Restrictive and Inappropriate: How High-stakes Testing & NCLB Abuse Sped Students

Friends of the the SOS March & National Call to Action blogged all this month about why they were marching in DC July 30th. And, today, we marched! I never wrote a post of my own, but this guest post by Chaya Rubenstein provides at least one reason for why I marched today and why I will continue to fight for real reform: federal education policy under Presidents W. Bush and now Obama such as NCLB and RTTT, and particularly high-stakes testing, are undermining quality public education. The effects of these policies on special education students are especially harmful and the special ed community has been especially under-represented (I, for example, have not blogged much at all about sped issues). 

Chaya is a retired special education teacher, and is a vice president of Professionals in Learning Disabilities & Special Education. In 1985, she was named Blue Island Teacher of the Year and, as such, was nominated for Illinois Teacher of the Year.  In 1999, her principal nominated her for a Golden Apple Award. Chaya is also a friend of the SOS March. Here's her post:

Not so long ago, teacher Paul Karrer's letter to President Obama in Education Week brought me to tears. Now here's another situation that brings me to tears: special education students who are forced to take high-stakes tests.

In Illinois, these tests are known as the ISATs. At the annual dinner for Professionals in Learning Disabilities & Special Ed., a colleague told me about a student in a self-contained classroom who eats paper. During the high-stakes testing of this past March, this student ate his test. In my experience, students hid under their desks, shaking, refusing to take the test. One student threw his three pointy and perfectly sharpened #3 pencils into the ceiling while loudly proclaiming, "Not taking this, not taking this, not taking this. . ." thus disrupting the other five students in the room, who then lost their concentration. The principal had to be buzzed to come and remove him, but brought him back to the room ten minutes later, saying he was now ready to test; the student repeated his previous behavior. Yet another student returned home from a vacation at 12:00 AM the morning of the test, not having gone to bed until 1:00 am. Her parents were called and yes, they insisted that she take the test; she fell asleep after the first fifteen minutes and continued to sleep throughout the rest of the testing that morning. Another student used her highlighting pen to fill in the bubbles on the answer sheet (remember, #3 pencils only!). One of MANY students with Attention Hyperactivity Disorder NOT on medication got up and wandered about the room during testing. These are but a few--I can assure you, there is no end to these stories!

The misery caused to many sped students (not to mention the loss of REAL education time spent otherwise on test preparation) aside, because they may comprise a subgroup large enough to be counted in the testing results, an entire school may not make average yearly progress. One of the most exceptional and high-performing schools in the country--New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois—was the subject of a Chicago Tribune editorial, "New Trier Gets an F." Why? New Trier did not make AYP this year because the sped subgroup had only 68% (the Math & Reading averaged together) “meet” or “exceed.” (& that percentage is undoubtedly one of the highest in the country for SpEd.—but not, according to the Feds—high enough.) At the middle school where I taught, our sped subgroup made AYP only one year out of six, but that year the English Language Learners (ELL) subgroup did not make it. The Illinois State Board of Education had been told to come up with a better form of testing within a certain time period, which it did not. Therefore, a month before the ISATs, though the ELL teachers had been given an alternative test—the Logaramos, I think—all of the bi-lingual teachers were told that they had to give their students the ISATs! All of us had been giving these tests for years, and we had begun prepping in September, using books and materials we'd already had. We, as Resource Teachers, scrambled, trying to help the teachers prep their students as best they could under the circumstances.

The result? A restructuring of our school, at a great loss to our children--a large number of teachers were sent to other schools, for example: the very dedicated and experienced art teacher (when told she was leaving, the kids asked, "What does art have to do with test scores?"); an extremely talented math teacher who had won a teaching award--sent to the Alternative Learning Center (and his kids had consistently earned the highest ISAT Math scores of the three grade levels!); the sixth grade social studies teacher who was sent to second grade (she tried, but she has been having a very difficult year, as she was a middle school expert and had never taught in the lower grades--now her job is in jeopardy); and, the learning disabilities resource teacher (whose students consistently scored well on the tests) was sent to be a fourth grade teacher. Feeling she could not successfully teach in that capacity, she resigned.

