Education News Digest: 9/8/10

Posted on: 9/8/2010

Teachers move to run schools

Shortly after landing at Malcolm X Shabazz High School as a Teach for America recruit, Dominique D. Lee grew disgusted with a system that produced ninth graders who could not name the seven continents or the governor of their state. He started wondering: What if I were in charge?
 
Three years later, Mr. Lee, at just 25, is getting a chance to find out. Today, Mr. Lee and five other teachers — all veterans of Teach for America, a corps of college graduates who undergo five weeks of training and make a two-year commitment to teaching — are running a public school here with 650 children from kindergarten through eighth grade.
 
As the doors opened on Thursday at Brick Avon Academy, they welcomed students not as novice teachers following orders from the central office, but as “teacher-leaders.”
“This is a fantasy,” Mr. Lee said. “It’s six passionate people who came together and said, ‘Enough is enough.’ We’re just tired of seeing failure.”

The Newark teachers are part of a growing experiment around the country to allow teachers to step up from the classroom and lead efforts to turn around struggling urban school systems. Brick Avon is one of the first teacher-run schools in the New York region, joining a charter school in Brooklyn started in 2005 by the United Federation of Teachers.
 
Others have opened in Boston, Denver, Detroit and Los Angeles.
 
At Brick Avon, the principal, Charity Haygood, who calls herself the “principal teacher,” teaches every day, as do the two vice principals; Ms. Haygood started her career in Teach for America and eventually became vice principal for five years at another school.

While they are in charge of disciplining and evaluating staff members, they plan to defer all decisions about curriculum, policies, hiring and the budget to a governance committee made up largely of teachers elected by colleagues.

The school has 38 teachers, including Mr. Lee, Ms. Haygood and the other four Teach for America veterans who took it over.

Teachers have more say over what they teach, and starting next year they will have more time to work with children when they introduce a longer day.
 
To an unusual degree, they are shown they matter, as with the air fresheners left in the faculty lounge and bathrooms, or the new air-conditioner that will be raffled off at the end of the month to a teacher with perfect attendance.
 
Driving the establishment of teacher-run schools is the idea that teachers who have a sense of ownership of their schools will be happier and more motivated.
 
But some educators and parents question whether such schools are the solution for urban districts, which typically have large concentrations of poor students and struggle with low test scores and discipline problems.

They say that most teachers have neither the time nor the expertise to deal with the inner workings of a school, like paying bills, conducting fire drills and refereeing faculty disputes.
 
“Ever try to plan a vacation with a large extended family? That’s what it’s going to be like,” said Michael J. Petrilli, a vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education policy group in Washington. “It’s a good idea in theory, but there are just a handful of teachers who can pull it off.” 

On the steps of Brick Avon last week, Lisa James, 26, a home health aide with a daughter in second grade, said she worried that teachers doubling as administrators would lose their focus.

“Teachers should be teachers,” she said.

Teacher-run schools are spreading as many districts seek new ways to raise student achievement and compete more effectively against charter schools.

This year, Los Angeles has turned over 29 city schools to groups of local teachers who worked with parents, administrators and union leaders to beat out established charter operators like Green Dot Public Schools.

Detroit is opening an elementary school without a principal; its motto is “Where teachers lead, children succeed.”

Another school with no principal was started last year by the Boston Teachers Union, with teachers ordering supplies, giving feedback to one another and deciding whose hours to reduce to save money.

“It’s really a collaborative environment,” said Betsy Drinan, 57, a teacher-leader at the Boston school. “I haven’t worked in schools before where they come to you and say ‘What do you want’ and ‘What do you need?’ ”

While teacher-run schools started as early as the mid-1990s, most had fewer than 350 students or were charter schools, including some teacher-owned cooperatives in Minnesota.

Tim McDonald, an associate with Education Evolving, a policy group in St. Paul that supports teacher-led schools, said studies showed that when teachers were given control — much like doctors or lawyers running their own practices — schools had higher morale, less turnover, more efficient decision-making and greater motivation to improve.
 
Still, Mr. McDonald was skeptical that a truly collaborative model could succeed widely in school districts, unless it was somehow freed from the traditional bureaucracy.
 
“You’re trying to run an upside-down pyramid in a pyramid structure,” he said. “There is so much momentum against being completely different in most districts.”

