Entries by Jim Stergios

Indiana’s airball on national education standards

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  Basketball fans will remember the scene from the epic 1986 Gene Hackman movie, Hoosiers , where Coach Norman Dale (Hackman) is taking his small-town high school team, Hickory, on the road to the Indiana state championships. As they peer into their opponent’s massive gymnasium, his players grow understandably nervous. Taking out a measuring tape, Coach Dale has them measure the distance to the free throw line and size up the height of the rim, and says: “I think you’ll find it’s the exact same measurements as our gym back in Hickory.” I’ve often thought about that scene when interacting with Indiana’s State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett, himself a basketball coach, which is clear to anybody who meets […]

Why is the state not implementing the MCAS for U.S. history?

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We are in the middle of a U.S. Senate campaign and, while passions may run high on both sides of the partisan divide, what is a young Massachusetts student to think of the race? Given his or her ignorance of the role of a senator, whether in Massachusetts state government or at the federal level, the fact is he or she is unlikely to think beyond the partisan commentary that populates television and the internet. That is a shame and sadly ironic in Massachusetts where state Senate leadership was the driving force, behind the landmark 1993 Education Reform Act (MERA), which has brought many benefits to our students and to the state. In 1993, as former Senate President Tom Birmingham […]

Lawrence Eagle-Tribune: Lawrence’s big school problem needs a big, bold solution

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Jim Stergios The Eagle-Tribune The usual rules apply when things work, or at least aren’t disastrously broken. That’s not the case when 15 years of failing schools have culminated in every other student dropping out. Yet this is precisely what is happening in Lawrence, and the city and state have simply pretended that the adverse impact is not there. Each Lawrence dropout likely costs Massachusetts citizens $300,000. Not all have considerable innate talent, but many do, and we are squandering their economic potential. Those without unique talents can still be productive citizens, but we are not benefiting from their hard work. The children of dropouts are far more likely to remain in poverty, excluding entire generations from the possibility of […]

Huck, Jim and our interest in education

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Twain famously noted that the difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning-bug. Getting words right is arguable the key task in educating an individual, for precise use of language is critical to developing the ability to observe and to think. Then there is the sinister twisting of language for reasons of power (most often political power). This was a topic of intense focus by George Orwell, who in his staple of 9th grade reading courses, Animal Farm, described how the vision of Old Major was transformed to the darker purpose of other animals after his death. In the novella, the animals rebel against the drunken farmer Mr. Jones for […]

The Democrats’ Platform on K-12 Education

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Here is the Democratic National Platform on K-12 education, taken from the national Democrats.org site: An Economy that Out-Educates the World and Offers Greater Access to Higher Education and Technical Training. Democrats believe that getting an education is the surest path to the middle class, giving all students the opportunity to fulfill their dreams and contribute to our economy and democracy. Public education is one of our critical democratic institutions. We are committed to ensuring that every child in America has access to a world-class public education so we can out-educate the world and make sure America has the world’s highest proportion of college graduates by 2020. This requires excellence at every level of our education system, from early learning […]

The GOP Platform on K-12 Education

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Here is the Republican platform on K-12 education, taken from the National GOP web portal: Education: A Chance for Every Child Parents are responsible for the education of their children. We do not believe in a one size fits all approach to education and support providing broad education choices to parents and children at the State and local level. Maintaining American preeminence requires a world-class system of education, with high standards, in which all students can reach their potential. Today’s education reform movement calls for accountability at every stage of schooling. It affirms higher expectations for all students and rejects the crippling bigotry of low expectations. It recognizes the wisdom of State and local control of our schools, and it […]

Schools and the conventional wisdoms

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Facts are, as John Adams famously noted, “stubborn things.” But facts are also what makes politicians of good will less stubborn; that is, it is empirical evidence that allows both major parties to to coalesce around reforms that will work. Compromise for compromise’s sake, or hewing to conventional wisdom, is most often pandering with an eye toward one’s own ambitions. But, armed with facts, people of even the most strongly held principles can come to very surprising positions. We’ve been hearing a lot about how education may be the area for compromise between the two major parties. What’s driving this coalescence? Hard choices by the Obama administration? Empirical evidence? Or it is conventional wisdom? With Labor Day now behind us […]

An expert’s view of national standards’ focus on non-fiction texts

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(Gretchen Ertl for The New York Times) The Common Core national standards are increasingly controversial, with Utah, Indiana and a number of states that had adopted them now reconsidering. A recent New York Times education blog notes the following: Forty-four states and United States territories have adopted the Common Core Standards and, according to this recent Times article, one major change teachers can expect to see is more emphasis on reading “informational,” or nonfiction, texts across subject areas: While English classes will still include healthy amounts of fiction, the standards say that students should be reading more nonfiction texts as they get older, to prepare them for the kinds of material they will read in college and careers. In the […]

Sunset the Lawrence district school monopoly

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One of two kids in the Lawrence Public School system do not cross the 12th grade finish line. Even that is beyond what the “soft bigotry of low expectations” crowd can explain away on the basis of factors like poverty and family situation. Sadly, that dropout reality holds true in a couple of other urban districts around the state. But no other district is in school receivership… in a city that is in state fiscal receivership. And no other district can boast of the on-the-record, court-documented corruption within the school district office that we’ve seen in Lawrence. As noted in several previous blogs (such as this one), in Lawrence, just over 1,000 students of the 13,000 in the district will […]

Grossman wants to look squarely at reality

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The treasurer’s call for a cut in the pension’s rate of return on its investment portfolio reflects his desire to look reality squarely in the face. While investment history from the mid-80s is higher than 8 percent, investments over the last decade have been well below that target, and the market continues to be plagued with uncertainty and real structural questions. The treasurer’s call to reduce the expected rate of return is also prudent planning, because the years in which the state doesn’t meet the benchmark are usually the years in which we can least afford to kick additional money into the fund. Rhode Island’s general treasurer Gina Raimondo, a Democrat, started out similarly, seeking a reduction from 8.25 to […]

The right reform path in Lawrence?

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There are two issues that matter in K-12 education – what you might call the twin achievement gaps, those between the inner city poor (often including English language learners) and the rest of the state, and the international achievement gap whereby the percentage of students who are advanced in core subjects in the top-performing countries far outstrips the percentage among Massachusetts students. The second achievement gap is urgent; the first is an emergency and has to be treated as such. Ground zero for the emergency achievement gap is the city of Lawrence, where the public schools have been in free fall, where the previous superintendent has been convicted, where dropout rates are approaching 50 percent (not a typo), and where […]

MA Goes For Top-down Health Care Policies

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Even as “Massachusetts Health Care 2.0” legislation moves to the Governor’s desk for signing, and with it the heavy hand of top-down policies, individuals and companies in many other states are adopting market-based solutions.

Happy 100th Birthday to Milton Friedman!

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Happy Birthday to Milton Friedman, who would have been 100 today. A great way to understand Friedman’s contribution to the field of education can be summed up in the following series of videos associated with his renowned Free to Choose series on PBS. This series of six YouTube segments covers (in the first three) the actual documentary/commentary of the Free to Choose on the idea of scholarship vouchers for students to attend K-12 schools, as well as a fantastic roundtable debate on the then controversial idea. The FTC special on education opens up with a look at a Hyde Park school that was in the 1980s already plagued by the need for uniformed police, metal detectors, and other safety features. […]

Will New York Make Boston The Old Tech City?

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Neil Swidey had a wonderful article (N.Y. vs. Boston: The endgame) in the Boston Globe Magazine on the fabled Boston-NY (or is that NY-Boston) rivalry delving into the ever-timely question: “Where did all this nonsense begin?” What most intrigued me was his reference to New York’s plan to take “Roosevelt Island and a decrepit hospital that offers priceless views of the United Nations and the Chrysler Building” and turn it into “a new tech-focused graduate school that, in many ways, will be built in the image of MIT.” Swidey’s set-up is pitch-perfect in noting the pride Greater Boston takes “in our identity as College Town, USA, the egghead capital of the nation, anchored by Harvard and MIT and fortified with […]

Are Teachers Changing Their Unions?

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The recent deal brokered by Stand for Children with the Massachusetts Teachers Association (and at the end supported by the AFL-CIO and the Massachusetts chapter of the American Federation for Teachers) made some progress in making student performance a larger consideration in evaluating teachers and lessened the role of seniority. The Globe editorial board put it this way: Stand for Children was plowing ahead with a tough ballot initiative that would have eliminated nearly all aspects of teacher seniority in the state’s public school systems. It went so far as to put non-tenured teachers with three years or less experience — so-called provisionals — on par with the most senior teachers during layoffs. With the 107,000-member Massachusetts Teachers Association gearing […]

The obvious lesson for innovation schools

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Two-and-a-half years have passed since the passage of the reform law (“An Act Relative to the Achievement Gap”) that will, over time, double the number of charter school students and established a new category of in-district reform called innovation schools. (The law also made virtual schools possible, but the state’s department of education decided two years ago to tie a few regulatory double-knots on that type of reform, as I’ve blogged here and here.) In districts where MCAS scores lagged in the bottom 10 percent statewide, the cap on the number of number of students who could attend charter schools was doubled from 9 percent to 18 percent. We saw an increase of 16 charter schools in year one and […]

The SCOTUS ruling’s impact on education policy

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Internet traffic has been especially heavy for the past 32 hours as people across the US are trying to understand just what the decision yesterday by SCOTUS means. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is an extremely complex piece of legislation famously weighing in at well over 2,000 pages and already a couple of years into implementation leading to thousands more pages of regulations and guidance to fill in the gaps left to the U.S. Health Secretary Sebellius. As people learned the news yesterday, of course, some had extra pep in their step; others required pepto-bismol. Such high-profile ruling with broad implications for federal-state relations is bound to touch on education policy — and it does. The discussion of the Commerce […]

Making more than symbolic change in our schools

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Today’s lead story in the Globe relates the three years of “reform” by Sito Narcisse at English High: An extraordinary three-quarters of English High’s teachers and administrators have quit or been let go during the past three years, school records show, as headmaster Sito Narcisse pushed through one controversial initiative after another — from school uniforms to single-sex classrooms to eliminating the grade “D,” forcing students to earn a “C” or fail. Teachers who did not go along with Narcisse’s approach were “not the right fit,” in his words, and he sent 38 of them packing, while dozens of others retired or resigned. Given the continued drift in the school’s MCAS scores and observations of kids napping in class and […]