So, I ask: what was the gain here? The students lost many, many experienced, well-liked, respected and highly caring teachers because a small number of students--who shouldn't even be tested on these particular tests in the first place--did not make the grade. Many people do not understand that the alternative assessments are only given to those students who are “developmentally disabled” (the old classification was “mentally retarded”). Therefore, even if students have severe learning disabilities with social/emotional disorders, even if students have Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity (even just Attention Deficit Disorder is debilitating) and are not on medication (tending to be the case in low-income areas, where test scores tend to be lower), if the subgroup is large enough, test scores are counted, and the entire faculty is held accountable for them. (Our wonderful principal lost his position, as well.) Teachers who stayed on at the school do not think that the sped population's test scores improved this past year. (It has been said that the school did not pass this year, as well.) In fact, one of the sped teachers who was hired to replace another was recently fired for continual verbal abuse and for pushing a student. The learning disabilities resource teacher hired to replace another (this teacher not trained in specialized reading programs such as Wilson) is being re-placed into general ed reading and language position for next year.

But here is an even worse scenario: the new measure for determining learning disabilities (and it is supposed to be only for diagnosing learning disabilities, not for other learning problems) is now something called Response to Intervention (RTI), an agonizingly slow and often questionable (districts all over the country are utilizing/interpreting it in may different ways, with various, lengthy timetables) method. RTI is being used as an excuse to keep students from receiving sped services, thus accomplishing two things often beneficial to a school district, but not to the children: 1) the sped subgroup can be kept under the number that would make it eligible to be counted in the test results, and 2) school districts save money by not having to service these students.

Besides Mr. Karrer’s letter, Arne Duncan's recent dialogue in April with the Council for Exceptional Children, prompted me to write this. In it, Secretary Duncan acknowledges that sped students are testing behind the general population, and yet, even though the kids are not reading/working at grade level, they still need to be involved in this testing and must be tested at grade level in order to “raise the bar” and have high expectations set for them, so that they will be able go to college! Having been a sped teacher for thirty-five years, every dedicated teacher I know has the highest expectations for his/her students. I, for one, expected that ALL my students could succeed in college (I taught LD resource) and always told these middle school students--as well as their parents--to start researching colleges.

Yet, I ask, what does that have to do with this ludicrous testing program?! How does this help them go to college? A highly touted school here in Chicago, Urban Prep, had 100% of its students accepted to college; however, the school's test scores have been poor: the school has not made A.Y.P. It serves as proof that students can and will do well in their studies, even if they don't necessarily test well.

Finally, some time ago, I had read in the National Education Association Advocate about a group of special education teachers who did not administer state tests to their students as it was believed (as per school board policy &/or by union contract) that parents could refuse to have their children tested. As the teachers were charged to do so, they asked all the parents if they wanted their children tested. The parents said no, and the testing day(s) came and went with the teachers actually teaching and not testing their classes. Subsequently, the teachers were reprimanded for this, having letters placed into their files, along with other sanctions.

In conclusion, it is my hope and the hope of my colleagues that the mandated testing of all sped students will stop this year. Some sped students should be tested, of course, but that needs to be determined on a case-by-case basis (to be written into the I.E.P.) by teachers and parents. This is but part of a greater solution to repair our federal government’s damaging, restrictive, and inappropriate education policies, but it will help enormously. Our students deserve no less.

Hey Accountability Hawks, Put Down Your Pitchforks!

I had a jumbled draft of a post written out on the Atlanta cheating scandal, but then this piece in Slate by Dana Goldstein laid out much better most of what I had been thinking. Additionally, Yong Zhao wrote a very comprehensive and thoughtful series of posts on the same topic which is worth a read. 

I already expressed the crux of my opposition to high stakes testing here, though lest some accountability hawk call me a “test hater” (though I do hate taking standardized tests), I do recognize that standardized tests can be valuable diagnostic tools as well as give valuable information. Furthermore, assessment generally, including yes, tests, is a key part of the teaching and learning process.

I also begrudgingly acknowledge that the high-stakes accountability movement and NCLB did get some kind of ball rolling. As an ESOL teacher, I appreciated that schools could no longer send English Language Learners off to the basement to be taught by the PE teacher with an extra planning period or tell them to stay home the day of the tests. I remember patiently explaining to the 6^th grade science teacher in the rural Central Virginia middle school where I was teaching that my job was not, in fact, to chaperone his nature walks, but to support him in delivering linguistically appropriate science content to our shared ESOL students.

