Why Douglas County, Colorado, Vouchers Were Ruled Unconstitutional

Dianna Terrell Leave a comment

Diane Ravitch adds to the conversation on Colorado Supreme Court’s recent decision by grabbing the language from the state Constitution! It pays to follow the blog of an educational historian at dianeravitch.net The whole deal seems pretty cut and dry. Nevada next?

Diane Ravitch's blog

A few days ago, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that the voucher plan adopted by the school board in Douglas County was unconstitutional. It was a split decision. It is puzzling that it was a split decision, because the Colorado state constitution explicitly prohibits any public funding of religious institutions.
Text of Section 7:
Aid to Private Schools, Churches, Sectarian Purpose, Forbidden.

Neither the general assembly, nor any county, city, town, township, school district or other public corporation, shall ever make any appropriation, or pay from any public fund or moneys whatever, anything in aid of any church or sectarian society, or for any sectarian purpose, or to help support or sustain any school, academy, seminary, college, university or other literary or scientific institution, controlled by any church or sectarian denomination whatsoever; nor shall any grant or donation of land, money or other personal property, ever be made by the…

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Where are the “Good Schools?”

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When I tell people that I teach about education and education politics, I quickly hear their observations and misgivings about their communities. This often sounds like, “We bought our house before kids, and now we realize our neighborhood school’s test scores aren’t very good.”

Or, people express understandable concerns about the cost of living in the towns with the supposedly “good schools.” I love getting the question, “Where are the good schools?,” and I get it often.

The Home Advantage

At the end of the day, most parents who ask the question, “where are the good schools” are already doing many things in their typical parenting that are academically advantageous for their children: waiting to have children until they’re a little older and done with school, raising children with another adult co-parent, reading to -and reading in front of – their children.

Those home benefits, or what Annette Lareau calls the “Home Advantage” far outweigh some of the perceived risks of staying in or moving to a community that has less-than-desirable test scores in comparison to other area schools. (More on this in later posts.)

School rankings aren’t all equal

Despite this, people get a little…crazy… and start checking school rankings on websites like US News and World Report‘s best schools list or Great Schools. These rankings are generated based on a number of factors – chief among them are mean standardized test scores for a community.

One thing we all remember about means is that a few very low scores can really skew the mean. One other fundamental question to keep in mind is, “Is doing well on a standardized test really an indication of the type of intelligence I hope for my own child to exhibit?” It may be, but it’s still a worthwhile question to consider.

So, if you’re looking at these rankings to make decisions about where to raise a family, keep in mind that ranking methodology matters.  I like the group Niche‘s ranking metrics because they treat economic and cultural diversity as an asset in their methodology … because going to school with children from different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds isn’t just an asset for all developing children, it is necessary for becoming a functional, thinking adult.

Other ways to determine school quality

Having said all that, I fully endorse the drive-by school check.  You can learn a lot by a school and by the level of parent involvement by how fresh the annuals look in the garden beds and how many parents linger at drop off and pick up. I think “parent-lingering” is a good measure of a positive community and high social capital (if not the presence of a lot of mama-gossips).

We drove by several elementary schools in several different towns before we settled on the town we chose.**  If you want to get deeply into it, check out state statistics on per pupil expenditure (usually direct correlation to the property tax rate) and there are a few other measures that are public information that I would direct you to if interested. A good one is average teacher salary, another is the student teacher ratio, and the number of average years the teaching force stays. Higher teacher attrition can often signal poor administration or weak social capital. Many of these stats are listed on the Niche site so that’s one-stop-shopping.

**This is a luxury that not everyone can exercise. Still there is much you can do to support your child’s education no matter how your community schools “rank” on these metrics. More on that in later posts as well.

Colorado’s Voucher Issue

Dianna Terrell Leave a comment

Today the New York Times ran a front-cover story about Colorado’s state Supreme Court’s refusal to allow vouchers to fund religious schools. This might lead you to wonder, “Why is this happening? What’s so wrong with vouchers?”

http://huff.to/1KqUL5t

Voucher programs are typically a municipal initiative (like in Milwaukee, Wisconsin or Douglas County, Colorado), and sometimes a state initiative (like in Minnesota). Vouchers consolidate public money collected via tax revenue and then the program redirects the money intended for public schools back to parents. Parents are then able to use this voucher to offset the cost of private schools.

School choice proponents like this because it places control in the hands of parents. Courts do not like these programs because the most affordable private schools are often religious schools. Though vouchers typically hover in the $1,500 – $3,000 dollar amount, independent private schools often cost over $20,000 a year for tuition. Meanwhile, private religious schools average tuition is typically less than $7,000. So, if you’re a parent with a $2,500 voucher that clearly will go a lot further toward paying a $7,000 tuition rather than a $20,000 tuition.

