Hiatus

As you might have noted, we haven't been posting much on the blog. Part of it is that it's summer and there aren't as many things happening. The other part is that it's summer and we are very busy running data and writing reports about the effectiveness of various programs last school year.
Next year, we will have more to do and less staff to do it, so running this newsblog may be one of the things that has to go. We'll see what we can manage. Until then, consider us on hiatus. (Sounds less permanent, eh?)

Report on Governor's actions on bills since the Oklahoma State Legislature adjourned on May 23, 2008

Last week Governor Henry met his constitutionally mandated deadlines of taking action - either signing into law or vetoing measures - that the Legislature passed and sent to him. Brief summaries of bills dealing with education that survived the process to be approved by the Governor follow. In each bill description there is a link to the enrolled version of the bill, i.e. the copy signed by the House, the Senate, and finally the Governor. Also included in this wrap-up of 2008 actions by the Legislature and the Governor is a list of bills that either were vetoed by the Governor or "died" in the House or Senate.

Signed bills:

SB 1186, signed by Governor on 5-5-08. This new law changes the minimum time required for physical education instruction in grades K-5 beginning in 2008-09 be increased to an average of 60 minutes each week. Click here to read the bill.

SB 1199, signed by Governor on 5-23-08. This is the appropriation bill for the State Department of Education. The bill gives details on which accounts supplied certain amounts of funding for the duties that the SDE is required to carry out. Click here to read the bill.

SB 1769, signed by Governor on 6-3-08. This bill amended current law to add provisions for school districts which have ten or fewer students participating in a summer reading remediation program to receive a base amount of funding in addition to the per-student reimbursement amount.
Section 3 of SB 1769 includes new law that spells out exactly how remediation monies will be allocated to each district based on each student's score on each subject-specific test.
Sections 4 and 5 are also new law. Click here to read the bill.

SB 2100, signed by the Governor on 6-3-08. This bill in earlier versions called for the State Dept. of Education to allow ten school districts to "de-regulate" their operations. This version that the Governor signed into law ended up without that de-reg language. Current law was amended to include pre kindergarten programs in charter school sites as well as allowing charter schools to retain personal properties if the charter school re-invents itself with a different sponsor.
Eight pages of current law were amended to clarify calculation and determination of recipients of the Academic Achievement Awards (AAA).
Sections 3, 4, and 5 add the Oklahoma Department of Career and Technology Education after every reference to the State Department of Education.
Section 7 amends language regarding employee organizations that are designated by an election of the employees in an appropriate bargaining unit.
Section 8 is new law that gives the State Board of Education the authority to issue an administrative order placing an elementary school district under full state intervention when such district has failed to meet financial requirements for school districts or accreditation standards. Click here to read the bill.

Vetoed bills:

HB 2633, vetoed by the Governor on 6-3-08. This bill had several versions, the last (and the one vetoed by the Governor) included language that would expand the testing window dates for EOI tests. The rejected bill also included language known as the Religious Viewpoint Antidiscrimination Act. Click here to read the veto message.

SB 1880, vetoed by the Governor on 6-6-08. The bill called for a continuation of ACE Task Force II, a group charged with offering recommendations to the Legislature regarding NAEP scores. Click here to read the veto message.

Dead bills:

HB 3122, died in conference committee. If approved, the bill would have changed the calculation of the school year from days to hours and would limit time allowed for professional meetings to 30 hours each school year.

SB 2101, died in conference committee. If approved, the bill would have made changes in requirements for alternative certification for teachers.

Big Props for a "Broader, Bolder Approach to Education"

The potential effectiveness of NCLB has been seriously undermined, however, by its acceptance of the popular assumptions that bad schools are the major reason for low achievement, and that an academic program revolving around standards, testing, teacher training, and accountability can, in and of itself, offset the full impact of low socioeconomic status on achievement.-The Broader, Bolder Approach to Education Task Force Report.

This morning, more than 60 heavy hitters kicked off a campaign calling for a "broader, bolder approach to education policy." (You may have already seen the print ads in the Washington Post and NY Times.) Co-chaired by Sunny Ladd, a Duke University economist, Pedro Noguera, a sociologist at NYU, and Tom Payzant, the former Boston schools superintendent and U.S. assistant secretary of education, the task force calls for a more expansive view of education policy that views schools as one component of a comprehensive youth development strategy.

New CEP Report: Will Oklahoma's NCLB 'Balloon Payment' Come Due?

Like many states, our "100% proficiency" plan was based on the premise that the world would come to its senses. It has not. CEP has a report that explains the problem in detail.

