Class Struggle

It’s almost December, time to sum up and see if I added value to life on the planet this year. Others can assess my successes, if any. I prefer to dwell on my failures. There are many. Here are five I consider important.

The Rochester Community public schools in Michigan do a fine job. Their leaders often have great ideas. But according to school board member Mike Reno, they are talking about doing something to their Advanced Placement courses that could be troublesome, even though I once thought it was a good idea. (Some people who know me say that is the very definition of a bad idea.)

[This is my Local Living section column for Nov. 26, 2009. Happy Thanksgiving!]

Near the end of her struggle to find the right high school for a son who did not always share her tastes, Tracey Henley was overjoyed to discover that some of her son’s best friends had endorsed her choice, and his resistance had vanished. “So now we don’t have to forge his signature on the form, always a plus,” she said.

Where had this painful sifting of options occurred? Was it some struggling urban district? No, Henley lives in Montgomery County, like much of suburban Washington a mecca for those seeking the best in public education. Her story illustrates that in even the best possible circumstances, parents often have to work very hard to find the place that fits their child. I, like Henley, wonder if there is a better way to do this.

Here's an item from my colleague Nick Anderson on the national education beat.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who oversees city schools, said Wednesday morning in Washington that he has directed the nation's largest school system to ensure that principals use student test scores to evaluate beginning teachers who are up for tenure.

"It is an aggressive policy," Bloomberg, an independent who this year ran as a Republican for re-election, said in an appearance at the Democrat-leaning Center for American Progress. "But our obligation is to take care of our kids."

[Here is one of our occasional letters from readers and responses from me.]
Dear Extra Credit:

I read your column religiously and have noticed that you have sometimes asked to hear from homeschoolers. After reading your column this morning on the demise of research papers in high schools, I decided to make the leap. See, this is one of the main reasons I am homeschooling (for the first time this year) my two middle-school aged children.

Dan Goldfarb, a 51-year-old history teacher at the Benjamin Banneker Academic High School, says his first encounter with an evaluator under the District’s new IMPACT system for assessing teachers did not go well. Goldfarb does not claim to be an objective observer. He doesn’t like the new system. He doesn’t like how it is being implemented by D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee.

Here are two lengthy responses to the Monday column on Dan Goldfarb's teacher evaluation, just above this blog post. First are the thoughts of Jason Kamras, the former national teacher of the year who oversees the IMPACT evaluation program for the D.C. Schools. Second is the response from Goldfarb, the subject of the column. I don't usually provide lengthy notes after every column, but in this case I thought they had many more important things to say. The Web gives journalists a chance to help readers go deeper, and I hope we continue to take advantage of it in this way.

I thought rating teachers would be a hot issue, but that was an understatement. Emails and online comments are still popping up on my screen in reaction to the columns I wrote on Nov. 1 and Nov. 8 describing the perils of the District's new teacher evaluation system and the apparent lack of any serious effort towards one in the Washington suburbs. I expect more strenuous comment after next Monday's column, which will explore, for the first time, the secrets of a D.C. teacher's evaluation report.

But in this torrent of interesting feedback on assessing teachers, I have detected rising support among some experts for a radical change of direction that appeals to me.

Today's ed page has a startling story by my colleague Michael Alison Chandler on the rapid spread---and resulting score inflation---of portfolio exams in Virginia. These are collections of classwork of students with learning disabilities or insufficient English. They substitute for the usual state multiple choice tests in assessing those students' progress, and the progress of their school. At one Fairfax County elementary school, Chandler reports, the reading passing rate for English learners has gone from 52 to 94 percent and for special education students 34 to 100 percent in the two years this system has been in place. Sound fishy to you? It does to me, but I think it is going to force some interesting and likely beneficial changes.

[My Local Living section column for Nov. 19, 2009]

Doris Burton taught U.S. history in Prince George’s County for 27 years. She had her students write 3,000-word term papers. She guided them step by step: first an outline, then note cards, a bibliography, a draft and then the final paper. They were graded at each stage.
A typical paper was often little more than what Burton describes as “a regurgitated version of the encyclopedia.” She stopped requiring them for her regular history students and assigned them just to seniors heading for college. The social studies and English departments tried to organize coordinated term paper assignments for all, but state and district course requirements left no room. “As time went by,” Burton said, “even the better seniors’ writing skills deteriorated, and the assignment was frustrating for them to write and torture for me to read.” Before her retirement in 1998, she said, “I dropped the long-paper assignment and went to shorter and shorter and, eventually, no paper at all.”