Make sense?

At issue here is the separation of church and state, a maxim repeated often and implicitly addressed in the U.S. Constitution under the First Amendment, which decrees Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…

Many education reforms butt up against the Establishment and Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment (e.g. sex education in school, etc). What do you think? Are publicly-funded vouchers in violation of the First Amendment when they are applied toward tuition for religious schools?

2014’s Best and Worst States for Teachers

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Ask the Experts

Like any professional seeking an ideally balanced work situation and personal life, educators are no exception. Teachers must be able to make a reasonable living in order to meet the challenges of their positions. To propel the discussion, we asked a panel of experts to weigh in on teacher-related issues and offer advice to both job seekers and local policymakers.

Dianna Gahlsdorf Terrell
Assistant Professor of Education, Saint Anselm College

What are the biggest issues teachers face today?

Teachers are sometimes held solely responsible, and unfairly so, for the quality of education in America. If students don’t perform well internationally or nationally, within their state, their district or the school, Americans want to know where to put the blame, and it often falls on teachers. Of course to some extent the classroom teacher plays a significant role, but there is a host of other reasons for the uneven performance of American schools. So there seems to be a real undercurrent in the discourse that holds teachers accountable, and wants to evaluate a teacher’s quality on the “value” they add to students’ standardized tests scores in a single academic year. This is a considerable, and as I mentioned, rather unfair burden to bear for a novice teacher just entering the workforce.

Relatedly, the amount of support a new teacher receives in his or her job is extraordinarily variable. That is to say, some teachers get a great deal of support through induction and mentoring programs in their schools, while others are left to “sink or swim” with little to no support for improving their teaching skills. We know that the quality and quantity of support in the induction years plays a large part in terms of whether a teacher decides to stay in or leave the profession. With half of the teaching force leaving the profession in the first five years, attrition from the teaching career is a significant concern. So, a school’s mentoring and induction program merits a second look when a teacher is considering a job offer. They should ask the question, “Who will be my mentor and how will I be supported in my first year?”

Finally, I would say the variability in students’ “preparedness for school” – shorthand for the skills, knowledge and behavior students bring into a classroom – can be a real shock for teachers. A new teacher’s capacity to differentiate their instruction for an exceedingly diverse student body is a crucial skill for new teachers and an issue on the national stage just as much as it is at the district level.

How can local officials make their states more attractive to the best teachers?

Local officials should investigate whether new teachers and teachers transferring from other states are provided with the appropriate training and incentives to move to their district. This can be done easily by making sure local officials are current on state policies for certification, and making sure there is a clear link between teacher preparation programs’ expectations for their graduates, and state or district expectations for teacher credentialing.

An easy way to connect schools in a community with high quality novice teachers is to form relationships with particular teacher education programs in the area and to open classrooms of current teachers to pre-service teachers enrolled in those programs. Pre-service teachers can then be “trained up” within the culture of the specific school and gain a better sense of the school and community culture. Local districts that have learned how to do this enjoy the benefit of having “first pick” from a pool of qualified graduates. These are students who already have a great sense of the school and the broader community, and will require less in the way of orientation in their first year of teaching.

There also needs to be greater emphasis for teacher education programs to work with building leaders/principals in local schools to make sure teachers are being trained for the realities they will face in the classrooms in different districts and across states. Higher education institutions are trying to do this by creating networks of pre-service teacher education programs to be sure their programs are responsive to the needs of PK-12 schools, and state and local officials can support these initiatives by simply asking how they can make the “PK-20” alignment more seamless.

Another way to recruit high quality practicing teachers or career changing teachers into the community is to offer incentives like reduced costs to “tuition into” the district. In some cases, the strongest teachers live in a community outside the community that is trying to recruit them. With private schools, teachers are often offered a significantly discounted tuition rate. With public schools that allow people from other communities to “tuition in” to the school, it seems a good and simple budget-line investment would be to reduce the cost for the teacher to tuition his or her children into the school. When you have a high quality teacher who wants to bring his or her children into the district, reduced tuition costs are a win-win, as the school is showing an investment in the teacher and the teacher, with his or her children now in the districts’ schools, has the added investment of creating a better educational reality for his or her own children.

Are unions beneficial to teachers? What about to students?