From the press release:

When the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) became law in 2002, states were charged with the controversial goal of bringing all students to “proficiency” within 12 years. This year, halfway to the ambitious 2014 deadline, that challenge is about to become much more difficult for about half of all states, according to a new report from the Washington, D.C.-based Center on Education Policy (CEP).

The report finds that while half of all states (25 states and the District of Columbia) have
adopted incremental achievement goals that assume steady progress toward the 100
percent proficient goal, the other half of the states have taken a “backloaded” approach
that will soon mean dramatically higher—and potentially unreachable—achievement
goals.

Twenty-three states have taken the backloaded approach, generally setting lower
expectations for the percentages of students reaching proficiency between 2002 and 2008
in contrast to much steeper expectations later on. The higher goals are now becoming a
reality for states, which in some cases will need to increase the percentage of students
reaching proficiency on state assessments by 10 points or more each year between now
and 2014.

A thought or two on Teach for America and all that

There is quite a lot of writing in the educational blogosphere about Teach for America. Is it a force for good? Is it the Big Bad Wolf dressed up in Grandma's clothes?

Well, we won't get into all that, as we don't think there's enough research to support all the opinions that are out there. What we do find interesting is this: An awful lot of the education "reform" and alternative certification ideas seemed to be aimed at changing teaching -- from a profession into a job.

This makes sense if you are a tax-cutter. Many state budgets have been cut to the core, but education stands in the way of further tax cuts. What is the biggest budget item in education? Teacher salaries. So, to keep cutting taxes, you have to figure out a way to cut teacher salaries -- typically, an unpopular notion.

The one sure way to cut teacher salaries is to turn teaching from a respected profession into a job, especially a job that is performed by young people -- kind of like waiting tables. Hang on, let me be more specific -- a job like "waitressing." Alternative certification, instant certification after taking a national multiple-choice test, a surge in Teach for America publicity, all this seems to be going in the direction of de-professionalizing teaching.

It might be for a reason other than a desire to cut taxes, no matter what. But, as Deep Throat would say, "Follow the money."

To Curb Truancy, Dallas Tries Electronic Monitoring

Educators are struggling to meet stricter state and federal mandates, including those of the No Child Left Behind Act, on attendance and graduation rates. The Dallas school system, which, like other large districts, has found it difficult to manage the large numbers of truant students, is among the first in the nation to experiment with the electronic monitoring.

Exploring Oklahoma online

Check out this story in the Tulsa World for more than 600 historical maps on society’s Web site that show Indian territories, cities in their infancy.

Dig around a little and find original plats of just about every town in what is now eastern Oklahoma, including Owasso, and a 1902 plat of Tulsa. There’s a spectacular “New Map of Nebraska, Kansas, New Mexico and Indian Territories” from 1856 and a hand-drawn map of the Choctaw Removal.

Academic Ability?

Well, here's a sentence I've never written before: Checker Finn has a really interesting post -- it's well worth your time to read. It's a piece on what The Bell Curve's Charles Murray has been writing lately.

Don't stop in the middle. Read the whole thing.

New NCLB regs: Counting graduates & dropouts

Sherman Dorn's thoughts on the proposed new NCLB regulations regarding the calculation of graduation rates are worth noting. I fully agree with this statement: "I will need to read the proposed regulatory changes in NCLB more carefully when I have the chance..."

That's exactly what I'm hoping to do.....

No, wait....I'm hoping other intelligent people beat me to it!

What he said!

Skoolboy is doing the posting on Eduwonkette again, continuing the discussion of test-based accountability, and makes some points well worth noting. Especially this one:

Lots of commercial enterprises and non-profits owe their livelihood to public education, and are engaged in an ongoing project to shape our definitions of "real school."

Testing is big business in the U.S. Non-profits such as the Educational Testing Service and ACT have annual gross revenues approaching $900 million and $400 million, respectively. ETS's K-12 testing operation had gross revenues of $172 million in their 2006 IRS filings. On the for-profit side, Pearson Education had gross revenues worldwide of $4.6 billion in 2006, with $600 million in adjusted operating profit. Their annual report crowed of a "healthy outlook in school testing underpinned by 2005 contract wins with a lifetime value of $700m (including Texas, Virginia, Michigan and Minnesota)." McGraw-Hill Education had revenues of $2.7 billion in 2007, with operating profit of $400 million.

With this much money, and more, at stake, you can bet that there are ongoing projects to define tests and testing as the appropriate way of defining what counts as good education.

