Report: No Room for Rivalry in School Reform

The contentious relationship between traditional public schools and charter schools needs to end, according to a report issued as part of a Brookings Institution project. There are lessons to be learned, the authors say, from both the successes and failures of charter operations. Pilot programs in Houston and Denver are demonstrating the potential. The Christian Science Monitor reports:

Early data show that the strategy – applied in Houston and Denver pilot programs – yielded “promising” results, according to the report, titled "Learning from the Successes and Failures of Charter Schools" and released Thursday by the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution.

The study could help improve cooperation between charter schools and traditional schools, which have often viewed each other as competitors. The debate about whether charter schools or traditional schools are more effective is a false one and misses the central point, said secretary of Education Arne Duncan at the Hamilton Project’s education forum Thursday in Washington.

“The question isn’t: Do we need more charter schools, traditional schools, gifted schools, or magnet schools?” he said. “We need better public schools. Kids don’t know what kind of school they go to. All they ask is, ‘Do I have a good teacher?’ ”

The report focuses on the work that Harvard economics professor Roland Fryer did with the Houston Independent School District (HISD) to develop a pilot program targeting nine of Houston’s lowest-performing middle and high schools in 2010-11 and 11 elementary schools in 2011-12.

Dr. Fryer, who is the faculty director of Harvard’s Education Innovations Laboratories (EdLabs), studied 35 charter schools in New York and discovered the top five practices that separate low- and high-achieving charter schools: (1) extended time at school, (2) strong administrators and teachers, (3) data-driven instruction, (4) small-group tutoring, and (5) creating a “culture of high expectations.”

Lemonade Day Teaches Entrepreneurship to Indiana Kids

On May 19, many Indiana youngsters will experience the joys — and challenges — of entrepreneurship during Lemonade Day. Founded in 2009, the experience is combined with lessons about starting your own business, and was founded by native Hoosier and Houston entrepreneur Michael Holthouse. Hoosier entrepreneur Scott Jones — founder of ChaCha, among other endeavors — has launched the program locally.

The Lemonade Day web site has the details about registration, as well as a blog about the program. On the site, Jones relays why the concept is so important to him:

I had many start-up businesses as a kid, including lemonade stands with flavored frozen lemonade popsicles, putt-putt courses in my yard, haunted houses in my basement and garage, yard-work businesses, selling seeds and crafts door-to-door, and many other ideas.  I was constantly trying to figure out the “next big thing” (for my little neighborhood) even then! When I went off to college, I put a personal ad in the back of a popular hobbyist magazine that read: “poor starving student without pride or money seeking handouts, including computers, electronics, books, etc.” which triggered people to send, literally, busloads of equipment.  I turned all of this “free stuff” into a self-learning environment in my basement, which taught me much of what I later leveraged in my robotics and technology studies and businesses. 



At 25, I co-founded my first company, Boston Technology.  As a result, I obtained patents for technologies that now enable telephone companies worldwide to offer voice mail on a massive scale to over 2 billion people. Boston Technology merged with Comverse Technology, Inc., in 1998 for $843 million. I also founded Internet-based music service company Gracenote, which sold to Sony in 2008 for $260 million.

Many entrepreneurs talk about their early childhood entrepreneurial experiences when the “light bulb” went off – the moment when they knew they could control their own destinies. It was that way for me and I wanted kids to have that “light bulb” moment, so I created two foundations: The Scott A. Jones Foundation and the Think Forward Foundation, which launched Lemonade Day in Indianapolis in 2010 with over 7,400 kids signing up.

…What do I love about being an entrepreneur? I can attack fun and interesting problems that can improve how people do things, not just here, but around the world.

The program is administered by the Think Forward Foundation. You can learn more about why it started Lemonade Day here.

Not All Aging is Created Equally

OK, it’s no secret that America is aging. But U.S. Census numbers reveal sharp differences in where younger populations are locating. Interesting numbers emerge from taking a close look at the recent Census counts.

Due to baby boomers “aging in place,” the population age 45 and over grew 18 times as fast as the population under age 45 between 2000 and 2010. All states and metropolitan areas are showing noticeable growth in their older and “advanced middle age” populations which, for the first time, comprise a majority of the nation’s voting-age population.

Although all parts of the nation are aging, there is a growing divide between areas that are experiencing gains or losses in their younger populations. In 28 of the 50 states, and 36 of the 100 largest metro areas, the population below age 45 declined from 2000 to 2010. Yet in 29 metro areas, including Las Vegas, Orlando, Houston, and Atlanta, the under-45 population grew by at least 10 percent over the decade.

