Education improvements

This new essay by Nicholas Kristof is so right on, especially in view of the position of the Texas legislature!

How do we manage to get it so wrong? 

Clear evidence of democracy's failure:  the number of people who never vote!

Video summary from COMMIT!

COMMIT! report to the community

Below you'll be able to read my brief remarks yesterday to the community reporting session hosted by COMMIT!.

The Commit! Partnership helps drive student achievement throughout Dallas County from cradle to career by leveraging data, community expertise and collaboration, to measure what matters, identify best practices and spread what works. 

I was glad to be asked to say a few words about what I consider to be our number one challenge in Dallas and our region. 

________________________________

 

COMMIT! Update

February 24, 2015

 

·         Impressed by and grateful for this public show of concern and commitment to see our children receive the best in education across the region

·         My 5-minute assignment is a perfect length:  you’ll likely leave here with “data overload”—so, I’ll be easy on you

·         Here’s the deal:

1.       Poverty is the biggest challenge/problem/obstacle facing us and the education of our children

 

2.       Poverty is pervasive:  almost 9 of 10 DISD students receive free and reduced meals at school; if we look at the county public schools that number is 3 of 4 students

 

3.       Poverty is growing:  between 2000 and 2012 the population of the city of Dallas grew by a modest 5%; while for the same period the number of us trapped in poverty grew by 41%!

 

4.       Poverty is deepening:  during that same time frame the number of census tracts experiencing concentrated poverty almost doubled.

 

5.       Our poverty problem calls for new imagination as to how to use schools to strengthen entire families/neighborhoods—relationally, intellectually, financially, skillfully, spiritually & politically

 

New imagination as to how to regard one another with respect, value, love and commitment.

 

Poverty and education

Data is just numbers. Behind those numbers are thousands of stories... On Tuesday, February 24th, you're invited to come hear these stories as we release Dallas County's third annual Community Achievement Scorecard. With the release of the scorecard, you'll get an up-close look at where our students currently stand and what obstacles remain when it comes to supporting each child from cradle to career. Although data can help us define the challenge and tell us where to focus, we're not here to admire the problem but to work collectively to solve it. Join the following guest speakers in attendance: Featured Speakers Mike Rawlings Mayor, City of Dallas Dale Petroskey President/CEO, Dallas Chamber Larry James CEO, CitySquare Michael Sorrell President, Paul Quinn College Miguel Solis Board President, Dallas ISD Todd Williams Executive Director, Commit! 2014 Community Achievement Scorecard Launch Event When: Tuesday February 24th from 4:30PM to 6:30PM Where: City Performance Hall 2520 Flora St., Dallas TX 75201 Please join us to celebrate the great progress of our students and learn about the many opportunities we have to support them as we strive to create a more equitable and prosperous community together. Sincerely, The Commit! Partnership

Mayor Mike Rawlings

A message from our Mayor to the churches of our community is right here. 

Take a moment to take a look.

Public schools and poverty

Poverty Is What's Crippling Public Education in the U.S.—Not Bad Teachers

• ANTHONY CODY
• 1:34 PM ET
• COMMENTS

Reuters

Earlier this month in New Zealand, Minister of Education Hekia Parata shared a piece of knowledge that has become common the world over. In the Southland Times, “Experts have found that four consecutive years of quality teaching eliminated any trace of socio-economic disadvantage.”

The source of this is an American economist by the name of Eric Hanushek, a professor at Stanford University, who has been spreading this for the past several years. According to Hanushek, "Good teachers are ones who get large gains in student achievement for their classes; bad teachers are just the opposite."

He looks at the distribution of student test scores, and imagines that if we could fire the teachers who are associated with the lowest 10 percent or so, then we would make huge gains. This is the theory behind a great deal of the push for 21st century K-12 education reform in the US.  In order to identify and efficiently dispatch these slackers, we need national standards, and rigorous tests aligned to them.

This has led reformers to advocate that we:

• Test students more often, so we can measure learning incrementally. Test students in every subject, and at every grade level—even kindergarten, so that all teachers can be properly judged.
• Eliminate barriers to firing the "bad teachers" who get low scores, so due process and seniority protections have to go.
• Create new evaluation plans that give significant weight to "value added" measures drawn from test scores, for both teachers and administrators.

Hanushek has also argued, by the way, that more money won’t help schools succeed, nor will small class size. The teacher is the only variable worth targeting. Unions are a problem to the extent to which they make it difficult to quickly fire teachers identified as ineffective.

But the real world is proving to be a difficult place for Hanushek’s theories to be verified. No school has ever replicated the results predicted by his "four great teachers in a row" theory. In fact, there is no real research to support the idea that we can improve student achievement this way—it is all based on extrapolations.

And in fact, new data shows that in the three large urban school districts where these reforms have been given full rein, the results are actually worse than in comparable districts that have not gone this route.

