Will Reforms Help Our “Talented Tenth?”

June 21st, 2011 by Patrick Kaiser
Share |

As the education reform debate continues, most attention is focused on raising the achievement level of the lowest performing students by increasing their reading and math proficiency as well as graduation rates. While I agree that this is a vital area to improve in our country, we cannot overlook the needs of gifted students.

Innovation is a major source of our country’s economic growth and prosperity, and much of this innovation comes from many gifted individuals across the nation. In education, gifted students are sometimes referred to as the “talented tenth,” the highest performing ten percent of students.

Some schools have programs that challenge gifted students. However, there are some schools with weak or nonexistent gifted programs, and many of these schools serve low-income or minority students. Recent reports show that the fastest-growing gap between black and white students is in the area of advanced achievement.

But is it not just low-income and minority students who are lagging behind in gifted education. The most recently announced Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) results place the United States 31 of 56 participating countries in the percentage of students achieving at an advanced level in mathematics.

Thankfully, it is not an either/or situation when choosing between investments in helping lower and higher achieving students. Differentiating instruction within the same classroom is an important strategy used by effective teachers, allowing students within the same classroom to do work that is on their level. This is often done by giving students reading materials or math problems that are on the lesson topic but at a level that will properly challenge each student. Technology can often be used in the same way by allowing students to complete work on a computer that is tailored for their abilities.

Newly developed standardized testing measurements can help teachers and schools measure their success at meeting the needs of their top students. Using value-added models, teachers can see the academic progress each student made during the year. Just as many teachers look closely at the progress of their lower level students, they can also closely track the progress of their high achievers.

Thus, most of the same reforms that will help lower level students will also help the highest achievers. A high quality teacher in every classroom will improve classroom differentiation; an increase in technology will allow all students to perform work tailored to their abilities; and accurate testing data and models will help teachers and schools measure their success.

Closing the achievement gap is necessary for our country’s continued growth and prosperity, but let’s not forget to challenge and develop our top students, knowing that much of our innovation and development will come from the skills and minds of our talented tenth.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Report Falsely Discredits Student Scholarship Program

June 9th, 2011 by Eric Cochling
Share |

Georgia’s Tax Credit Scholarship Program is an innovative option for families who need access to a better education for their children. Unfortunately, the program has been misrepresented in a study released this week by the Southern Education Foundation that uses nonexistent data to reach false conclusions.

The scholarship program allows Georgia taxpayers who donate to student scholarship organizations (SSOs) to receive a tax credit. These funds are then awarded to students as scholarships toward a private school education.

Here at the Center for an Educated Georgia (CEG), we strongly support the program because it gives low-income parents with children in poor-performing schools the ability to choose a better school for their child.

The Southern Education Foundation’s report made widespread claims that are impossible to support with the data available for this new, three-year-old program. Without question, more information is needed about how scholarships are awarded and who receives them. However, concluding that the program is severely broken is misleading and unfair.

For starters, the report claims that the scholarships do not benefit minority or low-income students. But this conclusion is based on the largely irrelevant demographics of counties where participating schools are located, not on the characteristics of the kids who actually receive the scholarships.

For example, Georgia GOAL Scholarship provides over 35 percent of its scholarships to minority students. Two others, Arete Scholars and GRACE Scholars, provide minority students with over 70 percent and 40 percent of their respective scholarships. That’s almost 1,000 minority students receiving scholarships from just three of Georgia’s 33 SSOs.

To support low-income students, four of the largest SSOs either require or encourage schools to grant scholarships on some means-based system. One of these, Arete Scholars, has an average household income of $30,000 for recipient families, and 90 percent of its recipients are eligible for free or reduced lunch. So how can the study claim that the program “fails to increase low income students attending private schools?”

To its credit, the report does advocate for improvements in reporting and accountability for SSOs. It also calls for an end to the practice where a few SSOs have encouraged private school students to enroll for a day in public school in order to qualify for a scholarship. We couldn’t agree more. In fact, CEG has been on the forefront of advocating for improvements to the program in all of these areas. We especially consider the “enroll for a day” practice to be an absolute abuse of the intent and spirit of the law that must end. However, we do not agree that the actions of a few SSOs should be used to tar and feather an entire program that is doing so much good.

In fact, improvements to the program have already begun. The Georgia General Assembly passed legislation this year (that CEG strongly endorsed) that gives the Department of Revenue a process to remove SSOs that operate improperly and charge SSO leaders who violate the law with a crime. This was an important improvement and lawmakers should continue to require more transparency in this program.

The Tuition Tax Credit Scholarship is providing thousands of Georgia school kids access to a better education. More transparency is certainly required, but for the Southern Education Foundation to characterize the program as a “failed experiment” is absolutely wrong. The challenge we face moving forward is to strengthen the program without undermining the hope it is giving to thousands of children across the state.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Thousands of Georgia Grads Not Ready for College

June 2nd, 2011 by Patrick Kaiser
Share |

Last month thousands of Georgia seniors graduated from high school. Many of these students will be heading to college this fall, expecting that their high school prepared them for the next step in their education. And many high schools will tout their high graduation rates as evidence of their success.

But does a high graduation rate necessarily indicate that a school is high-achieving?