Areas experiencing the fastest senior (age 65+) growth are located in the Sun Belt, while areas with the highest concentrations of seniors are located primarily in Florida, the Northeast, and the Midwest. Yet baby boom generation “pre-seniors,” now just turning 65, are growing rapidly in all areas of the country due to aging in place. College towns such as Austin, Raleigh, Provo, and Madison are among those where pre-seniors are growing fastest.

Suburbs are aging more rapidly than cities with higher growth rates for their age-45-and-above populations and larger shares of seniors. People age 45 and older represent 40 percent of suburban residents, compared to 35 percent of city residents.

Metropolitan suburbs differ sharply in the degree to which they are attracting young adults and children. The suburbs of 34 metropolitan areas, mostly in the Northeast and Midwest, registered declines in their child and under-45 populations in the 2000s, leaving high concentrations of “advanced middle aged” and older residents. An even larger number of cities experienced losses in these younger populations. 

Four-Day Workweek Still Worth Discussing for Some

Would you rather work four 10-hour days than five eight-hour days? It’s been a topic of debate for a few years now, and MSNBC has the latest story about a private company that’s about to give it a shot:

Bert Martinez, CEO of a business-training firm in Houston, has decided to blow away the five-day workweek for himself and his staff of 28.

Starting next month the entire company is going to work for four ten-hour days instead of five eight-hour days, and the company’s workweek will stay that way if productivity and profits stay the same or increase. It’s all part of Martinez’s strategy to take back his personal life, and his general inclination to shake things up at the firm.

“I want to spend more time with my family, and I’m really curious to see if results are going to stay the same,” Martinez said. “Will we lose money or make money? We’ll see what happens.

Martinez may be onto something. While his experiment may sound unusual, it’s actually part of a growing movement to rethink the standard five-day, 40-hour workweek that has been around in this country since the New Deal.

One larger example of the phenomenon is seen in Utah. In 2008, then-Gov. Jon Huntsman launched the “Working 4 Utah” plan to shift state workers who were putting in five-day weeks to a Monday-through-Thursday, 7 a.m.-to-6 p.m. work schedule. The verdict: Employee satisfaction, energy savings and a boon for the environment.

“I don’t think we have any plans to go back to five days,” said Jeff Herring, executive director of the Utah Department of Human Resource Management. Still, he added that the state is continuing to monitor the new work system to make sure it’s saving money and working both for employees and the public that uses state services.

It’s a radical idea and not without its critics. Utah State Rep. Michael Noel called the initiative “stupid” in a New York Times article last week that said other states are considering following Utah’s lead. Some experts question whether we would ever be able to abandon the five-day grind so entrenched in corporations and society at large.

And the Top Manufacturing City is …

No matter the math, Indiana still generally ranks as the most manufacturing intensive state in the nation. That means we have more manufacturing jobs based on our population/workforce. Wisconsin and North Carolina are typically in the same neighborhood.

Manufacturers News Inc. changed the scope recently and put out a top 50 list of most manufacturing jobs by city. Certainly population is a bigger factor here, but there are still some interesting numbers.

The top 10 (list below), lost more than 95,000 jobs between August 2008 and the end of 2010. Big movers included Detroit (falling from 29th to 45th) and Seattle (moving up to 34th from 46th). Five from California (L.A., San Diego, San Jose, Irvine and Santa Clara) made the top 50.

Top 10 Manufacturing Cities

  1. Houston: 228,226
  2. New York: 139,127
  3. Chicago: 108,692
  4. Los Angeles: 83,719
  5. St. Louis: 83,123
  6. Dallas: 81,626
  7. Cincinnati: 81,364
  8. Indianapolis: 79,566
  9. Phoenix: 77,322
  10. San Diego: 70,709

Education: Adding It Up (2 + 2 = $)

They’ve tried it in Dallas, Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C. among other places. The results have been mixed at best. Overall, in this writer’s view, there’s something that just doesn’t feel right.

It, in this case, is paying students for academic performance. And it, in this case, adds the twist of rewarding parents with cold, hard cash if their kids pass certain math tests and if the parents go "above and beyond" by attending conferences with teachers.

Shouldn’t parents already have an interest in the education progress of their offspring? Shouldn’t students take the responsibility, with the help of their parents, to try and perform to the best of their abilities? I know the answer and also realize what should happen doesn’t happen all the time. But high expectations, in my opinion, instead of high rewards, would yield more productive results.

Your thoughts? Here’s an excerpt from the Houston Chronicle:

The Houston school board signed off Thursday on the $1.5 million program, which is funded by the Dallas-based Liemandt Foundation. The incentives will go to students and parents at 25 elementary schools that rank among the lowest in math achievement.

