The bad news for education in Connecticut is that in the state budget, which takes effect on July 1, 2015, money will be spent on charter schools for 2% of Connecticut children that would have been better spent on the other 98% of Connecticut children. The good news is that if the Connecticut legislature wants to address that kind of injustice, it will soon have the power to do so.

The legislature derives that power from a bill it just passed. It is S.B. 1096 entitled “An Act Concerning Charter Schools”. The bill passed with a vote by the Connecticut State Senate of 35-1 and with the House of Representatives voting in concurrence with the Senate. The passage of that bill gives the Connecticut legislature, for the first time, the authority to approve the formal funding of any proposed charter schools. Previously, the appointed officials of the Connecticut State Department of Education had that authority. This change means that we as citizens, for the first time, through our elected officials, will have some say over the extending or limiting of charter schools in Connecticut. That will take place unless nefarious political shenanigans in the Special Session overturn the decisive vote of the legislature.

As CT Mirror reports, the two-year budget that was passed on July 3, 2015 allocates $12.4 million dollars to add about 700 seats to existing charter schools and to open two new charter schools this fall, one in Bridgeport and one Stamford, both of which are being opened despite the local boards of education voting against them. At the same time, a group of struggling public schools, targeted for state intervention and state funding, called The Commissioners Network will receive $4.7 million less than they received this year. Also, 15 of our poorest public school districts will lose $3.6 million slated to extend the school day and offer summer academic programs and lose $1.6 million to help public schools transport students. In addition, the Democratic Party’s plan to move the state towards universal preschool has been put aside because $7.2 million was cut from the planned $10 million dollar project.

For those of you who are counting, that is $12.4 million given to publicly funded, privately operated and profit-making charter schools and $17.1 million taken away from traditional public schools.

But maybe it’s not all about the money. Maybe it’s about the education. What if the student achievement gained in charter schools is worth it? What if the trade-off pays off?

Answers to these questions can be found in a multitude of national studies which demonstrate that student achievement in charter schools and traditional public schools is pretty much the same. Answers particular to Connecticut can be found a report commissioned by the Connecticut State Department of Education entitled Evaluating the Academic Performance of Choice Programs in Connecticut, which was just released. The report compares student achievement in non-urban schools, urban schools, and the choice programs of public charter schools, magnet schools operated by districts, regional magnet schools such as those operated by CREC, and Open Choice programs in which inner-city students attend suburban schools.

The news was quite underwhelming regarding the performance of charter schools. As Commissioner of Education, Dianna Wentzell commented, “ In some cases, students in choice programs made greater academic gains than their peers not enrolled in these programs (students in traditional public schools), thereby closing the achievement gap, while in other cases they did not.” Sometimes students in regular, old inner city public schools made more impressive gains than students in publicly funded but privately owned and managed charter schools, and sometimes students in charter schools did better.

There was no clear winner among the alternatives to traditional public schools. The report compared the growth in reading and writing at both proficient and advanced levels of students between grades 3 and 5 and between grades 6 and 8 as measured by standardized test scores.

The public charter schools actually showed a regression in proficiency in reading and writing for students between Grades 3 and 5 while all other choice programs as well as traditional urban schools demonstrated growth in proficiency. Charters students also demonstrated much less growth in advanced scores of 5^th graders than all other groups of students, including those in traditional urban public schools. The students in regional magnet schools showed the greatest growth in proficiency in reading and math.

The report also measured students’ growth in proficiency between Grades 6 and 8. Students in charter schools and inner city students who attend school in the suburbs through the Open Choice program showed the most growth in proficiency, and students in charter schools and regional magnet schools demonstrated the most growth in 8^th grade advanced scores.

So it’s a mixed bag for charter schools.