Yes. Unions get a bad rap, but in some communities signing on with a union is a requirement of signing a contract with the district. In other words, if you’re not represented through the union the district will not extend you a contract. In my experience this is a good thing, because the union provides representation for novice teachers while they’re primarily focused on developing their practice.

In my second year of teaching, a student’s parents threatened to sue me and the district if I did not reexamine a grade I had issued to the student. You can imagine this is a terrifying predicament for a new teacher, but a reality in our highly litigious society. My union membership allowed me free access to counsel so I could continue to hold students accountable for the quality of their work, and to teach ambitiously knowing that, even without tenure, I would not be cast out to pasture when a true problem arose.

In the sense that unions protect ambitious teachers with high standards, unions are good for students. Of course, it makes a much better headline to show all of the unethical conduct that teacher unions appear to condone and even defend – and in those cases it’s clear that teachers unions aren’t always working in the best interests of students. What gets lost in that portrait of unions are the many teachers, like myself, who have tangible experiences that provide evidence of the fact that when unions support good teaching they’re also supporting student learning.

What tips can you offer young teachers looking for a place to settle?

The interests of a typical, young 20-something teacher are quite different from the interests of a family person, a veteran teacher or a career changer, so it’s difficult to offer advice to all of these different subpopulations entering a school as a teacher. The population with whom I have the greatest experience are the “young” teachers you reference in your prompt.

Most times, teachers are just looking for a job – this is true in particular certification areas like Elementary Education and secondary history and English teaching where the candidate pool exceeds job opportunities. In those cases, my best advice is just to find a classroom teaching job, and know you may be working in a community in which you do not see yourself long term. They also must understand that just because they’re in this position now, doesn’t mean they’re bound to that grade, school, district or even state long-term. Classroom teaching experience is preferred to non-experience, and they’ll be able to trumpet the skills they built in those initial years in their next job search. At that point, it’s more appropriate to be looking for a “place to settle.”

In any case, the best advice I have is that teachers should know that if the first job doesn’t feel like a “fit” that does not mean that the career is not a “fit.” They should understand that it may take some time before they find the right school community and culture – a place where they feel at home. Hopefully, that place will have a building principal or curriculum leader who has the development of his or her faculty at heart, and who can see the young teacher’s potential may not just be in the classroom, but could be with a different role within education. This speaks to an earlier response where I noted that a teacher looking for a job should ask the question, ““Who will be my mentor and how will I be supported in my first year?”I would add here “How will I be supported in my career?”

The preceding is an excerpt from an interview I did in 2014 with WalletHub. For the full story by Richie Bernando, WalletHub Contributor, including ratings of each state based on WalletHub’s methodology, please follow this link.

Teacher tracking: Higher ed group worried about proposed legislation

QuoteDianna Terrell Leave a comment

Proposed federal legislation that would track teachers and the institutions that educate them after graduation has the New Hampshire Institutions of Higher Education Network concerned about its implications — specifically, that it’s too difficult to implement and that it will discourage teachers from working with special-needs populations for fear that there won’t be enough evidence to prove the teachers are making progress.

Dr. Dianna Gahlsdorf Terrell, secretary of the IHE Network and professor of education at Saint Anselm College, said that on a federal level, there is increasing interest in teacher progress and regulating teacher education programs.
“They are being looked at in terms of, ‘how do we control what they are doing more?’” Terrell said.
The proposed legislation is still being drafted. It would see training institutes like Saint Anselm track teachers after graduation and into the classrooms by examining how their students perform, Terrell said.
“We’re not … equipped with the resources like that to track our graduates in their own classrooms,” she said. “It’s statistically sort of shady, the further and further you get out.”
Terrell likened it to Harvard Medical School having to track its graduates into their practices and measure them based on patient health status. Doctors who choose to work with cancer patients, for example, see a higher mortality rate in their caseloads. “It’s cumbersome for us to follow our teachers out of the classroom. It’s a stretch to say that everything that happens in the classroom is because of a teacher,” Terrell said, noting many other factors are at play.
She said it is even more statistically invalid to trace it back to the program in which the teacher was trained.
The federal government currently measures the quality of schools as a whole based on children’s scores on high-stakes standardized tests, like the Smarter Balanced test. The new legislation would put more of an emphasis on individual teachers — if a teacher doesn’t add value over the course of the year, the teacher’s quality will be called into question. “There are a lot of teachers who work with populations where it’s tough to move the needle,” Terrell said.
Terrell gave the example of the Head Start program, where it’s harder to gauge and show success on measures with standardized tests because of socioeconomic and learning challenges. “The implications [of the legislation] for teachers are [that] it’s not a good way of showing their quality. It’s going to dissuade people from working in populations with high needs,” Terrell said. “The ones that deal with the most at-risk kids are going to be the most at risk for not showing progress.”
The impact on institutions that statistically aren’t producing enough effective teachers could mean the loss of accreditation from the state and loss of Title I funds from the federal government.