Value Added Conversation

A guest post by skoolboy on Eduwonkette's blog has generated more than 25 comments; what you'll find is an interesting conversation on the use of value-added models (VAM). Interesting stuff, if you're a geek. Important stuff, if you are a teacher or policymaker.

New NAEP Comparison Reports Published...Our Question: Why?

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has published two reports that will undoubtedly be used by policymakers (and pundits) to discern something about the quality of (a) state tests, (b) state standards, (c) public education in each state, or (d) all of the above.

Here are the links to the reports:

Comparison Between NAEP and State Mathematics Assessment Results: 2003

Comparison Between NAEP and State Reading Assessment Results: 2003

I went to a session on these comparisons at AERA, and I am glad to say that the first chapter of the report (I've only looked at the math report so far) goes through each of the caveats discussed at that session. A good portion of the first chapter is devoted to all the things this report cannot tell us.

I have to ask this: If so much time has to be spent telling the reader how NOT to use the report, why publish the report at all? It is as if the NAEP folks expected that the reports would not be read in their entirety, that the findings would be misused....

Here are just a few of the many, many caveats in that first chapter of the math report (in the report authors' own words):

• This report does not address questions about the content, format, or conduct of state assessments, as compared to NAEP. The only information presented in this report concerns the results of testing.
• The only inference that can be made with assurance is that the schools where students achieve high NAEP mathematics scores are teh same schools where students achieve high state assessment mathematics scores. (This is the only reliable finding, yet they printed a 2-volume set of books on the comparisons of math scores?)
  
• This report does not necessarily represent all students in each state. It is based only on NAEP and state assessment scores in schools that participated in NAEP. (Approximately 100 schools in each state participate.)
• NAEP results are for grades 4 and 8, and they are compared to state assessment results for the same grade, an adjacent grade, or a combination of grades. (!!!)
• This report does not address questions about NAEP and state assessment of individual variation of students' mathematics scores within demographic groups within schools.
• For most states, this report does not address comparisons of average test scores.
  
• The only comparisons in this report are between percentages of students meeting mathematices standards, as measured by NAEP and state assessments. (A footnote documents that even this standard of judgment isn't adhered to for all states.)
  
• Comparisons between percentages meeting different standards on two different tests (e.g., proficient as defined by NAEP and proficient as defined by the state assessment) are meaningless. (Okay, once you write that sentence, why don't you just stop writing the report?)
• Finally, this report is not an evaluation of state assessments.

The report also lists non-content factors that may depress correlations between NAEP percentages and state percentages include, but are not limited to:

• differences in grades tested (yes, that's right, these reports compare NAEP scores of 4th or 8th graders to state scores of students in grades 3, 5, 7, or 9);
• small numbers of students tested (by NAEP or the state assessment) in some small schools. Here the report authors toss a small bone in the direction of the huge problem of the unreliability of percentages;
• extremely high or extremely low standards, which would depress variability and thus correlations;
• differences between the NAEP and state tests in accommodations for students with disabilities and English language learners;
• differences in motivational contexts -- ya think???
• differences in the time of year of testing.
  

Expect to see these caveats completely ignored as these reports get a lot of press and policymaker attention.

Spellings will issue new regulations on state/district dropout reporting

As reported in this morning's NY Times, US Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings will institute new rules & regs for dropout reporting. It's expected that the US DOE will require reporting in accordance with the governors' compact, through which most states have stated their intent to count dropouts in the same manner. Since this method will require reporting at the student level, Spellings is expected to authorize states to use the governors' agreed-on method or an estimate of that method.

Here's the operative paragraph from Spelling's speech today; you can read her complete official remarks here.

"In the coming weeks, I will take administrative steps to ensure that all states use the same formula to calculate how many students graduate from high school on time, and how many drop out. In addition, we will make this data public so that people nationwide can compare how students of every race, background, and income level are performing."

AERA Session on "Dropout Factories"

I attended this session and I've been meaning to post about it, but then I saw that Eduwonkette was going to do that, so I waited. Her post accurately summarizes the session; in addition, several others who attended the session posted comments. Click the title link to read about the session.

This is not what Oklahoma alternative schools are supposed to be, continued

Tulsa's "boot camp" has been covered in depth by the Tulsa World -- six articles, an editorial, and an editorial cartoon this week. Click the title of this article to go to the World's education news index page.

The Tulsa school board is supposed to address these issues on Monday night. I believe you can watch it from the comfort of your own home, if your home is in Tulsa and you have cable. Look at those local channels you mostly ignore and you should find it...get out the popcorn...you may need it to throw at your television...