James H. Lytle, an education professor at the University of Pennsylvania who teaches a course on urban school reform to Teach for America teachers, said the test of school leaders was whether they could make a school work smoothly.

Teachers, he said, “want the textbooks to be there and the students to come on time.”
 
“The question is whether teachers have the patience to do the ‘adminis-trivia,’ ” said Dr. Lytle, a former principal and superintendent in Philadelphia and Trenton.
 
The union-run UFT Charter School in East New York, Brooklyn, has run into problems. Two principals resigned after clashing with teachers, and recent test scores have been disappointing; only 22 percent of last year’s eighth graders passed state tests in English and 13 percent in math, compared with citywide rates of 37.5 percent in English and 46.3 percent in math.
 
Here in Newark, Mr. Lee and his partners — Ms. Haygood; Chris Perpich, who is one of the vice principals; Bernadette Scott; Princess Williams; and Mindy Weidman — worked at night and on weekends for 18 months to develop the blueprint for Brick, which is an acronym for Building Responsible Intelligent Creative Kids.
The school has a global focus, with plans to seek approval as an International Baccalaureate school and to require Mandarin as well as Spanish.
 
The group asked Newark district officials for a school to run in the South Ward, a poor, crime-ridden section of the city, because, as Mr. Lee put it, “you go where the need is greatest.”
 
They were given the former Avon Avenue School. In 2009, only 38 percent of Avon’s eighth graders passed state tests in language arts and 14 percent in math, compared with 82.5 percent and 71.8 percent statewide.
 
Mr. Lee, soft-spoken and unflappable, raced through the school last week, handing out class lists to teachers, security guards, even a surprised custodian. Later, he was wiping down cafeteria tables for lunch.
 
“It has to get done, so teachers can focus on teaching,” said Mr. Lee, who serves as Brick Avon’s operations manager as well as executive director of Brick, but also will be teaching in the school. 

The teachers are raising money — $125,000 so far — to pay for extras like teacher training and an after-school program for students. They have tried to build good will in the community by holding a barbecue in the schoolyard, stopping by block parties and knocking on families’ doors.
 
The day before classes started, Ms. Haygood, the principal, stood before the other 37 teachers in the auditorium, two-thirds of whom had previously taught at Avon. She read from the book “If You Don’t Feed the Teachers, They Eat the Students.”
 
Then she shared her vision of a collaborative teacher-run school and asked them to demonstrate how they planned to take charge. Those without enough enthusiasm, she joked, would be required to get Brick tattooed on their backs.

Some teachers sashayed across the floor, while others cheered B-R-I-C-K. A group that included the music teacher broke into song. One teacher even slid into a split.

Afterward, Ms. Haygood asked them to jot down their feelings about the coming year.
 
Ed Crisafulli, 57, a science teacher working for his eighth principal at Avon, wrote down “hopeful” and then “finally.”

“We finally have someone who is a teacher,” he said, “someone who understands teachers from the smallest little thing to the biggest.”

Source: New York Times


How and why middle schools harm student achievement

Middle school. The very words are enough to make many Americans shudder with memories of social anxiety, peer pressure, bad haircuts, and acne. But could middle schools also be bad for student learning? Could something as simple as changing the grade configuration of schools improve academic outcomes? That’s what some educators have come to believe.

States and school districts across the country are reevaluating the practice of educating young adolescents in stand-alone middle schools, which typically span grades 6 through 8 or 5 through 8, rather than keeping them in K–8 schools. The middle-school model began to be widely adopted almost 40 years ago. Now, reformers in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Maryland, and New York, and the large urban districts of Cincinnati, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, are challenging the notion that grouping students in the middle grades in their own school buildings is the right approach.

Why the turn against middle schools? For more than three decades, American public education embraced this organizational model. Between 1970 and 2000, the number of public middle schools in the U.S. grew more than sevenfold, from just over 1,500 to 11,500. These new middle schools displaced both traditional K–8 primary schools and junior high schools (which first appeared a century  ago and served grades 7–8 or 7–9). From 1987 to 2007, the percentage of public-school 6th graders in K–6 schools fell from roughly 45 percent to 20 percent.

Neither the middle school nor the junior high has ever been popular among private schools, which educated only 2 percent of their 6th and 7th graders in these types of schools in 2007. And maybe the private schools have had it right all along. For the last two decades, education researchers and developmental psychologists have been documenting changes in attitudes and motivation as children enter adolescence, changes that some hypothesize are exacerbated by middle-school curricula and practices.

These findings are cause for concern, but there is reason to doubt their conclusions. Because the studies use data from a single school year to contrast students in middle schools and K–8 schools, most of the available research cannot reject the possibility that differences between the groups of students, rather than in the grade configuration of their schools, are actually responsible for the differences in behavior and achievement.

To provide more rigorous evidence on the effect of middle schools on student achievement, we turned to a richly detailed administrative dataset from New York City that allowed us to follow students from grade 3 through grade 8. Some of these children attended middle schools and some did not. Because we could follow the same children over a period of time, we could do a better job of ruling out the role of influences other than middle-school attendance on educational outcomes.

What we found bolsters the case for middle-school reform: in the specific year when students move to a middle school (or to a junior high), their academic achievement, as measured by standardized tests, falls substantially in both math and English relative to that of their counterparts who continue to attend a K–8 elementary school. What’s more, their achievement continues to decline throughout middle school. This negative effect persists at least through 8th grade, the highest grade for which we could obtain test scores.

We found that the middle-school achievement gap cannot be explained by a scarcity of financial resources for the schools. Instead, the cause is more likely to be related to other school characteristics, especially the fact that middle schools in New York City educate far more students in each grade. Although our conclusions about the reasons for the middle-school gap are tentative, we are quite confident that the evidence shows that middle schools are not the best way to educate students—at least in places like New York City.

Data and Methods

Our study was based on data for New York City school children who were in grades 3 though 8 during the 1998–99 through 2007–08 school years. We were able to follow students who entered 3rd grade between the fall of 1998 and the fall of 2002 for six years, until most had completed the 8th grade. We have data about the grade configuration and other characteristics of their schools, individual academic achievement as measured by annual standardized test scores in math and English, and a variety of personal characteristics. In particular, we know each student’s gender, ethnicity, whether they received free or reduced-price lunch through the federal lunch program, whether they were English language learners or received special education services, and their record of suspensions and absences from school.

Elementary schools in New York City typically serve students until grade 5 or grade 6, while a smaller portion of elementary schools run through grade 8. This means that most students move to a middle school in either grade 6 or grade 7, while some never move to a middle school. Of the 3rd graders in our initial sample of students, 62 percent were in a K–5 school, 24 percent were in a K–6 school, and 7 percent were enrolled in a K–8 school. The small fraction of remaining students attended K–3, K–4, or K–7 schools and are excluded from our analysis.

To isolate the impact of attending a middle school from the many other factors that influence student achievement, we combined two basic strategies. Most importantly, we tracked the performance of individual students over time to see how their performance evolved relative to that of their peers as they progressed from grades 3 to 8, in essence, using each student as his or her own control group. This step alone provides much stronger grounds for conclusions about the effects of attending a middle school than previous research.

A lingering concern, however, is the possibility that different types of students choose to attend middle schools than choose to continue in a K–8 school. If students do sort themselves into middle schools because of some unobserved characteristic that causes changes in academic achievement over time, we would incorrectly attribute differences in achievement to the middle schools instead of to characteristics of the students themselves. We reduced the likelihood of making this mistake by using a statistical technique that effectively takes the choice to switch schools out of the students’ (or parents’) hands.

Specifically, we ran a statistical model that used the last grade served by the school that a student attended in grade 3 to predict whether the student attended a middle school. We then used that prediction to place each student into one of the two groups we are comparing, that is, students who attend middle schools and those who do not. Our key assumption in taking this approach is that there are no unobservable factors that cause a drop in student achievement at precisely the same time as students must leave the elementary schools they attended in grade 3. While we cannot definitively rule out the existence of such factors, we do not know of any plausible alternatives that would explain our findings.

The Middle-School Disadvantage

What determines a student’s level of academic achievement is complex. But the simple fact is that students who enter public middle schools in New York City fall behind their peers in K–8 schools.  This is true both for math and English achievement. Even more troubling, the middle-school disadvantage grows larger over the course of the middle-school years. With the transition into a middle school, students set out on a trajectory of lower achievement gains.

