in with $43 million in new Teacher Quality partnership grants, money that'll largely go to residency programs at schools of education.

Will one route to the classroom emerge as the new gold standard?

You can bet we're considering these topics as we plan the May issue of Educational Leadership on How the Teaching Profession is Changing. (P.S. the deadline to submit articles for this theme is December 1, 2009.)

Mastery Charters as National Model?

Last week, everyone was reading about Mastery charter schools in Philadephia. The schools and their leadership are getting props from the Obama administration for their rigorous college-prep-for-all curriculum model, wed to a strict behavior code, and emphasis on personal responsibility and interpersonal skills.

Mastery's school years and days are longer, struggling students attend mandatory Saturday tutoring sessions, and students must achieve a grade of 76 percent or higher in order to advance grade levels. Based on success at Mastery's initial school site, former Philly schools chief Paul Vallas enlisted Mastery to convert three of the district's most-troubled middle schools to charters. At all sites, school violence is way down and student achievement is much higher.

DOE Secretary Duncan calls Mastery "a national model" for school reform, and under Duncan's four options for turning around failing schools, organizations like Mastery are definately poised for expansion.

And this raises some familiar questions from critics like whether rural areas would be able to pony up new staff required in most charter-style takeovers, whether students fall through the cracks of charter enrollment procedures, and what sort of quality assurance measures will govern charter expansion.

Carnegie Report Calls for a Revolution in Adolescent Literacy

A Time to Act, the final report released last week by the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s Council on Advancing Adolescent Literacy, calls on education leaders to restructure schools, particularly grades 4-12, around literacy. For example, the report advocates for hiring teachers skilled in literacy instruction across content areas, building adolescent literacy training into preservice and ongoing professional development for teachers and principals, and using and maintaining statewide data systems that inform all literacy instruction.

Capitalizing on A Time to Act requires active support from the federal government. The report suggests putting more money (via Title 1 or creation of a separate fund) toward disadvantaged middle and high school students; supporting common core standards (like these); and backing the draft reading legislation currently kicking around Congress, which proposes $1.2 billion toward literacy in grades 4-12 (currently funded at $35 million per year under the Striving Readers program).

Though adolescent literacy instruction is prime for more research and development, A Time to Act underscores the importance of teaching reading within the nuanced context of each subject area, and beyond the current concentration on decoding skills in grades K-3.

Staying On Message

Obama's address to U.S. schoolchildren dominated education news last week, and likewise, it was a big topic at last night's kickoff of ASCD's LEAP Legislative Institute.

Author and journalist Gwen Ifill fielded questions from educators concerned that, in the past week, a universal message about the importance of hard work and staying in school was drowned out by political ideology. The big education story quickly became the hype surrounding the speech, not the speech's message itself. Ifill shared her frustration, urging not only media to be responsible in covering important education stories but also educators to help students parse between opinion and fact.

LEAP participants are charged with bringing important education issues, like the dropout crisis, ensuring ESEA will be reauthorized with full funding, and closing the achievement gap, to their representatives during this week's scheduled Capitol Hill visits.

What are the big education stories in your district, and how do you make sure they are heard?

Showing the Speech?

Fueled by talk radio characterizations and "artless" curricular suggestions from the Department of Education (DOE), Obama's speech (planned for online broadcast today at noon) to school children became quite the political football last week. Since this story broke loose of its teapot, the DOE has reworded the reflection activity accompanying the speech, and the officials have assured that the speech will focus on working hard and staying in school—it won't be a pitch to sway kids politically.

Most schools are opting to show or make the speech available to students, with parents and guardians making the call about whether their kids participate. Marc Cohen, principal of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Germantown, Md., and 2009 ASCD Outstanding Young Educator, recently wrote that he's "embarrassed to admit just how much time I've spent planning for and responding to concerns about the President's speech to our nations' children." He adds,

Newspaper headlines talk of outraged communities and stepping over the lines of power. The pundits opine about using our children for political gain. As for me, I just want my students to hear the most powerful man in the world talk about the importance of staying in school and getting a good education. I want my African American students especially to see a vision of success within their grasp if they answer the President's call to take their education seriously.