The pilot program — thought to be the first that offers joint incentives for parents and students — will allow fifth-graders to earn up to $440 for passing short math tests that show they have mastered key concepts, according to the draft proposal. Parents will get slightly less money for their children doing the work, and they can earn an extra $180 for attending nine conferences with teachers to review the youngsters’ progress.

Combined, the students and their parents can pocket $1,020.

Parents can opt out of the pay program, which also is expected to include money for teachers – up to $40 per student – for holding the parent conferences. The Houston Independent School District already has the nation’s largest program that rewards teachers and school staff for boosting students’ scores on standardized tests.

Nationwide, public support is low for school districts paying students for specific behaviors, such as reading books, attending class or getting good grades, according to the 2010 Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll. About one in four Americans favor the idea. A similar number said they had paid their own children for academic accomplishments.

The Houston program appears to be based on the Dallas work. Second-graders in Dallas were paid $2 for each book they read once they passed a simple quiz to confirm they had done the reading. A study found that the students who were promised money improved in reading comprehension and language more than those who weren’t offered the reward.

The idea of paying parents intrigues Dan Ariely, a Duke University professor who studies human behavior, but he said he expects little long-term benefit from the cash rewards for students.

"The parents actually have some control over the kids," he said. "They can tell the kids to study."

For the students, he said, the monetary incentive will do nothing to instill in them a love of learning. "What is questionable is whether you could create short-term learning or not," he added. 

Paying to Get the Students to Play

The blame for lack of student achievement typically falls in a few different camps. Ineffective teachers, administrations hamstrung by union rules, society in the form of a poor learning environment, parents that don’t emphasize education and sometimes even the young people themselves are held accountable.

In the past few years, some school districts have tried bribery as a partial solution. That is payment in cash or prizes to students for good grades, high test scores or merely showing up for class. My opinion aligned with the majority in stating that this was a serious misuse of funds. I honestly don’t know whether there has been any substantive study of the results of those efforts.

Now, the Houston public school system is preparing to offer payments to struggling students in the lowest-performing schools if they show up for Saturday tutoring sessions. Another "throw money at the problem and let’s see what happens" scenario. Maybe not in this case.

In addition to the extra weekend help (the superintendent equates the payment to a job as many of these students must work to support their families), the school district is implementing other meaningful reforms that include:

  • Extending the school year and day
  • Giving students who are performing below grade level a "double dose" of math and English
  • Removing ineffective teachers and principals
  • Students and parents signing performance contracts (a strategy employed by some successful charter schools)

It might be categorized as a desperate measure to pay students $30 a tutoring session (with free breakfast and lunch). But it’s not taking place in isolation and if some of the other reforms are successful, maybe getting students in the door will lead to improved results. Hopefully.

The Houston Chronicle has more here.

Required Reading for All Interested in Our Future

We take seriously the job of providing fairly quick, but informative reads in this space. We’re going to fall short on the first count here, replicating an education opinion column that recently appeared in the Washington Post. The quality, however, makes up for longer-than-normal length. It should be a mandatory assignment for those who think they are doing their best as part of our education system.

The authors are Joel I. Klein, Michael Lomax and Janet Murguía. Klein, who recently appeared before Indiana’s Education Roundtable, is chancellor of New York City schools. Lomax is president and chief executive of the United Negro College Fund. Murguía is president and chief executive of the National Council of La Raza. 

Why great teachers matter to low-income students

In the debate over how to fix American public education, many believe that schools alone cannot overcome the impact that economic disadvantage has on a child, that life outcomes are fixed by poverty and family circumstances, and that education doesn’t work until other problems are solved.

This theory is, in some ways, comforting for educators. After all, if schools make only a marginal difference, we can stop faulting ourselves for failing to make them work well for millions of children. It follows that we can stop working to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (currently known as No Child Left Behind) and stop competing in the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative, which promises controversial changes.

Problem is, the theory is wrong. It’s hard to know how wrong — because we haven’t yet tried to make the changes that would tell us — but plenty of evidence demonstrates that schools can make an enormous difference despite the challenges presented by poverty and family background.

Consider the latest national math scores of fourth- and eighth-graders, which show startling differences among results for low-income African American students in different cities. In Boston, Charlotte, New York and Houston, these fourth-graders scored 20 to 30 points higher than students in the same socioeconomic group in Detroit, Milwaukee, Los Angeles and the District of Columbia. Boston fourth-graders outscored those in Detroit by 33 points. Ten points approximates one year’s worth of learning on these national tests, which means that by fourth grade, poor African American children in Detroit are already three grades behind their peers in Boston.