Charter schools in Connecticut, as everywhere else, have a more select population than traditional public schools: fewer students with special education needs, fewer students who have English as a second language, fewer students from impoverished homes or no homes at all, and more students who have higher base line scores than their counterparts in traditional public schools. This Connecticut State Department of Education study acknowledged those differences and corrected for them but did not correct for other differences between the students in charter schools and students in traditional public schools.

Three factors not corrected for in the study influence student achievement. One is the dynamism or lack of it in the family structure. There is a difference between charter school parents who have had the time and energy to seek out various schooling options for their children and other parents who did not or cannot. That family structure influences study habits and attitude towards school and provides all kinds of support for achievement. Another factor contributing to student achievement is peer influence. Attending a charter school with other students from families who similarly value education establishes a school culture which fosters achievement. Both the family and the peer group greatly influence the third factor: intrinsic student motivation.

Given that many more students in charter schools have the advantages of a positive family structure, a peer group that is a positive influence, and their own inner drive that many students in traditional public schools do not, it is reasonable to expect that charter school students would perform very much better than they do. But they don’t.

The report also demonstrates that it is impossible to know if the teaching and the approach to learning in charter schools improve student achievement. The report states: “ It cannot be said with certainty that clones of these choice programs, or an exportation of specific pedagogical techniques and strategies used, will necessarily ensure similar performance success for urban students in general.” Therefore, this report does not in any way endorse the curriculum or instruction of charter schools or make any statement about what goes on in the classrooms as being a causal factor for student achievement.

So we are back to the question: Should we set up new publicly funded, privately managed, profit-generating charter schools at the expense of providing educational resources to a broad spectrum of Connecticut’s children? Hopefully, each Connecticut legislator in the future and each Connecticut citizen who puts legislators in office will answer: Not on my watch.

Ultimately, it is way more than a question about one educational setting versus another one. Whether like Jennifer Alexander who lobbies for charter schools, you see thousands of Connecticut public school students “trapped in failing schools” or, like me, you see the possibilities for curriculum design and professional development in those schools, what we have before us and before the Connecticut legislators in the future is a key moral question about what is the right thing for citizens in a democracy and their elected representatives to do.

That moral question is: Are not all Connecticut’s children our children, and, if they are, how will we educate them?

A reposting from Saturday for those who were away for the weekend:

The other night, I was making shrimp scampi for the first time. The man behind the fish counter at Whole Foods had talked to me about the importance of de-veining the shrimp exactly right and predicted unpleasant results if I didn’t follow his directions precisely so I wasn’t paying attention to the news on the small kitchen TV.

Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw an ad which told me that this sweet, forlorn little girl was about to have her locker, her school desk, her teacher, her friends, and even “her very self “taken away from her if the Connecticut legislature did not fund new seats in her public charter school.

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Moreover, the ad said that 861 children would be denied access to new seats in public charter schools. The ad concluded with a plea to Connecticut legislators to live up to their responsibility for all of Connecticut’s children.

I continued to de-vein the shrimp.

Several shrimp later, the ad came on again, and I watched it more intently.

I heard again about the sad plight of the lovely little girl and was shown how happy she had been before everything was taken away from her (See below).

When I finished with the shrimp, I put the water on for the pasta. As I placed the cutting board I had used for the shrimp into the dishwasher, I looked to the TV, and there was the ad again. I saw once more how the little girl was overcome with sadness without her locker, without her desk, without her teacher, without her school, and without her very self.

When the water boiled, I added the pasta. The pasta took seven minutes to cook. As I drained the pasta, the ad came on once again. I heard for the fourth time that the sweet little girl would have her locker, her desk, her teacher, her very self taken away from her, and it was the fault of the Connecticut legislature because legislators were threatening to not fund new seats in her charter school.

By this time, I had a lot of questions:

First of all, how would this little girl have her existing seat, locker, friends, and teacher taken away from her since it is new seats, not her seat, that are at stake in the state budget?

Also, who has the kind of money to run this ad four times in the time it took me to make a meal that the recipe said took 30 minutes?