The achievement gap between middle-school students and K–8 students is put in stark relief in Figure 1, which displays our estimates of the impact of attending a middle school on student achievement as measured by standardized tests in math and English Language Arts. The graphs show how well students who attend a middle school perform relative to how we would expect them to perform if they attended a K–8 school. We report those differences, in standard deviations of student achievement in math and reading, for the 3rd through 8th grades. We separate students who enter a middle school in grade 6 from those students who enter a year later, in grade 7.

No matter whether students enter a middle school in the 6th or the 7th grade, middle-school students experience, on average, a large initial drop in their test scores. Even after accounting for a host of other factors that influence student achievement, students who eventually attend middle schools go from scoring better than their counterparts in K–8 schools in the year prior to transitioning to middle school to scoring below where we would expect if they were not attending a middle school. Math achievement for 6th graders transitioning to middle school falls by 0.18 standard deviations, and English achievement falls by 0.16 standard deviations. Contrast that decline with the 6th-grade test scores for students who will enter middle school the following year, in the 7th grade. Their test scores in both subjects continue to improve relative to their peers in K–8 schools. When these 6th graders move to a middle school in the 7th grade, however, we see the same dramatic fall in academic achievement: math scores decline by 0.17 standard deviations and English achievement falls by 0.14 standard deviations. Just how large are these effects? Consider that decrease in achievement associated with middle school entry—between 0.14 and 0.18 standard deviations—is roughly 20 to 25 percent of the achievement gap between poor and non-poor students (as measured by free lunch receipt) in New York City (about 0.7 standard deviations).

Moreover, these are not temporary dips followed by rebounds in learning. Throughout the middle-school years, students fall further behind. After two years in a middle school, on average a student who entered in the 7th grade will score 0.10 standard deviations in math and 0.09 standard deviations in English below what we would expect if he had gone to a K–8 school. After three years in a middle school, a student who entered in the 6th grade will underperform on 8th-grade assessments by 0.17 standard deviations in math and by 0.14 standard deviations in English.

A particularly distressing finding from our study is that students with lower initial levels of academic achievement fare especially poorly in middle school. To investigate the possibility of different effects on students with higher and lower initial achievement levels, we separated students into two groups: one group had grade 3 test scores above the citywide median, the other group scored below the median. Although we found substantial drops in achievement during middle school for both groups of students, the first-year drop and cumulative deficit were, respectively, 50 percent and more than 200 percent greater for students who start at the lower end of the achievement distribution.

We also found evidence that student absence rates increased when students entered middle schools and were significantly higher in grade 8 than for students who never entered a middle school (see Figure 2). More specifically, our estimates indicate that students were missing almost two additional days of school per year than would have been the case had they attended a K–8 school. Thus, increased absences may be one mechanism through which middle schools lower student achievement. There is little chance, however, that absences could explain a large share of the overall effect of attending a middle school.

To be sure, the population of public school children in New York City is different from that of many other school districts around the country. These differences might mean that middle-school attendance would have smaller or larger effects on other students than we estimate it to have on New York City’s public school children. For example, students with fewer educational resources at home may be more strongly affected by changes in their school environment. If that is the case, studying New York City students, who arguably come from less advantaged backgrounds than, say, the students in New York City suburbs, may have led us to find a larger middle-school effect than had we followed a more-affluent student population. While we encourage readers to be cautious about applying our findings without qualification to all public schools, we also encourage school districts to support research that can identify middle-school effects in other settings, especially since we find the consequences of attending a middle school for student achievement to be substantial and troubling.

Explaining the Trouble with Middle Schools

Why might New York City’s middle schools be detrimental to academic achievement? We find little support for the notion that differences in resources, such as per-pupil expenditures and class size, could explain the middle-school achievement gap. In middle schools serving grades 6–8 and grades 7–8, average per-pupil expenditures were $10,094 and $11,082, respectively, while per-pupil expenditures in K–8 schools were roughly equivalent, at $10,950. Nor do students experience a large decline in per-pupil spending when they move to a middle school. Average per-pupil expenditure in K–5 schools was $10,144 (compared to the $10,094 for grade 6–8 middle schools) and $9,680 in K–6 schools (compared to $11,082 in grade 7–8 middle schools).