Falling short on the Lawrence school turnaround

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In November 2011, the Board of Education decided to put the city of Lawrence’s public schools into receivership. With that announcement the power to install a receiver for the district was given to the state’s education commissioner. The January appointment of Jeffrey Riley as receiver by the Education Commissioner was well received. Riley has experience as a Teacher for America and also as a principal of a challenging school. His work as the Chief Innovation Officer in Boston’s schools was marked by a steady but persistent push for change. So, yesterday the receiver and the commissioner made public the state’s turnaround plan for the Lawrence Public Schools today with fanfare and much talk about urgency. The Lawrence Eagle Tribune lists […]

A big test at Madison Park Vocational

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Over the past decade, while there has been incremental success in most suburban schools, and limited incremental success raising achievement in a few urban school districts, the big stories in raising student achievement have come in the state’s 70 or so Commonwealth charter schools and its 27 regional career-vocational technical schools. Currently, there are 63 CVT schools in the Commonwealth with about half serving regional populations while the other half is under the direct jurisdiction of larger districts. The regional voc-techs have many similarities with charters: They operate outside the direct control of a single district superintendent, and in fact have their own dedicated leadership (superintendents and elected school committees); they are schools of choice; they are highly focused on […]

Perspectives on the Romney education plan

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A round-up of various perspectives on Governor Romney’s education policy announcement yesterday. I’ll post later on today to help you navigate through the noise, but it is always good to have a broad set of perspectives when big announcements are made. Here is the full education “white paper” entitled A Chance for Every Child and a list of the Romney education team. Here is a transcript of Governor Romney’s speech before the Latino Coalition’s Annual Economic Summit in Washington, D.C. From today’s Boston Globe, here is Matt Viser’s article. The Wall Street Journal‘s video take below: Trip Gabriel’s take in the New York Times. And Paul West of the LA Times. Crossposted at Boston.com’s Rock the Schoolhouse. Follow me on […]

The wrong lesson on national standards

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Dear David, Congratulations on becoming the new head of the College Board. I know, as a Founding Father of the national standards effort, you may have read certain things I have written that you do not agree with. While I haven’t met you personally yet, I look forward to it. I have heard universally that you are a smart guy and reputed by all to be a nice person. I hope you and the Coleman family are well, and I am writing to say I’m sorry. In addition to writing about school innovations, charter schools, vocational technical schools, school choice, accountability to results, and teacher quality issues, I’ve written with some frequency about academic standards and curricula—and especially recently about […]

Decision Time is Here For Extended Learning in Massachusetts

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The Education Reform Act of 1993 was a complex piece of legislation but its principal components are four: High academic standards for K-12 schools; Accountability through the MCAS test and a state office that performs audits on schools and districts; Improved teacher quality through rigorous testing of teacher’s mastery of the content in the state’s academic standards; and Expanded public school choices for parents through charter schools. The subsequent history of education reform in Massachusetts has been an ebb and flow of implementation of these elements. It took until 1996 for the state to truly embark on any of the first three reforms listed above (and it took a long time and lots of public debate to move them ahead–one […]

Massachusetts’ Katrina Moment

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In a previous job, I spent a lot of time in major Massachusetts cities outside of Boston. Cities like New Bedford and Fall River, with their stunning coastal views, and cities at the edge of Boston with so much potential like Lynn and Brockton, always intrigued me. But I have to admit to two favorites–Springfield and Lawrence. They are indeed among the most troubled, but they are both architecturally unique, with strong neighborhoods and muscular industrial histories. Whenever in Lawrence, I would try to make it to Saint Anthony’s Maronite Church or eat at Cafe Azteca. The smells in each place are enough to keep you going for days. A sensation similar to the “beignet haze” you get walking within […]

Not grateful about “charter cap lift”

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The 2010 Achievement Gap bill that was passed by both the House and the Senate and signed into law by Governor Patrick lifted the limits on charter schools and the number of students in them in districts that were failing to see improvements in student achievement. Rather than limiting the number of students to 9% in these largely urban districts, the law allowed up to 18% of students to attend charter schools. The six-year period for the expansion up to 18 percent of students was not coincidental. It aligns with the six-year reimbursement schedule for districts, by which districts: • receive 100% of the per-pupil funding for in the first year after a student leaves for a public charter; • […]

How are the Rural Poor Doing at School?

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Massachusetts is a wealthy place. We are among the wealthiest states in the country, and the educational attainment of Massachusetts parents is well beyond that of parents in every other state. All this should point to high-powered students and schools in the Bay State. In fact, “big thinkers” in education policy often point to those factors to explain why Massachusetts does so well on national and international assessments. In part, that’s true. But what these big thinkers fail to see is that Massachusetts not only has risen from around 11th in the country on the national assessments to number one, but also that the performance of all Massachusetts student groups has gone up. In fact, Massachusetts’ improvement in performance among […]