We Should Focus on Teacher Quality

Teacher quality is the Holy Grail of education reform. Among education professionals at all levels, there’s widespread agreement that student achievement is more closely aligned with teacher quality than with any other factor, including poverty, the presence of other stressors in the environment, such as gang violence, and even learning disabilities. Stanford economist Eric Hanushek publishes research that helps to narrow down “teacher effectiveness.” When this quality is quantified, Hanushek finds that students who have the most effective teachers (with effectiveness in the 90th percentile) learn on average 1.5 years’ worth of material in a single school year. But students who are taught by teachers whose effectiveness rates in the 10th percentile learn only one-half year’s worth of material in one school year. “No other […]

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Magnet Options in Wake County

We’ve discussed the exceptional quality of many, but not all, charter schools in Wake in another blog post on this site. But school choice can also be applied to Wake County’s traditional public schools (TPS, also referred to as district schools). Within the district, choice starts with the much-lauded magnet program. And it’s a great place to start. A national magnet-school certification program, Magnet Schools of America (MSA), recognized 30 Wake County schools in the National Merit Awards program for 2017-18, designating 12 as Schools of Excellence and 18 as Schools of Distinction. The previous year, they named 27 WCPSS magnet schools as either Schools of Excellence or Schools of Distinction. In April 2018, MSA named April Guenzler, a teacher at Brooks MES in Raleigh, […]

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The False Promise of School Choice

“School choice” is both a politically charged concept and an ill-defined goal. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has been a strong advocate for increased parental choice for close to 30 years. She described her 2017 tour of “innovative” schools and school districts as an opportunity to “really highlight and expose to more people the beauty of options and choices and to continue to make the case that all parents, not only ones that have the economic means, should be able to have a decision-making power to make some of those choices” in an October edition of EducationWeek. But there’s abundant evidence out there that parents are pretty bad at selecting their child’s school.  Much hand-wringing accompanied the findings, in multiple research studies, that only 1-2% […]

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Too Many Choices

We Americans love to have plenty of options. When we enter the grocery store, we are surprised, or even disconcerted, if we see an empty or partially empty shelf. We try on a dozen pairs of shoes before we finally select a pair, and we save the receipt, just in case we see something even better. And we’re glad—at least, most of us are glad—to receive a reminder each year from the Wake County Public School System that lists our children’s “base school” for the subsequent school year because that same reminder also explains that we could be sending our child to a different school. Sometimes, the choice of a school for your child is easy. Your younger child should go to the same school […]

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Book Review: Hope and Despair in the American City

Review: Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Schools in Raleigh By Gerald Grant The book’s title is flattering enough, but sociologist Gerald Grant finds plenty of laudatory things to say about Wake County’s public schools in this 2009 study of urban blight and education reform. Grant is a retired professor of Education and Sociology at Syracuse University who grew up in Syracuse, NY and returned to it in 1978. Clearly distressed by the steady decline and uneven recovery of the core sections of Syracuse, Grant has done extensive archival research about both segregation and urban planning in preparation for writing this book, which benefits from his interwoven personal experiences. A scholarly project, Hope and Despair in the American City […]

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Black History Month in Education

February is Black History Month in the United States. Here’s info about local educational opportunities: NC Museum of History in Raleigh:  https://www.ncmuseumofhistory.org/black-history-month Fun with Facts: Shaw University-sponsored 16th Annual African American History Awareness Competition, a Quiz Bowl-style competition for students in grades 3 and up. More info: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/16th-annual-african-american-history-awareness-competition-tickets-41224246832?aff=es2 Celebration: The Future of Black History (TFOBH) in Cary (Feb. 24, 2018). More info and registration here:  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-future-of-black-history-registration-42168839133?aff=es2   Black History Month in Wake

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Earning College Credit in High School

If you’re a North Carolina resident, an opportunity to save a lot of money on higher education is staring you right in the face. The State of North Carolina provides two paths for high-school students to earn college credit tuition-free, while still enrolled in a public high school. These paths represent the evolution of efforts to keep students focused on higher education while still in secondary school. They’re two of the three components of the NC Department of Public Instruction’s Career and College Promise Program (CCP). (More on the third path, Career and Technical Education, in another blog post.) The path that you’ve probably heard about, early college, requires students to attend one of the specially designated WCPSS “academies,” but there’s another path, too: dual […]

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Performance of Charter Schools in Wake County

In 2017-18, there were 22 charter schools in Wake County. It’s hard to compare their performance with that of WCPSS district schools for several reasons. For one thing, the district has so many more schools (183), with wide variations in school populations, resources, and programs. For another, both traditional public schools (TPS) and charter schools must report many statistics. They might excel in one area while falling short in another. School Performance Grades (SPGs) are summaries that provide a clue, and most charters and TPS receive these annually. But some education experts believe that North Carolina’s SPGs are too heavily weighted toward test scores, and many argue that growth statistics are more accurate than performance statistics. (More on that later.) When assessing the effectiveness of […]

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Really Bad Legislation

The 2016 unfunded class-size reduction mandate is just one example of legislators’ strangely punitive relationship to district superintendents and public-school administrators throughout North Carolina. No matter what, the requirements that stem from this legislation would be mind-bogglingly expensive to enact. Yet somehow, state legislators are blaming local districts for not planning carefully enough, or for misallocating funds that could miraculously have built the required schools, installed the required trailers, and hired the required teachers in record time. Multiple lawmakers have admitted that the legislation entailed some unintended consequences and was rushed through as part of a budget package, which limited  opportunities for debate. Senate Pro Tempore Phil Berger was quoted in the Asheville Citizen-Times defending the law. Berger states that the 2016 “state budget included […]

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Charter Schools Are Big News

Nationwide enrollment in charter schools was about 3.1 million students during the 2016-17 school year, as compared to 50.4 million students who attended U.S. public schools that same year. In 2017, 86,446 North Carolina students were enrolled in charter schools, while 1,432,507 students were enrolled in traditional public schools, or TPS. Charter schools receive public funding to provide students with a free K-12 education, and in exchange for accepting various oversight and reporting requirements, are allowed to operate with more freedom to (one hopes) both innovate and improve student outcomes. Typically, the funding comes as a per-student allocation that matches the amount spent by a local education agency for each public-school pupil. Following Hurricane Katrina, regulators converted the public schools in New Orleans to charters […]

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