Why would that child in the ad be denied a locker, a desk, a teacher, and a school? Don’t we have public education in this country with lockers, desks, and teachers to which all students have a right?

Why would this child lose “her very self”, her whole identity, if she didn’t have a charter school? What disservice was being done to her that she would feel adrift in the world without the identity of attending a charter school? Who would foster that kind of cult-like allegiance?

What happened to Brown vs. the Board of Education and Sheff vs. O’Neill? Aren’t all children better off in classrooms of diversity? The children in the classroom in the ad, as typical of charter schools, are all children of color.

Why are the 861 children who could fill new seats in publicly funded but privately owned and privately managed charter schools more important than educating 98.5% of children in Connecticut who attend publicly funded and publicly accountable traditional public schools? Governor Malloy’s proposed state budget does not increase funds for traditional public schools but does call for an increase in funding for public charter schools.

Watching this ad convinced me that the governor has the wrong priority in requesting the funding of new charter schools seats and not increasing funding for traditional public schools. Even more importantly, I became aware of how parents and children in Connecticut’s inner cities are being taken advantage of by those who own and run publicly funded, profit-making charter schools. Parents in Simsbury, South Windsor, Fairfield, and Mansfield, or any other suburban community would not tolerate a publicly funded but privately owned and managed charter school in their town.

Can you imagine a neighborhood in West Hartford in which two or three of the children on the cul-de-sac attend a charter school, funded with $11,000 per student per year of taxpayer money and promoted as a superior school, while all the other children in the neighborhood attend what is said (by the charter school advocates) to be an inferior school also funded by taxpayer money?

Can you imagine Avon supporting a public charter school although that school has no greater performance record than the Avon Public Schools? Measured by standardized test scores, which is the current American way of determining school excellence, about 50% of charter schools perform the same as their traditionalX public school counterparts although the charter school student population is more selective and has fewer special education students and fewer students with English as a second language. The other 50% of charter schools are about equally divided between some doing better than traditional public schools and others doing worse than traditional public schools. What is clear from reviewing the studies of charter school performance is that charter schools have not lived up to their claim to provide an education significantly and dependably better than traditional public schools.

Can you imagine New Canaan parents sending their children to an elementary school in which 23.78 % of the children are suspended as at a charter elementary school in New Haven (Achievement First’s Amistad Academy)? Or can you imagine Wethersfield parents sending their high school students to a charter school that suspended 58.6% of its students (Elm City College Prep) or 53.5% of its students (Bridgeport Achievement First) as compared to 25 % of high school students suspended from “failing” high schools and 12.3% as the state-wide average for high school suspensions?

Can you imagine a high school in Glastonbury in which 50% of the students who entered the school as ninth graders would be pushed out of that high school by senior year, thus producing a graduation rate of 50% although touted to be 100% because 100% of those not pushed out of the school did graduate? The graduation rates and college acceptance rates in Connecticut’s charter schools need to be scrutinized. For example, in 2013, Achievement First’s Amistad High School announced that 100% of its seniors were accepted to college. In reality, 38% of those who entered the high school in ninth grade were accepted to college, 25 students out of the original 64 ninth graders. The remaining 39 students were either held back in senior year or were no longer enrolled in the school.

Can you imagine a school in Madison having a 20-45% teacher turnover rate with young, uncertified teachers who have no teaching experience coming in each year and staying for an average of 2.3 years as in most charter schools, including Achievement First schools in Connecticut? High teacher turnover affects the quality of the education because it impedes the development of instructional cohesion within the school or school district. Teacher turnover rate in charter schools is much greater than in traditional public schools, and teachers in charter schools are more likely to leave the profession than teachers in traditional public schools.

Can you imagine the taxpayers of Greenwich supporting a school budget in which 10% of the budget went to a charter management company with no oversight by local or state taxpayers through the Greenwich Board of Education or the Connecticut General Assembly?

The answer to all for all of these questions: Of course not.

Families For Excellent Schools, though, is asking the state legislature to give to our inner cities, through the funding of new charter school seats, a kind of education that would not be tolerated in our more affluent towns.

Below is the last frame of the ad:

The words of this last frame of the ad are correct. The Connecticut legislature must stand with all of Connecticut’s children, most of all those being victimized by the charter school establishment, funded by billionaires such as the Walton family, owners of Walmart. The Walton family underwrites the organization called Families for Excellent Schools and, among others who do not give their names, is responsible for the ad I saw four times before dinner.

Connecticut legislators have a public trust to deliver to ALL Connecticut children a well-funded, taxpayer-accountable, integrated, PUBLIC school with experienced, knowledgeable teachers and administrators who are involved in the school for the long term, knowledgeable about providing the best learning experiences possible, and committed to graduating all the students who enter their schools.

It is the responsibility of legislators to give our inner city children the same quality of education that children in more affluent towns in Connecticut receive. Those children do not deserve to be shuttled into academically limited, segregated, restrictive learning environments of publicly funded but privately owned and privately managed charter schools. The legislature should not vote to fund the expansion of charter schools. It makes no sense. It is simply wrong.

The Common Core State Standards, which were written without the input of early childhood educators or those at the university level who are knowledgeable about cognition and child development or pediatricians and other clinicians who work with young children, stand in the way of real learning for young children. This four minute video explains how the standards are an impediment to real learning in kindergarten. Please watch.

If you cannot access the video here, you can find it at https://youtu.be/DVVln1WMz0g

It is time for action. We adults can talk endlessly, but each child has only one time to be kindergartener or preschooler. For each child, we must do all that we can to provide the best school experience possible. Two organizations, Defending the Early Years and the Alliance for Children, recommend changes in policy and practice. Here are their calls to action:

Some public figures in Connecticut, both elected and appointed, say that the content of the Common Core is rigorous and just the implementation has been the problem. Others who served on the Governor’s Task Force on the Common Core have said that the content of the Common Core does need a little “tweaking” but is basically just fine. However, the highly respected National Council of Teachers of English does not agree with either point of view.

The National Council of Teachers of English was not consulted in the creation of the Common Core Standards although the organization has for more than 100 years been the standard-bearer for excellence in English language arts education in the nation’s elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools. NCTE, however, was invited to respond to each draft of the Common Core Standards. In each of its review of the drafts of the Common Core Standards, NCTE took issue with the content of the standards, took issue with the very way that reading and writing is taught with the Common Core Standards. The NCTE review teams cited the reduction of the teaching of narrative thinking and writing in high school, the lack of teaching of metacognitive (learning-how-to-learn) skills, and the lack of collaboration as a way of creating individual meaning as students read and write as serious problems. The review teams pointed out that all the countries with which we compete have standards for those skills. NCTE also took issue with the Common Core Standards because they are not supported by any evidence that those standards will develop students as readers, writers, or thinkers.

The National Council of Teachers of English, after conducting their careful reviews of the Common Core Standards, decided to not endorse the Common Core Standards. You can read the NCTE reviews at http://www.ncte.org/ or contact me for copies. It is remarkable and unfortunate that standards in literacy are being mandated for all the children (kindergarten through grade 12) in the United States without the endorsement of the professional organization representing all the teachers of reading and writing in the country.

The voice of that highly regarded professional organization should be part of the conversation in Connecticut about the quality of the Common Core Standards. It is   reasonable that anyone in that conversation who passes judgment on the Common Core Standards for English language arts should have three qualifications:

1) They have read the 42 standards and fully understand the pedagogy for teaching the discrete and random skills students should know and be able to do in each grade (90 such skills in kindergarten and 190 such skills in 11th grade).

2) They have experience and expertise in teaching English language arts.

3) They have in-depth knowledge of child and adolescent development, including how children and adolescents learn.

The National Council of Teachers of English review teams meet those qualifications. Many others in Connecticut who comment in the public arena about the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts do not. I think it is time of us to bring professional educators, such as those who understand why NCTE did not endorse the Common Core Standards, into the conversation in Connecticut about education so that all of our children have opportunities for real learning as they progress through Connecticut schools.

Here are a few pivotal quotes from the NCTE reviews of the Common Core State Standards to begin that conversation:

1. The literacy environment is one that demands innovation, creativity, and adaptability within an accelerating rate of change. In our classrooms across the nation, the impact of these changes is already apparent. That impact, however, is not apparent in the draft of the Common Core State Standards, which, with a few exceptions, could apply as well to the schools of 1950 as to the schools of this decade and the realities the nation and the world face today. (NCTE Review, July 2009)

 2.  For affluent students whose lives are already privileged, objectives like the ones listed in the Common Core State Standards draft might be taken for granted in their schools. Students who come from more privileged families and communities will meet these goals quickly, and so their curriculum will move beyond the low-level objectives to more sophisticated and enriched learning. For students from marginalized groups, especially ethnic minorities and students from low-income households, however, we anticipate school experience sharply narrowing to focus on only the limited skills enumerated in the document, omitting the literacy practices that motivate, engage, and inspire, as well as those that represent real power in civic life, the workplace, and the academy.  (NCTE Review, July 2009)

3. The standards are articulated as individual, testable actions rather than as authentic performances in college classrooms or workplaces. (NCTE Review, July 2009)

 4.  As drafted, the standards leave out very important dimensions of literacy learning—and if one imagines a teacher adhering tightly to the currently proposed standards, one must imagine a teacher who is prevented from preparing students for the real world. (NCTE Review, July 2009)

 5.  We note that the document presently contains a claim that these standards are evidence-based, but we note that none of the evidence has been drawn from peer-reviewed research journals or similar sources. Rather, the evidence offered at present consists of surveys conducted by the testing companies that stand most immediately to gain from the testing of these standards. This seems to represent a conflict of interest in the development of the standards. (NCTE Review, July 2009)

6. Exclusion of metacognitive strategies is particularly contentious for us, as it is referenced in the introduction to the standards: “The Standards, with their emphasis on observable outcomes, do not enumerate various metacognitive strategies that students may need to use to monitor and direct their thinking and learning” (p. 4). First, the notion that only observable outcomes are worthy of being named in the standards seems spurious. Perhaps current standardized tests are not sensitive enough to measure such outcomes, but teachers have been, in fact, measuring “in-the-head processes” for decades. (NCTE Review, January 2010)

7.  Omission of strategy language represents a grave concern and jeopardizes the viability of these standards to be able to achieve their intended outcome. Additionally, metacognitive strategies such as making connections, seeing relationships between items, questioning and determining importance, as well as demonstrating an awareness of one’s thinking, are all needed for success in the 21st century. Furthermore, a review of the high school standards of the ten nations/regions identified by your organization as exemplars for international benchmarking shows that 70% of these standards (of other countries or regions) make direct reference to metacognitive strategies as being important. (NCTE Review, January 2010)

8.  Without negating the importance of and relative difficulty of other forms of writing, omitting narrative writing as a form for high school students does not represent the rigor that is possible and necessary within these documents.  Again, a search of the benchmark standards demonstrates that 90% of these nations/regions that outperform the United States in student achievement actually do emphasize narrative writing at the high school level…..Narrative writing has had tremendous power and will likely continue to lead to new thinking necessary for humanity to both thrive and survive in the 21st century. Omitting or reducing the role of narrative writing to a technique does not represent (the Common Core) stated goals of being more rigorous, or of being internationally benchmarked, or of trying to ensure that students are well prepared for the 21st century.  (NCTE Review, January 2010)

9. The danger with having so many grammar skills enumerated is that teachers or districts become overly focused on grammar instruction, a practice that research has widely shown to be unhelpful to developing quality writers. (NCTE Review, January 2010)

 

 

 

 

 

 

All students deserve real learning. Real learning prepares students for their future. These checklists describe real learning and not-real learning in high school English classes.