Some of the key findings from the Economic Policy Institute’s April report:

• Test scores increased less, and achievement gaps grew more, in “reform” cities than in other urban districts.
• Test-based accountability prompted churn that thinned the ranks of experienced teachers, but not necessarily bad teachers.
• School closures did not send students to better schools or save school districts money.

Most importantly:

• The reforms missed a critical factor driving achievement gaps: the influence of poverty on academic performance.

This last point is crucial. This attention to the supposedly pivotal role teachers play in student success comes at a time when the number of children in poverty has been on the rise. According to a study in 2011 (pdf), one school in five was considered high poverty, up from one in eight in the year 2000. Another study showed that "many high-poverty schools receive less than their fair share of state and local funding… leav(ing) students in high-poverty schools with fewer resources than schools attended by their wealthier peers."

We are turning our schools into test preparation factories.

While conservative economists such as Hanushek wish to focus our attention on "bad teachers," in actuality by far the largest factor affecting school performance is family income. In fact, the achievement gap between rich and poor has grown to be twice as large as the black/white performance gap in America.

Teachers are important, and of course we want to recruit the most expert and brightest possible, and give them lots of support. But the expansion of tests, and efforts to make teacher jobs depend on ever-rising scores, are turning our schools into test preparation factories.

Hanushek’s ideas have been driving a vast school reform project, which has been underwritten by the largest philanthropies on earth—starting with the Gates and Walton foundations. Now that this project is a decade old, and showing little signs of success, the time has come for a major reappraisal.

Rather than vesting our trust in tests to identify and weed out the worst teachers, why not invest some confidence in these teachers themselves, and empower them to engage in peer observation and growth through proven programs like Peer Assistance and Review? These programs feature experienced teacher coaches working with peers who have been identified as struggling. This has been found to be an effective way to strengthen teachers—and remove those who are unable to improve.

And how about some direct action to reduce the extreme income gap between wealthy and poor? An increase in the minimum wage would provide increased stability to millions of families, which would help children focus on their studies instead of where their next meal will come from. Most schools have cut nurses, librarians and counselors, at the same time we are expanding our investment in measurement systems.

So I offer this warning to the people down under and beyond. This misguided emphasis is no more likely to work there than it has in the US—unless of course, New Zealand truly is “opposite land,” where hot snow falls up.

This post originally appeared on Quartz, an Atlantic partner site.

Michael Sorrell and Gerald Britt weigh in on poverty and public education

For almost 10 months, Dallas has been engaged in a very public local battle in the national war to “fix” urban education.

Nationally, and locally, some combatants on both sides of the war — while sincere — employ logic and tactics that insult and belittle the very communities they purport to save. All parties in this war share the goals of higher-performing students, better-equipped schools and the redevelopment of economically depressed neighborhoods.

Yet in Dallas and across the country, communities that presumably have the most to gain from the efforts of the reformers are rebelling against them. To quote Natalie Merchant and 10,000 Maniacs: “What’s the matter here?”

To read the entire essay click here. 

The challenges facing our children. . .and us

Consider the statistical dimensions of our challenge in Dallas County:

• 2.5 million people live in the County
• 800.000 students aged 0-22
• 500,000 children in grades K-12
• 91% attend public schools
• 70% qualify for free and reduced lunch program
• 12 of 15 school districts have more than 50% of children in poverty; 70% are economically disadvantaged
• Only 13% of students graduate college/career ready with only 4% of our African American/Hispanic students who represent 80% of all 1st graders
• By 4th grade only 1 in 3 students read at a level on track for college
• Only 1 of 7 early childcare centers have any type of quality rating
• Every year 5,000 students fail to graduate from high school
• Fewer than 50% of higher ed students graduate with a degree
• $5 billion of lifetime income loss to our region of each annual class of high school dropouts
• 344,314 total students not attaining post secondary readiness by high schcool graduation

--Source:  Commit!

Commit!

Todd Williams, Executive Director of the public education advocacy and reform non-profit Commit!, published the following editorial in The Dallas Morning News about a week ago.   

Todd is on target as usual.  

What will we do? 

We are failing Dallas County’s schoolkids

I left the private sector three years ago to volunteer my efforts full time toward education. I’d realized that whatever success I’d had was owed principally to teachers and mentors over the years who’d convinced me I could do anything in life if I studied hard and gave my best.

Growing up within a family living, at best, paycheck-to-paycheck in East Dallas, my access to a quality public education from Dallas ISD substantially changed my life trajectory. Austin College and 100 percent financial aid transformed it. I was blessed to live the American Dream.

Growing up in the 1960s and ’70s, my story was very common. Today, it’s increasingly unique. And we, our collective community, must ask ourselves: Why?

Today, Dallas County has 500,000 K-12 students. Ninety-one percent of those students attend a public school. Poverty is pervasive; 70 percent of those students qualify for free or reduced lunch.

Most importantly, only 13 percent of public school students who start ninth grade across Dallas County graduate four years later academically ready for higher education. For our Hispanic and African-American children, who collectively represent 80 percent of all first-grade children regionally, that number is 4 percent. These tragically low numbers represent our community’s future — and that future is increasingly worrisome.