Cohen is one of the many administrators who has decided to show the speech, making clear that parents need only ask if they want their kids to opt out.

What about your school? Have you had to deal with fallout over the speech, and what was your ultimate decision? If you're showing the speech, will teachers incorporate it into lesson plans or keep it as a stand-alone activity?

Standards-Based Report Cards Replace Letter Grades

This year report cards at Miles Elementary in northern Kentucky, near Cincinnati, Ohio, will report student progress toward specific standards, instead of letter grades. Teachers collaborated to create rubrics to determine whether students are making no progress, making progress, meeting standards, or above the standards that will help them continue to the next grade level.

So far, it looks like Miles may have learned a few lessons from Prospect Hill Elementary's (Pelham, N.Y.) switch to standards-based grading—parent involvement is playing an important role in the transition from letter grades.

Furthermore, our assessment expert Jim Popham offers this advice to schools adopting standards-based grading:

[T]he quality of your standards-based report card initiative depends on the clarity and rigor of the reporting system you adopt. Standards-based reports that are less than clear will be less than useful. Second, if parents, students, and teachers are obliged to evaluate a student's progress with respect to an excessive number of content standards, such a report card approach is certain to stumble. Standards-based clarity is a good thing. Standards-based clarity about too many standards is a contradiction in terms. The upper-limit number of standards to include in such report cards should be based on what the participants can easily keep in the forefront of their minds—somewhere between 6 and 12 standards. I lean toward the lower end of that range.

Bob Marzano's Classroom Assessment & Grading That Work goes deeper, explicitly outlining the steps for implementing standards-based grading and asking us to consider how our methods for reporting student achievement (letter vs. standards-based grades) make students—and teachers—more capable to improve learning.

Meta-Analysis Shows Online Learning Benefits

A recent meta-analysis of research comparing online learning with traditional classroom learning showed that, on average, students performed better in online learning conditions as opposed to exclusively face-to-face instruction. Researchers found this effect was larger in studies contrasting conditions that blended elements of online and face-to-face instruction with conditions taught entirely face-to-face.

Report authors are emphatic that their meta-analysis does not crown online as the superior learning medium. In the studies reviewed, online learning was supported by conditions like extended time on task, supplemental materials, and increased opportunities for collaboration, and it's the combination of these elements that created observed advantages for online learners.

Another caveat: Despite estimates that more than a million K-12 students took online courses in the 2007-08 school year, very little research rigorously compares learning effectiveness in those courses to traditional learning experiences. Only five studies reviewed in the meta-analysis met inclusion criteria.

Although this meta-analysis mainly focuses on postsecondary and adult education experiences, K-12 stakeholders can certainly draw from the recorded benefits of additional time on task, support materials, and opportunities for collaboration that online learning afforded. In addition, researchers found that students benefit from online learning that is not simply a traditional classroom unit presented in an online format. When blending online learning with face-to-face instruction, this research suggests online learning that supports personalization, choice, and reflection.

Broader support for online learning may chip away at traditional, classroom-based instruction, but a short piece about this report in the NY Times claims learning will remain a community-based activity.

NAEP Drafts Tech-Literacy Exam Framework

Last week NAEP released a discussion draft of their framework for a national assessment of technological literacy, a computer-based test to be given to a sample of students in 4th, 8th, and 12th grades in 2012.

The draft defines technology and technological literacy broadly, with the latter being "the capability to use, understand, and evaluate technology as well as to apply technological concepts and processes to solve problems and reach one's goals." Assessment targets will be divided into three major areas of technological literacy: Technology and Society (p. 44), Design and Systems (p.57), and Information and Communication Technology (p. 70). Turn to page 94 for the kinds of practices that articulate the thinking and reasoning used to respond to assessments across these three targets.

This 2012 test would be NAEP's first assessment of technological literacy, and framework authors acknowledge the challenges to getting it right (see page 34 in the draft). Limited time, resources, and the scope of what skills can be measured, not to mention trying to predict and assess future technological innovations, are some of the big hurdles.

Like other NAEP assessments, the test will evaluate technological literacy in the context of relevant social issues (see p.85). Some (see Stephen Krashen's comment on the EdWeek article) wonder how NAEP developers will keep pace with changing technology, not just new tools but unforseen contexts.

What do you think about this draft or the undertaking in general? 

$350 Million Test Makeover

Recently, Secretary Duncan announced $350 million of the $4.35 billion Race to the Top fund will be set aside to improve assessments of student achievement. Standardized, multiple choice tests are cost-effective and mathematically reliable but largely criticized for not drawing a detailed picture of student learning.

Advancements in testing technology, along with an injection of federal funds, could mitigate the high cost of developing and scoring richer, performance-based assessments, Ed Week notes. Experts said better tests would improve students' critical thinking and give teachers informative feedback on how students learn.

These improvements could be hamstrung, though, if assessments are marginally improved within a federal education agenda that also needs an overhaul. NCLB is criticized for focusing exclusively on accountability, without giving educators much useful information other than who's meeting AYP and who isn't.

Can this $350 million infusion help create assessments that are informative not just about the "who" of student achievement, but the how and why?

Snapshot of a Turnaround School in Nevada

Valley High in Clark County, Nev., went from being a school in need of improvement to a high achieving turnaround through an approach that seems to have teacher leadership at its core. Valley Principal Ron Montoya reorganized the high school into small learning communities led by teacher teams and focused on clarified learning objectives (the state proficiency exam, literacy, and basic skills). Teams of teachers really knew their students, their colleagues, and how to best support both.

Administrative leadership at Valley said, "We relied on teachers' professional experience in the classroom to tell us what would really work to reach the kids." In addition to big jumps in achievement, professional morale is up at Valley—teacher turnover has dropped by about 75 percent.

Draft Common Standards Draw Mixed Reviews

Last week, Core Knowledge blog posted a draft of the national English and math standards being proposed by a partnership led by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers.

Though the draft still has several months' worth of comment and review scheduled, Core was quick to give the documents a failing grade. Too little guidance on what literary texts to teach and too much emphasis on skills over content were Core's big problems with the proposed English standards.

Others from the International Reading Association and the education community in general are pleased that this initial draft is not overly prescriptive and incorporates creativity and critical thinking. The standards are expected take on more depth and detail as they are developed. Likewise, the math standards drew some cautious optimism and hopes that K–12, four-year college, and vocational educators will be involved in the review process.

Beside the concern that teachers will not be involved in drafting these standards, others have asked who common standards address: are they a basic bar for all students, regardless of what they will do after high school?

Gap Data Both "Hopeful" and "Sobering"

A new study from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) looks at several years of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores for black and white students to determine achievement gap trends on a national and state level. The results show small gains in closing the black-white achievement gap, mostly at the elementary level.

Although these small steps are encouraging, the slow rate of change and lack of significant progress in closing 8th grade reading gaps has some officials doubtful these gains will put much of a dent in the high school dropout rate.

Nebraska and Wisconsin demonstrated particularly grim statistics(from Education Trust's statement on the NCES study) :

• In Nebraska, the black-white gap in 4th grade reading has doubled since 2002, while scores for African American students have declined.
• Wisconsin has among the largest black-white gaps in the country, with African American students trailing their white peers by 45 points in 8th grade math and 38 points in 8th grade reading.

Education Trust says that though some black students enter school behind their white peers academically, schools contribute to these deficits by staffing predominately black schools with less prepared teachers and by providing less challenging curriculum and less funding compared to majority white schools. The trust gave kudos to Delaware and Arkansas for intensive, statewide efforts to raise expectations, tie instruction to standards, and provide professional support to their educators. These efforts contributed to significant gains and provide a lesson to states hoping to follow suit.

Teaching No Longer Recession-Proof

Growing student enrollment, efforts to reduce class sizes, and a somewhat stable economy (at least, in comparison to the recent economic crisis) had made education-related jobs fairly stable—with employment growing by about 3 percent annually in the last 15 years.

That growth came to a halt in the past 12 months, reports the Wall Street Journal. New teachers and those not teaching math, science, or special ed are the most vulnerable to layoffs. And while Teach for America predicts placements from their program will continue to increase, big districts like New York City and Los Angeles plan on reducing reliance on the induction program.

Still, WSJ reports there's no ebb in the tide of young professionals pursuing teaching credentials. Presumably, if they are following this news, working in high-needs subjects and schools will be part of their career planning.

Has the recession caught up with education-related employment in your district?

Bye-Bye Textbooks, Hello Improvement

At Woodlawn Elementary School in St. Petersburg, Fla., teachers were fed up with seeing their students perform poorly in math class. Instead of giving up or continuing what had obviously not been working, they got creative and rewrote the math curriculum. Part of the restructuring included throwing their textbooks in the closet and never looking back.

This week's most-clicked ASCD SmartBrief story highlights the changes educators made in their curriculum to boost scores on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT). By tossing out the textbooks, focusing on reading and writing, and creating games and group activities, teachers saw their students' test scores go from a D average to a B average in a short amount of time. The educators attributed this success to trying new things that provided them opportunities for higher engagement with the students as opposed to just teaching from textbook day in and day out.

Do you feel educators would be more effective if they were not tied down to teaching only from a textbook? What benefits do you see in removing textbooks from the classroom?

Tracking "Makes You Feel Like You're Not Smart"

Most in the education community agree that academic tracking creates a caste system—from who gets challenging course content and is expected to go to college, to who your friends are and where you sit in the cafeteria. Historically, black and Latino students disproportionately populate "lower" tracks.

Cloonan Middle School in Stamford, Conn., made last week's most-clicked ASCD SmartBrief news with the story of their transition from tracking to mixed-ability classrooms. The school hopes detracking will help close the achievement gap by broadening academic opportunities and raising expectations for all students. Cloonan will maintain an honors tier, but students' math and English scores will not, as before, designate them across the board as honors students. Students qualifying for honors will likely take some combination of honors and mixed-ability courses.

For the last eight weeks of school, Cloonan experimented with the new mixed-classroom model and found a drop in behavior problems. In an effort to teach to more diverse classes, teachers are trying out more collaborative projects, where students can learn from one another. Parents are on both sides of the debate, with lower-tracked parents applauding the shift as more equitable and some higher-tracked parents petitioning to keep the tracks and threatening to pull their kids into private schools.

Inservice applauds Cloonan's efforts and hopes the administration will provide ample support for teachers in the transition. To explore this topic more deeply, check out the free sample chapters of the ASCD book Detracking for Excellence and Equity, by Carol Corbett Burris and Delia T. Garrity. You can also check out our talk with these authors: listen to the whole thing here, or browse clips from the talk by topic on our ASCD Talks With an Author page.

The Asterisk on the Index?

Longtime Washington Post education reporter Jay Mathews is a big fan of college-level coursework in high school. His Challenge Index is, in some ways, a very high-profile platform for encouraging schools to increase and make more accessible opportunities for students to get involved with advanced curriculum. Mathews owns up to this agenda in his answer to Question 7, in the lengthy explainer that accompanies this year's index (definitely worth a read, along with the ASCD SmartBrief most-clicked headlines that two Dallas magnet schools topped this year's list). He also previews new features on the index, like the Equity and Excellence rating—"a new statistic developed by the College Board that indicates how well students are doing on the exams at each school while still recognizing the importance of increasing student participation."

Mathews defends the criteria behind calculating the index (number of AP, IB, and Cambridge exams divided by number of graduating seniors in a school), saying the idea is to create a list that measures how good schools are in challenging all students and not just how high their students' test scores are.

Critics argue that, while there's no harm in rewarding a culture of high expectations, the rankings fail to acknowledge the effects of shrinking graduating classes and large achievement gaps. In fact, Ed Sector's Andrew Rotherham asks if these problems might even help schools, especially magnets, find their way onto the index:

"For instance, Southside's low graduation rate means the number of AP and IB tests its students take is divided by a smaller number of students to reach the final ratio. This problem likely accounts for the inclusion on the list of many schools with magnet programs within them: pockets of AP and IB test taking surrounded by a school with dropout problems. Sadly, this is a metaphor for America's achievement gap problems more generally."

Eleven years since the index's debut, Rotherham and others challenge Mathews and Newsweek to use increasingly abundant accountability data to create a better metric for the best high schools.