CHECKLIST FOR REAL LEARNING

Real learning is about students constructing their own knowledge and creating personal meaning by being actively engaged in the language acts of reading, collaborating, and writing.  They are taught to think critically, divergently, and innovatively, to broaden and deepen their individual thinking by being in dialogue with others, and, to express themselves effectively in writing as well as orally. As students develop as readers, writers, and thinkers, they also learn how to learn and are prepared when new situations and problems present themselves. 

 If you check all of the following boxes, the English class is preparing students for their  future.

☐ Students pose and shape their own questions as they interpret literary texts and evaluate ideas the texts offer.

☐ Students create individual meaning and construct new knowledge as they read literary texts.

☐  Students read informational texts in order to analyze and evaluate author’s purpose and rhetorical effectiveness. 

☐ Students participate in and lead whole class discussions with one another and the teacher so they deepen and broaden their initial thinking.

☐ Students cite textual evidence as they read and and as they write.  

☐ Students  examine their personal and cultural assumptions as they read and write.

☐ Students make connections to their own lives and to the larger world as they read and write.

☐ Students create individual meaning and construct new knowledge as they write.

☐ Students write for two different purposes: 1) to form their thinking and 2) to express their thinking to others.

☐ Students write daily either in preparation for class, as part of the class, or in response to ideas discussed in class.

☐ Students write three kinds of essays: 1)arguments with deductive reasoning in which they defend a position, 2)essays with inductive thinking in which they explore a question of their own from multiple perspectives and 3) essays with narrative thinking in which they tell the story of their thinking.

☐ Students participate fully in the writing process, including deciding what to write about and revising their writing in order to express their thinking in increasingly clear ways.

☐ Students develop skills for writing in both a personal voice and an academic voice.

☐ Students write in a variety of genres: memoir, poetry, fiction, and essays.

 ☐ Students conduct research in order to “dialogue” with experts and bring the ideas of those experts into the classroom collaboration.

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CHECKLIST FOR NOT-REAL LEARNING 

Not-real learning is based on the premise that there is information to be conveyed by teachers to students and if students acquire that information, they will have what they need to be successful. Students do not make personal meaning or create new knowledge as they read and write. Not-real learning doesn’t recognize that the communities in which students will live and work will be increasingly diverse and contain a multitude of perspectives so students need to learn how to think critically and creatively in the midst of competing ideas and a broad range of possibilities. Students do not explore their own questions or explain how their thinking is growing and changing.  Students do not develop learning how to learn skills needed for new and demanding situations  in our rapidly changing world and economy. The Common Core State Standards mandate not-real learning. 

If you check all of the following boxes, students in this English class need additional learning experiences in order to be prepared for their future.

☐ Students are taught that the meaning is within “the four corners of the pages” of literary texts, and they dig it out with the help of the teacher who is familiar with that meaning. 

 ☐  The teacher asks the students questions for which the teacher already knows the answers.

 ☐  Literature is studied in the same way as informational tests are studied instead of as a means for developing skills in individual interpretation and evaluation of ideas.

☐   Literature is studied for structure and style without regard for historical and cultural context of the text. 

☐ Literature is studied for structure and style without regard for the readers’ personal connections to the ideas in the texts.

 ☐  Students write only essays of argument with deductive reasoning, often on assigned topics.

☐  Students cite textual evidence for only their deductive reasoning as they read and and as they write.

☐  Students conduct research for the purpose of finding information and reporting that information.

☐   Students write all their essays in an impersonal voice.

☐  Students practice writing timed, single draft, unrevised essays.

 ☐ Class time is spent preparing students for standardized tests.