But whereas pre-accountability, some public school kids were fed nothing and some were fed junk and some were fed a balanced but utilitarian meal, some were fed a gourmet feast, and some … you get the point, the policies of NCLB and now RTTT seem to be ensuring that most kids are fed Mc Donald’s. As Justin Baeder explains here, accountability has gone way too far. Insufficient and unhelpful teacher evaluations and seemingly no accountability in the past was no good, but unhelpful and inaccurate teacher evaluations and accountability that encourages bad practice is also no good. As my father constantly reminded me growing up, two wrongs don’t make a right.

Responding to the cheating scandal in Atlanta, various edu-leaders and pundits have declared that test-based accountability is not at fault, that instead, we must dig ourselves deeper into the high-stakes testing accountability hole, clamp down on testing security, and hunt down the cheaters. These people are constantly calling for “innovation” in education, but there’s nothing innovative about an arms race. In response to crises, this is what the invariably impetuous American political elite do: declare war on abstract concepts. The most destructive examples I can think of are: Prohibition (The War on Alcohol), The Cold War, The War on Drugs, and The War on Terror. There is arguably a War on Bad Teachers right now. It looks like we have a War on Bad Parenting brewing (I have a post on this bad idea in the works), and if these law and order and data obsessed folks have their way, we’ll have a War on Cheating.

As all these “wars” do, a War on Cheating will divert even more of our limited resources from proactive and positive forces to destructive and negative forces. In this case, from teaching and learning to test-prep and testing. There will be an even more reactive and draconian approach to struggling schools and learners than NCLB already takes. Part 4 of Yong Zhao's series of posts describes in chilling detail the testing security measures taken in China. Is this what we have to look forward to? Is this how we're going to Win the Future By militarizing K-12 assessment? If what the Department of Education's Office of the Inspector General did to this family is any indication of what cracking down on cheating will look like, it won’t be pretty.

A law and order solution to what happened in Atlanta (and New York and in Philadelphia and in DC and in New Jersey and in Florida and in. . . .) will do nothing to improve the quality of teaching and learning in our schools, nor will it stop the cheating. Rather than doubling down on what’s an already bad policy and adopting a wrathful response (speaking of which, are the accountability hawks prepared to punish those members of the Atlanta business community who were complicit?), I call for a truth and reconciliation process. Let’s examine what happened and find out what went wrong. Let’s learn from our mistakes and let's fix our broken education policies. And then let’s recognize that the best way to gather useful information from tests is to stop misusing them and remove their punitive stakes.

And then, please, let’s get back to thinking about how to best educate our children.

Petrilli on Educating Poor Kids is Problematic

One of the few conservative edu-pundits I follow is Michael Petrilli. I disagree with him that high-stakes testing, rigid accountability schemes, disempowerment of teachers unions, and a focus on hiring and firing policies will lead us down the path towards better education. And he seems entirely too focused on specific outcomes, compared to improving the overall quality of teaching and learning. But he has some ideas worth considering and has great insights into the political process. Plus, he is reasonable, thoughtful, and open to respectful debate.

This recent post of his (and he wrote a similar one a while back) explored two questions:

"First, whether affluent parents should be satisfied with the public schools to which they send their own children. And second, whether those same parents can be energized to fight on behalf of school reform for the poor." 

Given the positive things I say above, I had to read the post several times before I figured out why it bothered me so much. 


First:

"The No Child Left Behind backlash in the suburbs isn’t due to concerns that the law isn’t working to fix urban education. Plenty of evidence shows that it’s helped. The anger comes from a feeling that the federal law is starting to make middle-class public schools worse–or at least worse in the eyes of their customers."

I agree that NCLB is harming the quality of education in middle-class and more affluent schools alike--I've not heard or read otherwise from those parents. But I vehemently disagree that NCLB "is working to fix urban education." Where's this "plenty of evidence"? Juked testing stats? I would argue, in fact, that the poorer the population of any school (which often means the lower the test scores), the more draconian and harmful the interference of NCLB. I am NOT saying that it's worthless to invest in quality education of poor kids until we fix poverty--far from it. I am saying that NCLB is interfering with quality pedagogy and curriculum in ALL schools, especially in poorer ones. 