A recent analysis of state data by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution leads one to think otherwise. The analysis found that nearly 20 high schools in metro Atlanta had at least half of their 2010 graduates take remedial courses after enrolling in the University System of Georgia this past fall.

I wonder if all those graduates receiving their diploma at these high schools realized that their school did not properly prepare them for the rigors of college coursework.

It is not just a few schools that aren’t preparing graduates. According to the University System of Georgia data, nearly 14,000 students – about one in four college freshmen – take remedial classes in reading, writing, or math each fall. These remedial classes cost about $22 million a year — money that could be used elsewhere as the University System absorbs about $300 million in state cuts.

High school graduation rates are an important measurement of a school’s success. Schools that graduate a high percentage of students should be financially rewarded, and drop-out factories need to be significantly reformed or closed altogether. But the analysis of a school’s quality should not end with the percentage of students who receive a diploma.

The purpose of a high school is not simply to graduate students, but to prepare them for successful futures in college or the workplace. If a large number of graduating students are not ready for college, then high schools need to take a closer look at the quality of education offered and the level of expectation for students.

When a student graduates and is admitted to college, he or she should be confident they are prepared. However, many students will soon learn the harsh reality that they are not ready for college coursework. Hopefully, as high schools begin to analyze the past year, they will consider these statistics and make the needed reforms to help all their graduates prepare for the future.

Tags: ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

The Need to Read

May 17th, 2011 by Patrick Kaiser
Share |

Students require many skills to be successful in school, but none is more important than the ability to read. An important benchmark for developing this necessary skill is third grade. Until third grade, students are learning to read; after third grade, they are reading to learn.

Think about it. A low reading level impacts a student in every subject. How can a student learn history or science when they can’t read their textbook? In math, even if a student understands the concept, how are they going to answer a question when it is a struggle to read a word problem or the directions?

Additionally, with all the material to cover, teachers after third grade do not have the time – let alone the necessary materials and training – to help students catch up on their reading. Thus, it is important that students leave third grade with essential reading skills.

And a recently released study by the Annie E. Casey Foundation demonstrates just how important reading is. Using longitudinal data from nearly 4,000 students, the researchers found that students who do not read proficiently by third grade are four times more likely to leave high school without a diploma than proficient readers. For the lowest level readers, those at a below-basic level, 23 percent drop out or fail to finish high school on time, a rate six times greater than that for proficient readers.

While these struggling readers account for about a third of all students, they represent more than three-fifths of those who eventually drop out or fail to graduate on time. And this rate is even higher for students living in poverty. The study states that the combined effect of reading poorly and living in poverty puts these children in “double jeopardy.”

As has been the case on many educational issues, Florida has taken the lead in improving third grade reading levels. As part of a comprehensive reform effort in 1999, Florida curtailed social promotion of functionally illiterate third graders, requiring students to demonstrate basic reading skills before they can move on to fourth grade.

A study by the Manhattan Institute found that “students lacking in basic skills who are socially promoted appear to fall farther behind over time, whereas retained students appear to be able to catch up on the stills they were lacking.” Basically, the retained students learned how to read, whereas the promoted students continued to fall further and further behind.

While it may seem harsh to require students to repeat a grade, it is even worse to allow them to continue going through school without the basic skills needed to succeed.

Given the importance of reading and the success of the policy in Florida, the Georgia General Assembly should enact a similar third grade retention requirement. By ensuring all students learn to read by the end of third grade we will better equip them with the skills necessary for reading to learn in fourth grade and beyond.

Tags:
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Competing Views on a National Curriculum

May 12th, 2011 by Patrick Kaiser
Share |

Education leaders are engaged in an important debate over the need for a national curriculum and assessments. Currently, each state develops its own curriculum for each subject and grade, and most write their own standardized test to assess students’ mastery of the material.

In Georgia, the standards are called the Georgia Performance Standards (GPS). Students in grades 1-8 take the Criterion Referenced Competency Test (CRCT) to assess their mastery of the standards, while high school students currently take the Georgia High School Graduation Test (GHSGT) in Grade 11, but this will soon be replaced by End of Course Tests (EOCT) that students take at the end of each high school course in major subjects.

Several education leaders signed and published a manifesto calling for a national core curriculum to go along with the Common Core State Standards that have recently been adopted by 42 states, including Georgia. The Albert Shanker Institute Manifesto, “A Call for Common Content,” states that the national Common Core State Standards “requires a clear road map in the form of rich, common curriculum content, along with resources to support successfully teaching all students to mastery.”

This week, a counter manifesto called “Closing the Door on Innovation” was published to rebuke the call for a national curriculum and national tests. The counter manifesto states that the 100 education, business, and political leader signatories “do not agree that a one-size-fits-all, centrally controlled curriculum for every K-12 subject makes sense for this country or for any other sizable country.”

After reading both manifestos, I agree with the opposition to a national curriculum. Here at CEG we oppose a “one-size-fits-all” approach to education and advocate for families to have a wide variety of educational options available so they can choose the school that best fits their child’s needs. A centrally controlled curriculum would significantly reduce the options available to families and limit the educational innovation our country needs to improve our education system.

This is an important debate that will significantly affect the education provided in schools all across the country, so I encourage you to read the manifestos for yourself and let us know what you think.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »