tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4468664660833170893.post1590675436452820577..comments2024-01-08T14:53:19.838-05:00Comments on Bluegrass Policy Blog: More on Texas ChartersKelly Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17249335217299732224noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4468664660833170893.post-28151817968373076352009-12-31T10:00:29.349-05:002009-12-31T10:00:29.349-05:00RE: Anonymous, December 30, 2009 9:22 PM Part 2
R...RE: Anonymous, December 30, 2009 9:22 PM Part 2<br /><br />Regarding your second set of comments about breaking out educational performance by race, we unfortunately don’t live in a world where we can do the right thing for children by ignoring data by race. The facts are that ignoring our education system’s very different performance for different races would hide serious disparities while allowing the situation to continue unchanged. Not collecting data by race just allows the true “bigotry of low expectations” to continue.<br /><br />For example, one of the biggest failings in Kentucky’s old CATS and KIRIS assessments was that neither held any penalty for schools with big performance gaps. In fact, the way the CATS system was designed, a school could do a very inadequate job for a very significant sub-proportion of its students and still wind up with high enough Accountability Index Scores to totally escape sanctions all the way to 2014. <br /><br />I did a paper several years ago that showed schools could avoid CATS sanctions in 2014 with performance that included math proficiency rates as low as 39 percent and writing proficiency rates of 0 percent (on line here: http://www.freedomkentucky.org/images/b/b3/Planning_For_Failure_(with_CATS).pdf). That provided more than enough slack for schools to largely ignore minority performance and still look stellar under CATS.<br /><br />CATS was designed (perhaps inadvertently, perhaps not) to ignore serious failure for minority kids in Kentucky. <br /><br />It took the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act to finally bring the performance gap issue in Kentucky to real attention. NCLB definitely required separate performance determinations by race, but that was not a racist provision – far from it. It was placed in the federal statute so that the education system could no longer hide the very different educations the different races were receiving. <br /><br />There is another reason why the Bluegrass Institute regularly uses NAEP data disaggregated by race. State to state comparisons with the NAEP can be very misleading if only the overall average student scores for each state are examined. The reason is that student demographics have changed dramatically in many states and overall across the nation. Meanwhile, here in Kentucky our student demographics have remained remarkably stable since NAEP started to report state-level results in 1990. <br /><br />For example, Kentucky’s NAEP samples run around 85 percent white and 10 percent black, plus or minus a few points, in all of the NAEP state testing to date. <br /><br />In California, by way of contrast, back in the early 1990’s the state was about 51 percent white. Today California’s student makeup is only about 27 percent white. The change has largely come from immigrant Hispanics, many of whom don’t speak English as a first language. <br /><br />The education problem in California is therefore much more severe than the one we face in Kentucky. With many severely under-educated students flooding its system, California’s overall all student NAEP scores don’t reflect what is actually happening in the schools there.<br /><br />Kentuckians would be very unwise to fool ourselves into feeling good by only doing simplistic comparisons of overall all student scores for Kentucky and California. <br /><br />You have to look deeper, and because the NAEP currently has no correction for state-to-state demographic differences (or differences due to different rates of exclusion of students and provision of testing accommodations), the only reasonable way to do a better analysis is to examine the disaggregated data (You can learn more about problems with interpreting the NAEP here: http://www.freedomkentucky.org/index.php?title=The_National_Assessment_of_Educational_Progress#Pitfalls_in_Interpreting_NAEP_Scores). <br /><br />In a perfect world, we wouldn’t have to do all of that analysis. Our education system would serve all children equally, and disaggregation of data would be unnecessary. <br /><br />Sadly, we don’t live in such a world today.Richard Innesnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4468664660833170893.post-14441599072641583852009-12-31T10:00:05.118-05:002009-12-31T10:00:05.118-05:00RE: Anonymous, December 30, 2009 9:22 PM Part 1
I...RE: Anonymous, December 30, 2009 9:22 PM Part 1<br /><br />It does appear that the teachers’ unions in Texas operate somewhat differently from the current situation in Kentucky. <br /><br />In addition to the possibilities you mention, it could be that the unions in Texas are more in tune with the way I think a professional organization should operate. While member representation and service is important, professional organizations also work to improve the state of the art of their profession and strongly value customer service their members provide. <br /><br />In the case of teachers, that would mean understanding that the needs of children should come ahead of such things as allowing the best qualified, longest tenured teachers to avoid service in the most needy and demanding schools. That isn’t consistently happening in Kentucky. <br /><br />During testimony at the October Kentucky Board of Education meetings, two school principals and the superintendent from Jefferson County admitted that two of the school district’s lowest performing schools didn’t get the experienced teachers they needed because of the union contract. That contract provision is unworthy of professionals. <br /><br />In fact, the National Education Association not long ago sent out a message to local union affiliates to remove such language from their contracts. So far, that has changed nothing in Louisville.Richard Innesnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4468664660833170893.post-1780490516889092992009-12-30T21:22:26.114-05:002009-12-30T21:22:26.114-05:00It is apparent that the teachers unions in TX are ...It is apparent that the teachers unions in TX are either less powerful than the KY teachers unions or less radical. Either one works for me. <br /><br />The reason teachers unions oppose charter schools, private schools, and home schools is related to political power which they appear to believe is more important than the quality of instruction students receive.<br /><br />I realize that focusing on minority students' performance is how we get liberals to listen, but I sure would like to see less division by race, etc. <br /><br />IMHO, categorizing by race is a genuine form of racism. I know liberals won't admit this, but it is true.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4468664660833170893.post-48286853072750372962009-12-30T19:45:10.842-05:002009-12-30T19:45:10.842-05:00Looks like the blacks in Texas are smarter than ou...Looks like the blacks in Texas are smarter than our Legislators. I'll bet you are not surprised.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com