Saturday, June 19, 2004

Taking Care of The Business of Education (4/14/04)

It's like an episode of "Back to the Future," without the popcorn or the stainless steel DeLorean. The business community is doing, in all humility, exactly what I said it would.

About 10 years ago, I wrote an op-ed piece in the Durham Herald-Sun that described in some detail how the business community would soon be fed up with waiting for public schools to get their act together.

Facing an increasing need for high-tech workers, these companies would in the coming years find themselves spending more and more resources on the unwanted task of training them. There would come a tipping point, I said, where the need to take over becomes obvious.

How would this hostile takeover manifest itself? My prediction was that the heavy hitters in business would put their heads together and conclude that they're the largest consumers of the "product" of public education. They hire high school and college graduates. They are, therefore, the test of whether or not education has prepared young people for the world of work and self-reliance.

So the local companies with the heft to do it would first put down a large sum of money and offer to help the schools. They would not do this via straight donation, but rather by establishing an external resource they could control.

With that established, they will have effectively bought themselves a seat at the policy table and little by little, their influence will drive the changes in the public school system.

A couple weeks ago, we all heard about the so-called "High Five" project, which translates to $2.5 million over five years' time, sponsored by Blue Cross and Blue Shield's foundation, the News & Observer, SAS, Progress Energy and Capitol Broadcasting.

These companies have each plunked down a half-million smackers toward the "audacious" goals they've outlined. They are:

*All ninth graders will graduate high school in four years.

*Ninety percent of students complete some sort of college preparatory course of study on either a university or tech-prep track.

*Eighty percent of students meet requirements for admission to the UNC system.

That's it. According to Blue Cross and Blue Shield's CEO Bob Greczyn, that's a plan that's "not just ambitious, it's audacious."

Sorry, Mr. Greczyn, it's not audacious. In fact, it's not even particularly ambitious. If students meet their high-school graduation requirements now and do so on time, they've largely met these goals. The schools should be doing that right now. Of course, I'll wager that Greczyn is keenly aware of that, just like he knows that Blue Cross' record profits last year were not quite a quirky "missed guess."

The real curiosity is that area districts are purportedly very excited about this new reform effort, even as Chapel Hill-Carrboro school officials are busily ramming through their own version of "reform"-- no doubt so they could claim to be ahead of the curve by the time High Five hits the ground crawling.

But they're so far behind it, they probably can't catch up. School officials are busy stonewalling parents of gifted kids as they phase out any set-aside curriculum for academically gifted students. While they'll still accept every nickel of extra taxpayer dollars for meeting the needs of the academically gifted, they're just going to clog up mainstream classes with gifted kids whose need for challenge and fast-moving material will turn into behavior issues quicker than you can say "IEP."

You can teach children of varying levels in one classroom. I've seen it. It's awesome. I recommend it. You just can't do it in today's public school classroom, not when you're teaching to high-stakes end-of-grade tests never designed to evaluate individual performance, No-Child-Left-Behind accountability standards, and your classroom in the trailer is overcrowded.

This is where the self-described "best district in the state of North Carolina" should be holding the line and demanding that it offer:

*As many Advanced Placement courses as possible.

*Magnet AG programs to allow children from all over the county to segregate themselves for the purpose of working to much higher standards.

*Well-managed resources for children with special needs, based on the gains it makes in grouping AG students together to meet their needs.

*Various creative scheduling options to allow students to finish high school in 21/2 or three years, helping (even in a small way) to alleviate overcrowding.

For $2.5 million, these area businesses will be looking to jam their feet in the door to bring some real-world efficiency to the participating school districts. Let's hope the local captains of industry have better luck than parents in getting a straight answer from the schools. Even more critical, let's hope that with two major media companies involved, the process will be refreshingly transparent.

posted by Jean Bolduc @ 1:46 PM 0 comments

Weapons of Mass Obstruction (4/28/04)

On Monday's editorial page, Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools Superintendent Neil Pedersen made a statement some parents may find surprising. "We cannot turn a deaf ear to criticisms that a student is bored or unchallenged in class," he wrote.

Read that sentence very, very carefully and you'll find some compelling and disturbing information. First, it's the opposite of the facts, according to many, many parents of gifted children. Pedersen and his staff have done precisely what he says they "cannot" do.

A deaf ear? Pedersen and his staff have not only lost their hearing, they have unplugged the phones (they don't return calls), turned their e-mail into rubber stamps that say little more than "return to sender" and have flipped the back of their hands to parents whose frustration is becoming manifest.

Several parents have e-mailed me with attachments of their queries to the district staff or school board members in Chapel Hill. These are long, detailed, thoughtful correspondences with detailed, intelligent questions. They get responses like Nick Didow's "Thank you for your e-mail. I will give it thoughtful consideration."

So widely reputed is this response among these parents, Didow would have an easier time trademarking that phrase than Donald Trump would of "You're fired."

Pedersen declares that he believes in the differentiation plan -- and that's good enough for him. Never let evidence get in the way of what you believe.

And as parents are screaming bloody murder about being systematically ignored by the district, he writes about not turning a deaf ear to them. What he says is wholly contrary to the direct experience of these parents as substantiated by voluminous amounts of e-mail. But Pedersen still contends that he's "listening."

The independent research being done by these parents to help develop and operate under the best practices in gifted education is enough to sink a battleship. To see how the district receives this help, you'd think it was enough to sink the district.

Like these frustrated parents, the county commissioners have earned a degree in dentistry for the number of painful extractions (of information) they've experienced with Chapel Hill-Carrboro. One such exchange had exasperated county officials pounding their fists and chewing the furniture for such top-secret information as how many employees the district has.

The clash in these matters is about two things near and dear to everyone involved. Money and power are forceful drivers, after all, and they are integral pieces to the vexing puzzle.

The money involved is the revenue the district gets from the state for students they identify as exceptional. This includes students at both extremes of the spectrum. A student with a high IQ, for example, would presumably be intellectually gifted, though he or she may not test well or be particularly high achieving in the classroom.

Academically gifted kids are typically high achieving, though they can be students who simply work harder and longer to master material earlier or at a deeper level. According to the Chapel Hill-Carrboro district, some 30 percent of students meet one of these descriptions.

But the district gets funds that are capped at a fixed percentage ... it is presumed that the bell curve will work it all out. Chapel Hill-Carrboro may have a disproportionate number of gifted students. Another district may have an unusual concentration of students with learning disabilities or students living in poverty with lesser reading skills, for example.

So the districts find themselves with something of a disincentive to meet the needs of students as individuals. Offering more AP courses doesn't improve the district's overall performance, the argument would go, it just drives costs up in keeping teachers trained in the advanced course work.

In his guest column, Pedersen is careful to talk about what is offered instead of what is being reduced. His district offers 26 AP courses, he says, but never offers a sound explanation for why it's important to individual students that they be discouraged from taking as many AP courses as they want.

In Advanced Placement coursework, the student is at last getting the best approach to teaching gifted kids -- an advanced curriculum the student has self-selected. It is unconscionable to me a district would pursue a policy that will tend to reduce the number of such courses that one student takes. To claim this is on behalf of limiting the "academic pressure" students feel is to insult everyone involved.

"Our schools need to develop more effective accountability measures to determine the academic progress gifted students are making," writes Pedersen.

Sounds to me like a new assessment tool for AG students. Another task force, another multi-year wheel re-invention. Where does it end?

posted by Jean Bolduc @ 1:43 PM 0 comments