Not surprisingly, these differences persist (or grow) by the eighth grade, at which point low-income African American students in Detroit are scoring 36 points behind their peers in Austin.

The scores tell a similarly painful story for low-income Hispanic students in different cities. In fourth grade, there is a 29-point difference between test scores in Miami-Dade and Detroit. By eighth grade, the gap has closed slightly, with low-income Hispanic students in Houston outscoring their peers in Cleveland and Fresno, Calif., by 23 points.

These numbers represent vast differences in millions of lives. Low-income African American and Hispanic students in different cities are sufficiently similar in terms of their academic needs, but their outcomes are so dramatically different.

The main difference between these children is that they are enrolled in different school districts. And research indicates that if the data were broken out for the same students in different schools, the differences would be more dramatic — and more dramatic still if broken out for the same children in different classes.

What explains these differences? Schools and teachers. "Teacher quality is the single most important school factor in student success," the Aspen Institute’s Commission on No Child Left Behind recently noted. Given how much research supports this view, it is especially troubling, the commission found, that "teacher quality is inequitably distributed in schools, and the students with the greatest needs tend to have access to the least qualified and least effective teachers."

Different teachers get very different results with similar students. So as reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is considered, we should look closely at those whom we attract and retain to teach, with regard to their quality and to ensuring that they are distributed equally across our school districts. If we can do those things, we could at least make Detroit students perform like those in Boston, and make Boston students do a lot better.

A few things need to happen:

First, we must attract teachers who performed well in college. Countries that do best on international tests draw teachers from the top third of college graduates. In the United States, however, most teachers come from the bottom third. Moreover, the bottom of that group is vastly overrepresented in our highest-needs communities.

Second, we must create systems that reward excellence rather than seniority by creating sophisticated evaluation systems that include student performance and merit-based tenure and compensation. We must make it easier to remove teachers who are shown to be ineffective.

Third, we must do more to attract teachers to high-needs students, schools and subject areas, such as English language learners, special education and other areas to which it is difficult to draw talent because of opportunities in other fields.

These are common-sense and ambitious reforms. Such efforts are rewarded in the Race to the Top initiative and ought to be fully integrated into a new Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Yes, they call for a reevaluation of seniority — the staple of most collective bargaining agreements — in the context of what actually serves children. But right now, one bad teacher with seniority earns as much as two great young teachers. Who really thinks this is best for our kids?

Apologists for our educational failure say that we will never fix education in America until we eradicate poverty. They have it exactly backward: We will never eradicate poverty until we fix education. The question is whether we have the political courage to take on those who defend a status quo that serves many adults but fails many children. 

Where’s the Common Sense in Disaster Reporting?

I paid a little more attention than normal to Hurricane Ike and its assualt on Texas last weekend. My in-laws, who lost all in the mid-1980s while living on Galveston Island, evacutated their home south of Houston early this time. Obviously, though, the interest in our household was high.

While Indiana has seen more than its share of tornadoes and flooding in recent years, hurricanes offer a unique scenario that I simply don’t understand. Why do these weather and news reporters stand out in the middle of a storm, while telling everyone else they should have already evacuated and they have only themselves to blame if they didn’t heed the local leaders’ warnings of "certain death" if they stayed?

OK, I can answer my own question: ratings. But it just doesn’t make sense. I fear it’s going to take reporter or camera operator suffering a tragic death to alter this practice. These natural disasters wreak enough havoc. Let’s not add another catastrophe to the list.

Coal Conversion: We’ve Got Coal

West Virginia has some really nice state parks and a Greenbrier resort (and former famous congressional bunker hideaway) that is second to none. But the state certainly isn’t top of mind when it comes to economic development and innovation.

A headline that screams "W. Va. Takes Lead in Future of Fuel" will certainly draw attention. The plan: take advantage of the state’s greatest natural resource — coal — and turn it into gasoline and methanol in the first project of its kind in the United States. Incidentally, one of the partners (a Houston-based company) has already helped build a coal-to-liquids plant in China.

The $800 million project will provide security for West Virginia’s expansive coal industry, create additional jobs and potentially be part of the long-term solution to our country’s energy challenges. The president of Consol Energy, based in Pittsburgh, goes a little overboard when he terms West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin "one of the few governors in the 50 states who can spell coal."

Indiana has coal, maybe not as much as West Virginia, but ample supplies. It is crafting an entrepreneurial path of its own with Duke Energy’s coal gasification plant in Edwardsport. Can our state be a player in the coal-to-liquids game? We’re not sure.

The West Virginia project is intriguing. Read about it here.