Nor can we attribute the disparity we see to differences in class size. The average class size is slightly smaller for 5th graders in K–5 schools than for 6th graders in 6–8 schools (24 vs. 25 students); students in K–8 schools see similar growth in class size between grades 5 and 6. Class size is actually larger for grade 6 students in K–6 schools than for grade 7 students in 7–8 schools (24 vs. 23 students).
What about the possibility that the relative age of students in a school, especially during adolescence, can influence how students learn? In other words, does being the youngest students in a school have negative effects on the educational experience of those students? We could not find evidence in our data to support this explanation for the initial drop in test scores upon transitioning to a middle school. In our study sample, about one-third of new 7th graders moved out of a school serving grades K–6 and entered a middle school for 7th and 8th graders, becoming the youngest cohort in the school, while roughly half of new 7th graders entered a grade 6–8 middle school as part of the school’s middle cohort of students.

We find that the effect of entering a middle school was essentially the same for both of these groups.

At least part of the problem with middle schools may be that they usually combine students from multiple elementary schools. In the New York City schools we studied, the average cohort size was 75 students in K–8 schools, 100 students in K–5 and K–6 schools, and over 200 students in middle schools for grades 6–8 and 7–8 (see Figure 3). We went back to our data and analyzed the effect of these cohort size differences on test scores. What we found was that cohort size has a pronounced influence on student achievement during these school years. We estimate that an 8th grader who attends school with 200 other 8th-grade students will score 0.04 standard deviations lower in both math and English than he would if he attended a school with 75 other 8th graders, the average cohort size for a K–8 school. This 0.04 standard deviation deficit represents roughly one-quarter of the largest test-score declines we attribute to middle-school attendance.

Given the data we have, we can only speculate about why it is harder to educate middle school–aged students in large groups. Developmental psychologists have shown that adolescent children commonly exhibit traits such as negativity, low self-esteem, and an inability to judge the risks and consequences of their actions, which may make them especially difficult to educate in large groups. The combining of multiple elementary schools and their students also disrupts a student’s immediate peer group. And middle schools often serve a more diverse student population than many students encountered in elementary school. Yet while it seems plausible that these changes in environment would matter, we could not find any evidence in our data that any one hypothesis can explain the drop in learning among students moving to middle schools.

Even though a full explanation of the middle-school achievement gap eludes us, there does seem to be a consensus among New York City students and their parents that educational quality in the city’s public middle schools is lower than in the boroughs’ K–8 schools. We reached this conclusion after examining responses to a citywide survey of parents of children in grades K–8 and students in grades 6 and higher, which was conducted at the end of the 2006–07 and 2007–08 school years as a part of the city’s new school accountability system.

On average, New York City parents of students in middle schools gave their schools lower marks on measures related to education quality than parents whose children attend K–8 schools. Figure 4 shows that parent evaluations of school safety, academic rigor, and overall educational quality was much lower among those whose children attended middle schools than among parents with children in K–5, K–6, and K–8 schools. It is important to note that this is not simply a product of the challenges of educating adolescents. There is little perceptible decline in satisfaction among parents in K–8 schools as their children age, a consistency we would not expect if educational quality simply cannot withstand the onslaught of puberty.

The students’ opinions are consistent with their parents’ assessments, although the lack of data on students below grade 6 prohibits us from more direct measurement of the degradation of education quality in middle schools. The clearest pattern that emerges from student reports is that 6th and 7th graders in middle schools think their schools have less academic rigor, less mature social behavior among the students, are less safe, and provide lower-quality education than do 6th graders in K–6 or K–8 schools.

The Longer View

We don’t yet know whether the troubling slide in test scores for middle-school students persists through the end of high school, a question that is certainly worth studying. Unfortunately, our data do not allow us to follow the students in our study further than grade 8. If the decline does continue, middle schools not only hurt student achievement in the short term but set students up for unnecessary longer-term disadvantages.

Of course, it is possible that transitioning to high school could be more difficult for students who come from K–8 schools than for middle school students. If K–8 students experience a larger drop in achievement upon entering high school, that could bring the two groups of adolescents back into parity. But it is hard to recommend closing the middle-school achievement gap by bringing everybody down. The better option is to address the trouble with middle schools—or do away with them altogether.

Source: Education Next

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