Next:

"The second question, it seems to me, will soon be answered by Michelle Rhee’s new endeavor, Students First. Rhee’s potential donors and supporters surely include many well-educated, well-to-do parents; she is encouraging them to contribute money and time in order to fix the schools of other people’s children, not their own. (Teach For America alumni–sensitized to the plight of inner-city education–will play a key role, I would bet.) The gambit is whether a “social justice” pitch to fix urban education can resonate–and be sustained–with people with the resources to engage politically, but without a personal stake in the fight. Time will tell whether Rhee can pull it off."

So affluent people's dedication to improving education for poor children is measured by the amount of money they fork over to people like Michelle Rhee and organizations like Students First? Really? First of all, where's the evidence that Michelle Rhee is "fixing the schools" of anybody's children? And wasn't it the affluent DC residents who overwhelmingly supported her while the ones who didn't were the poorer people whose schools she was supposedly fixing? I have no tolerance, either, for Richard Whitmire's cringe-worthy thesis that the poorer, black people in DC were too ignorant and full of race pride to realize that Rhee-form was good for them.

Lobbying groups like Stand For Children and Students First give money to politicians, many of whom these days advocate for policies that are harmful to the poorer people they profess to want to help, not to schools or to classrooms. Does Petrilli actually believe the only way to help poor children is via expanding our dysfunctional, lobbyist-run political system and buying politicians? How does that help improve the quality of education for poor kids? "Fixing the schools" is actually long-term and painstakingly difficult work that requires collaboration with educators and local communities. Rhee turned her back on many of the community-based groups working for school reform in DC and many lost funding as affluent and influential citizens decided, as Petrilli seems to, that all would be will since Michelle Rhee was there to "fix the schools." A more proper measure of their dedication would be the extent to which more affluent people a) support SES-integrated schools, b) support the poorer populations and schools in their own district, and c) support grassroots and community groups that work directly with poorer families. See here, for example.

Finally,

"The best schools for children of poverty focus on all aspects of their students’ development. At the same time, they look a lot different than the schools affluent families send their kids to. They are more focused on making sure their charges have mastered the basics; they spend a lot of effort inculturating their kids in middle-class mores; they give regular assessments to diagnose progress." (Emphasis mine.)

Neo-liberals like Mike Petrilli, Matt Yglesias, and David Brooks can cite research showing that some schools (translation: KIPP) are very good at boosting some poor kids' performance. But these schools differ from traditional public schools on several dimensions: massive resources, often high attrition, longer school days, more books, longer school years, a richer and more varied curriculum, and sometimes yes, "a different school culture." I have no problem with more emphasis on basics for those who need more basics (as long as that doesn't mean reading strategies or test prep), but I have a huge problem with the idea that "inculturating their kids in middle-class mores" helps kids to succeed academically. The assumption there is that the reason these kids are poor students is due to their parents' values or morals rather than due to the lack of privilege they were born into. (And please don't tell me that when Petrilli, Yglesias, Brooks, and their conservative brethren say "mores," "moral culture," or "bourgeois norms" in this context that they mean good study habits. These men are educated and write for a living. If they meant "habits of a good student," then that's precisely what they would say.)


Petrilli's desire to help poor children and to improve the quality of our education system is genuine. Since I find it valuable to hear the ideas of those with different views, I will continue to listen to what he has to say. Unfortunately, this and other posts show that many of his solutions to the achievement gap are superficial and ideological, failing to address the roots of the opportunity gap: gross societal inequities. Furthermore, like Brooks and Yglesias, his assumptions about human behavior and the causes of poverty are based on assumptions and a philosophy which is, thus far, irreconcilable with my own.

Most education reformers are barking up the wrong tree.

Major elements of the current approach to education reform include redirecting more money to classrooms by cutting pensions and increasing employee contributions to healthcare, dis-empowering teachers unions, and focusing on hiring and firing policies. Human resources practices, budgeting, and union considerations are important factors in any education reform agenda, but they shouldn't be the crowning ones.

First of all, I support creating more portable retirement funds and health insurance, and separating them from employment. People shouldn't feel forced to stay in teaching (or in any job) just for the benefits. Likewise, people should keep benefits even if they lose (to no fault of their own) their jobs. That being said, the benefits that teachers receive are not lavish, especially when you consider their lower salaries, nor are such pensions and benefits responsible for our precarious fiscal state.

Furthermore, I have a hard time when some edu-pundits hammer pensions, but remain silent when it comes to the unheard of sums of money some reformers spend on expensive and unnecessary systems, on their own salaries, and on consultants and central office employees who don't work directly with children. Why only go after pensions and compensation when there are so many more damaging budgeting practices occurring in the name of reform? Such inconsistencies lead me to believe that those who yell about slashing teachers' benefits while approving truly wasteful spending are interested more in advancing their ideology than in smart fiscal policy.

As for reforming unions, to be honest when I taught in DCPS it didn't sit well with me that deductions were automatically taken out of my paycheck whether I joined the union or not (and I did join the union). I'm just not convinced that's a good system. I don't share Modern School blogger Michael Dunn's perspectives on all matters, but I do agree with some of his criticisms of unions, for example, that automatic dues deductions should be abolished and that unions should use their money to help workers and to advocate directly to management rather than use it to make contributions to political campaigns. And this is a place where perhaps more conservative edu-folks would agree; however, they should also then advocate for ending corporations' financial influence in political campaigns. Again, this is where inconsistency can betray ideological rather than practical motives.

Criticisms of unions aside, I find this path to school reform puzzling. First of all, the right of workers to organize is grounded in their First Amendment rights and hence a larger part of the American democratic system. Furthermore, I seriously doubt that disabling teachers unions will do much towards reforming education or towards improving teaching and learning, though it will certainly disable the Democratic Party. There are definitely teachers who get so involved with union politics, activities, and ideology that they neglect their jobs and their students--teachers who don't do their jobs shouldn't be allowed to keep them, but in my time teaching in public schools and being a public school parent, I have rarely encountered any educator who talked about much union activities or about their political views. I am very liberal and I have taught and lived in some very conservative places. I've worked alongside conservatives and I'm sure some very conservative people educate my children (I live in Eric Cantor's district), but their union membership and political views, conservative or liberal, almost never come up, nor should they have, and as far as how and what I teach or how my own children are educated, they don't really matter.

What does come up then? What should we be concerned with when talking about to how improve teaching and learning? Pedagogy and curriculum. How should I best engage and teach the students before me, and how should I advise my kids' teachers to best engage them? How can my co-workers and I help one another to best reach our shared students? More importantly, what should we teach our students? What as social studies and ESOL teachers do we want out students to know and be able to do? As a parent, what do I want my kids to know and be able to do? This is what good educators focus on and this is what any education reformer worth their salt should focus on. Same with teacher talent: where teachers went to college and their pedigree is much less important than what knowledge they have about pedagogy and about the content they teach--what they teach and how they practice. This is where evaluation needs to be much more rigorous and much more useful--as a means to improve teaching and learning, and not merely as an instrument to fire people.

If the existence of unions and fairly compensating teachers has not hurt the quality of teaching and learning, the high-stakes accountability and standardization movement has. It has severely limited what and how we teach and what and how students learn. I have not yet spoken to one parent or teacher in the liberal, moderate, and conservative communities where I've lived and taught who thought that high-stakes testing and standardization was improving teaching and learning, who wasn't concerned about its corrupting and harmful effects. I know many families in central Virginia who home school, not for religious reasons and not because they don't believe in public education, but because they abhor high-stakes testing and what it's doing to curriculum and pedagogy.

Meanwhile, leaders of education reform labs such as DCPS and NYCPS focus relentlessly on these relatively irrelevant criteria as well as on the pedigree of their practitioners, elite hiring (how about first focusing on making it a sane and stimulating place to work? On not driving good people out?) and draconian firing policies (accountability!), and student test scores. DC has had several years of education reform and they're just now (just now!) thinking about curriculum--and only in Language Arts for the moment. Meanwhile, DCPS is investing more in a expensive, large, and growing Office of Human Capital. What about investing more in quality instruction and rich and meaningful curriculum? There are eleven departments within the DCPS central administration and only one of them is focused on pedagogy and curriculum. What kind of an education system only focuses 9% of their efforts on pedagogy and curriculum, the heart of teaching and learning?

No work is entirely immune to the influences of ideology and politics. Furthermore, considerations of politics, economics, human resources, and management are important to any school or system. But if we truly want to improve education, we should do our best to check our ideology at the school house door. The craft of teaching and the quality of content we convey is where the real work of educating gets done. It's time we stopped wasting our precious resources and our students' time on petty and ideological matters, that we rolled up our sleeves and got down to educating.