As seen in the March 19, 2015 issue of the Hippo.

Common Core is NOT a Test

Dianna Terrell Leave a comment

One thing that has made me crazy(er) in all of the media frenzy around Common Core is when media outlets refer to “Common Core Tests.” This is fundamental misdirection.

The Common Core State Standards are standards. Standards are guidelines that most districts and states develop to guide teachers and administrators in what should be taught during the school year. Standards focus on skills and content and are usually divided by grade levels. In other words, they list out what skills and content each child in that grade should be able to “show mastery of” by the end of that academic year.

Standards are listed by grade, and then they are often listed within disciplinary level. So, for example, in most states you could find list of grade level standards for math, English language arts (ELA), science and social studies. Less frequently you can also find grade level standards for language, art, music and other “extra curriculars.”

What media outlets have taken to refer to in shorthand as “the Common Core Tests” are a series of standardized assessments, often created by for-profit companies (others include Pearson and ETS) to assess, score, test or evaluate how well schools are meeting the Common Core State Standards. These tests are the subject of significant controversy across the nation. Two of the biggest standardized tests meant to evaluate whether the Common Core State Standards are being met are called PARCC and Smarter Balanced.

Now, to be clear, many folks have taken some issue with the Common Core State Standards. However, it’s the Common Core-based tests, like Smarter Balanced and PARCC, which are being piloted and administered in schools throughout the nation in Spring 2015 that are causing the biggest stir.

Parents complain that their kids should not be sent to school to take hours and hours of tests. Their children are stressed out. The tests are hard. The teachers and building principals are putting massive emphasis on the tests and often setting aside huge chunks of time to administer them. The results will take several weeks to compile and release and then it is unclear what actions the outcomes the results will bring. In other words, parents are worried that the test results will show their child is “behind.” School leaders might worry that test results will show their whole school is “behind.”

What no one seems to be worried about is why we’re so worried when it’s unclear if there will be any “real” repercussion in terms of funding loss for schools (there won’t be), or long term repercussions for students (there could be).

The point here is that when discussing whether you support or oppose these new Common Core State Standards, it’s worth separating the standards from the tests that are meant to assess whether the standards are being met.

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What led to Common Core Standards?

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The Common Core State Standards have a lot more going for them than most people realize. Surely school administrators, state commissioners and secretaries of education, state boards of education and professional associations including the National Governor’s Association and the National Council of Chief State School Officers in the 45 states that have adopted the standards cannot all be delusional. There must be some reason to support the standards.

The CCSS are only one of a host of guidelines school administrators and faculty consult to inform curriculum, instruction and assessment.

In 1983, the Regan administration funded a research initiative which generated a report titled, “A Nation at Risk.” The report cautioned Americans that education in the United States was lacking compared to other nations such that “if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” The repercussions of this report have reverberated in education policy and school reform since.  

Thirty years on, the results of international assessments (e.g. “PISA,” “PIRLS” and “TIMSS”) have consistently demonstrated the accuracy and the stubborn tenacity of the “Nation at Risk” findings. For example, studies released following the 2009 PISA test asserted that “out of 34 countries, the U.S. ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math” (NCES).

Subsequent research since 1983 has clarified the fact that this poor testing performance is not present in all our nation’s nearly 100,000 public schools. That is to say, poor results on standardized tests occur in pockets, not throughout the nation.

In studies of nations where schools have gone from mediocre to excellent (as in the case of Finland), school reformers found that high quality teacher training and setting high standards are among the common factors that turn school systems around. Yet, studies have also shown state generated standards can be woefully unequal state-to-state. For example, a 2004 study published jointly by the Fordham Foundation and Accountability Works called “Grading the Systems,” the authors found that many states “did dismally and the averages can most charitably be termed ‘fair’ to ‘poor.’” In other words, after decades of standards writing, many states were still working to get it right.

The CCSS are an attempt to provide a quality set of standards. These standards are not imposed by the national government, but in some cases they are tied to Title I funding.  States may adopt these standards or not.  New Hampshire education officials (some elected, some appointed), have chosen to adopt the standards.

These standards are not perfect, but they are for the most part reasonable. So, I’d like to reiterate the point of my earlier letter: In the interest of balanced fact-finding, please take a look at the Common Core State Standards on your own.