We are collectively failing our children. Regardless of their ethnicity or ZIP code, they are our children and our region’s future depends on the success of all of them.

Too many of us have stopped fully supporting our public school system, believing that if we pay our property taxes, we’ve somehow done enough. But our educators and children need more than our dollars; they need us to share in the collective accountability for each child’s future, regardless of whether our own children are grown or attend school elsewhere. Educators cannot, and must not, be asked to stem the cycle of poverty alone.

When is the last time each of us did the following? Encouraged our own offspring to consider becoming a public school teacher. Asked our company to adopt a school. Personally mentored a child, volunteered or provided an internship. Thanked a school board trustee for serving countless hours in an unpaid role. Voted in a school board election? Held our representatives truly accountable for working meaningfully to improve our education system.

Within DISD, we pay over $1.4 billion in taxes, yet less than 2 percent of us vote in school board elections. The 2011 elections were canceled due to lack of candidates. We allow select media to focus more on reporting scandal and conflict among educators instead of discussing academic progress, best practices and remaining challenges.

We watched the state decimate pre-K funding in 2011 while concurrently growing prison expenditures. We watched legislators cut $5 billion of resources for public K-12 education (taking us to the bottom 10 percent of the nation in per-pupil funding while college readiness levels remain wholly inadequate) and said little.

We do this because we either believe public education can’t be improved or we just turn away in disbelief or denial that our collective failure won’t significantly impact our community’s future in terms of workforce or neighborhood vitality. The sheer size of the numbers states otherwise.

But there is real hope. Proof points abound that all children are absolutely capable of learning, regardless of parental involvement levels. Countless effective teachers throughout our region are achieving outlier results with children from the same challenging demographics. Hundreds of best practices are worth spreading.

Businesses, foundations and individuals are increasingly getting involved. Thousands of volunteers are asking how to serve. While our community resources are not inexhaustible, they are plentiful, and if invested wisely could have dramatic impact on the lives of our children.

But most importantly, all of us need to collectively recommit to ensuring quality, universal public education by holding ourselves (and not just parents or educators) mutually accountable. The often well-publicized but ultimately unproductive finger pointing among adults, while the collective lives of our children, and our community’s future, wither on the vine, must stop. The problem is urgent, it is solvable, and it is ours.

Todd Williams is the education adviser to Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings and the executive director of Commit!, a nonprofit focused on supporting education throughout Dallas County. He can be reached at todd.williams@commit2dallas.org.

Poverty and the children of Dallas

This report appeared in DMagazine's FrontBurner release posted just yesterday.  I've just copied and pasted to share the entire story. Read directly from the original post here.

Dallas Kids Still Abnormally Poor, Census Shows

Posted on December 13th, 2012 11:42am by Bradford Pearson
Filed under Charts, Civics, Crime, Demographics, Gripes, Urbanism

Data released by the U.S. Census Bureau this week show that Dallas County children, on whole, are poorer than not only most other Texas children, but most other children in America’s largest cities.

Close to 30 percent of children in Dallas County between the ages of five and 17 live in poverty, the numbers show, nearly a five percent increase since 2007. The below chart shows the poverty rates for those aged children, in Dallas-area counties:

Source: U.S. Census data

Jump for even more disturbing news, and a few bright spots.

Okay, first with the bright spots. Dallas isn’t the worst county in Texas for child poverty, and it’s not even close. The five counties with the highest child poverty rates in 2011 (I removed Loving County from the list, because it’s the least populous county in the U.S., with only 82 residents.):

Brooks County: 48.1 percent
Hidalgo County: 46.2 percent
Cameron County: 45.5 percent
Starr County: 44.7 percent
Zapata County, Zavala County: 44.3 percent

Those six counties either hug the border or sit one county away from the border. Bleak stuff. Before I get to the bleakest data – the ones that show how poorly Dallas stacks up against the rest of America’s biggest cities — here are the overall poverty rates for the Dallas area. Most counties have oscillated slightly in recent years; Dallas has shot right for the bottom of the bucket.

Source: U.S. Census data

Now onto the part of the show where we compare Dallas to its similar cities, the fine folks in the other most-populous cities. Seems kids are doing a whole lot better in them than in Dallas, for the most part. These are based on county numbers for 2011:

New York (Bronx County: 41 percent; New York County: 28.8 percent; Queens County: 22.2 percent; Kings County: 33.3 percent; Richmond County: 16 percent)
Philadelphia (Philadelphia County): 38.6 percent
Dallas (Dallas County): 28.3 percent
Houston (Harris County): 27.5 percent
Chicago (Cook County): 26 percent
Los Angeles (Los Angeles County): 25.1 percent
San Antonio (Bexar County): 24.2 percent
Phoenix (Maricopa County): 23.4 percent
San Diego (San Diego County): 18.4 percent
San Jose (Santa Clara County): 12.1 percent

C’mon people, we can’t be worse than Houston. You can explore every county in America, back to 1989, here.