Matt Yglesias Thinks Struggling Readers Shouldn't Learn Content

Matt Yglesias is wrong, again. And what he's wrong about is too concerning to ignore. In light of recently (slightly) higher NAEP history scores he says:

"As it happens, I agree with history advocates that we’re seeing the impact of the accountability law. What we’re seeing, in particular, is that trying to teach history to kids who can’t read is a fool’s errand. Focusing more clearly on making sure that kids aren’t falling behind in their core skills is helping the worst-off kids do better across the board even at history."

This is ridiculous. Yes, it helps kids to do better on a test if they can read it, but it doesn't actually help them learn the content on the test if they aren't being taught the content. The NAEP scores are nothing to celebrate--they're pretty bad actually. The goal should be not better test scores but more educated kids. Beyond some limited explicit instruction in reading skills, what struggling readers (and all readers) need is content, like social studies, like science. Core skills are mostly built on core knowledge, not the other way around


My own twin boys had different experiences learning to read. One son was reading by the time he turned five, learning to decode (or translate letters into sounds) easily. The other was nearly six and a half before he was reading at all fluently. That son had some intensive instruction from a reading specialist at his school which undeniably helped him get over the obstacle that decoding presented him. But the hard work that he was willing to put in was powered by being interested in the knowledge that he could find in books. He couldn’t read the words, but he learned the difference between a pterodactyl and a stegosaurus from books we read to him, from television programs, and from visits to museums. In his case, basic reading skills were as much a consequence of content knowledge, as they were a prerequisite.

Is Matt Ygelsias proposing that one of my sons should have missed out on science and social studies instruction (his favorite subjects--both of my sons hate learning about reading, but love reading) until he could decode properly? Sorry, son, you learn about dinosaurs because you can't decode. You can't learn about the Revolutionary War because you can't decode. That's absurd and it's educational malpractice. Teaching content is teaching reading.

When schools spend too much time on basic skills, to the point where they’re neglecting to teach high-interest content, they are wasting kids’ time and contributing to the achievement gap in cultural capital. The road to stronger skills and a college culture is paved with rich and meaningful content. When we let skills usurp content then we’re telling kids: Not only are you bad at reading, but you’re bad at everything else; because you’re not ready to read on grade level, you’re not ready to learn on grade level. When we make interesting content contingent on basic math and reading skills proficiency, we are dangling a carrot and watching as students’ appetites languish. If they’re not getting the content, the skills will never catch up. A student will never be successful at reading if they aren’t learning about what it is they’re reading about. 

Ygelsias writes intelligently on many topics; education is not one of them. For a much more thoughtful post that raises valid questions about teaching history and the recent NAEP scores, read what Michael Lopez has to say.

UPDATE: Lest someone come along and say I don't think kids need to learn to read or that they don't learn or build knowledge through reading books (or other texts such as periodicals), that is not at all what I am saying. I don't think that at all. Reading is vital.

Kids need to learn to decode and they should read as many books as possible. We can learn so much from reading books. The more we read, the more we know, the better readers we become.

What I'm saying is that learning to read is not an isolated process--learning to decode can be, but beyond that, there's no such thing as learning to comprehend or learning reading comprehension. Comprehension is built on knowledge. Knowledge is built through learning. Knowledge can be delivered via many different forms and it can especially be delivered via books. But we can not discount the significance of the background knowledge and the content knowledge that aids us in the process of reading and comprehending those books.

If I can quote Cedar from the comments below:


". . .  it is exhausting to read something where you don't know what the words mean. Yes, it is possible to sit there with a dictionary and look up one or two words per sentence, but for most of us, it is taxing and unpleasant. If kids have to keep reading and re-reading, they find reading unpleasant. As you pointed out, you got your knowledge from books. Part of the reason that you got that knowledge from books is because you didn't find books exhausting."


Without background and content knowledge, reading books is exhausting for kids, and they won't do it or get better at it or learn as much as they would. But with enough background and content knowledge, reading becomes pleasurable and interesting and the more they'll do it.

Early Childhood Education: Vouchers or Universal Pre-K?

Erik Kain has an interesting post up about preschool where he talks about the importance (backed up by research) of early childhood education. Two problems he states: a) universal preschool is expensive and b) while programs like Head Start do great things, they tend to segregate poor kids. He suggests granting vouchers to low-income families for private preschool.

Normally, I am voucher-averse, but in the case of early childhood education, the idea is worth consideration. Where vouchers in K-12 can draw kids and funding away from an existing robust public system, not to mention fund the teaching of religious fundamentalism and xenophobia, there is only a very small public preschool "system" and very few middle- or high-income families send their kids to any kid of public preschool, and I wonder what percentage of low-income families do. On the other hand, as this HuffPo commentary questions about K-12 vouchers: How much would these vouchers actually be worth? Would they really cover the full cost of private preschool (which is often quite expensive itself)? Would there be enough spaces in private preschools to accommodate those who would normally enroll in public preschool programs like Head Start? Would it ultimately be more realistic, cost effective, and serve to better educate our youngest students to build a more robust public preschool system?

DC public schools just launched universal pre-K for three and four-year-olds. As far as I know, families can either enroll their kids in their neighborhood school's program or they can lottery in to other programs.

On the one hand, universal pre-K is quite expensive and I've heard the criticism in DC that with so many budget cuts, the city shouldn't be spending money on funding preschool for higher income families when other K-12 programs and students so direly need the funding.

On the other hand, I can surmise that if a program is universal, it's more likely to get a more economically diverse (meaning not just low-income folks) student body, which means less segregation of the poorest students. Studies have shown that less segregation benefits them. (That being considered, there's always segregation because of segregated neighborhoods--housing policy that aims to desegregate neighborhoods may be a much better way to skin that cat.) Also, I wonder if universal pre-K will hook more higher income DC residents to the public schools and keep them there, leading to a more robust system.

There is also the problem of quality. Will these universal pre-K programs be of high-quality and be developmentally appropriate for preschoolers? Or will they be doing way more academics than they should be?

It will be  interesting to see what happens in DC. I certainly hope someone has plans to study what happens to these students over time--it seems like a great opportunity.


UPDATE: Speaking of early childhood education, check out this great article in Ed Week about public pre-K - 3 initiatives.

International Baccalaureate: Friend or Foe?

Robo, one of my readers, had some questions about IB (International Baccalaureate) programs. Since this blog is about all things education, I thought it would make for a good post. From robo:

"My questions are basically the same as the issues in the TFA post: does IB detract/distract from the goal of providing a quality education for all students? Does IB draw an inordinate share of the resources from the 'mainstream' program? Finally, does it actually offer something better?

Obviously, we believe the last to be affirmative or we would not have enrolled both of our kids in this program. The only anti-IB material I've seen is from some obviously nutty fundamentalist/ conservative corners, but I'm sure your readers must have some knowledge on the topic."

I'll start with what I know, which isn't much since there weren't IB courses at my school--in fact, there were barely AP courses, I never taught IB or AP, and I have younger children. I've heard that IB courses are excellent--they're rigorous, multi-dimensional, and full of essential content. I've heard many educators and parents alike declare the approach and curricula to be superior to that of APs.

As for ethical considerations, from what I've heard that depends on how the program is implemented. In the county where I currently live, no school has a dedicated IB program; there are only IB courses. That means  there's no application process and that anyone can take an IB course, especially if recommended by a counselor or teacher. Also if one county high school has a program that another doesn't, the county will bus students who want to participate in that program to the school, so no matter which neighborhood a student lives in, they can take advantage of any program the county offers. Some other districts have magnet IB schools or programs (schools within schools) where it's an all or nothing thing. Usually the kids who get into the programs are the ones with parents most likely to be able to advocate to get them in or who advocate to bring a magnet program to their neighborhood school in the first place.

As for IB programs taking away from "mainstream" programs, I think that only happens if the school or district lets is happen. If IB courses include best teaching practices and offer great curricula, I don't see what good it does anyone to NOT offer them. A district would have to make sure, though, that IB is not offered at the expense of best practices and great curricula for students in other courses as well as make sure IB courses are accessible and encouraged for ALL students who are academically capable or prepared. (And yes, Michael Lopez, if you're out there, I know this gets us into the capable vs. prepared discussion. I need to learn more before deciding where I stand.)

Readers, what do you know about IB? Do tell below.

UPDATE: Since composing this post, I found two relevant posts from other blogs that I regularly read. This one is from Joanne Jacobs, about tracking, and this one is from a school principal named Mel Riddle who blogs for "The Principal Difference."