Check your comparisons

My sympathies to my compatriots on the Wachusett School Committee on what I can only describe as a gruesome school committee meeting last night, that ended with cuts of over $1.2 million. What positions (because it will be positions) will be cut will be determined at their next meeting on Thursday. Proposed is cutting all library staff and fifteen teaching positions, plus an elementary principal, and a number of service cuts, including athletic transportation. The teaching cuts will result in some classes of 28.

I was thinking in this light of Worcester's FY13 budget and also this list on "hidden costs" in public schools...most of which don't apply to Worcester:

• We don't expect kids to buy their summer reading 
• We don't charge sports fees. 
• We don't charge bus fees. 
• We don't charge technology fees. 
• We don't charge for extracurriculars 
• We don't charge parking fees. 

We fought to bring down class sizes this year (and you'll have to hunt to find one as high as 28).
We have free, full-day kindergarten in every school in the district.
We're bringing back elementary librarians, and we have librarians in our middle and high schools.
Every elementary school has either a full-time or teaching assistant principal.
We added school nurses this year, so we're completely staffed (finally!) at the elementary level..
We've never gotten rid of art or music, and students across the district can get free instrument lessons in elementary schools.
We raised our student supply budget this year.
We offer (without charge) dual language immersion programs at three elementary schools in the city.
We expanded (again) the number of Advanced Placement courses we offer (and we don't charge for them).
We've added Mandarin Chinese to the high school, so kids who started in middle school can continue.
We've added to the engineering program at Doherty and the health sciences programs at North.
We offer a huge number of chances, places, connections to get kids into everything from the UMass Medical School to local colleges to local businesses for everything from college credits to work experience to internships.
...And this is a list literally off the top of my head.

I say none of this to run down our neighboring districts; we're a larger system, we have more options in some ways, and we get more of our support from the state.

At a time, though, when way too many decisions about who's doing "well" and who's not are made by this chart right here, it's useful to consider other ways we could be looking at what we're offering kids.

And today in "we don't read our own paper" editorials

...we bring you the New York Times, who, alas, it appears have already forgotten this article from February and this article from November on the enormous problems with new teacher evaluation systems that use student standardized test performance to how their teachers are perceived to be doing.

The Times' own reporting only scratches the surface, of course, as I've posted countless times before.
 As Diane Ravitch points out this morning, this also gets it entirely backwards in terms of what actually motivates people, plus continues the fallacy that merit pay does anything.
It does not.

That one of our nation's "papers of record" would know so very little about teacher evaluation is not, unfortunately, surprising. It is saddening. It is also alarming that they would so freely opine about something, having done so little research.

Update: and the comments are priceless.

Every SINGLE thing?

Tangential, as the point of the article is not this, but I gasped aloud this morning when I got to the end of this comment in an article on extended school years:

“It is true that we have an unfair society, and it is true that kids who are coming from the poorer backgrounds and whose parents don’t do a lot of reading are losing reading skills over the summer,” said Peter Gray, research professor of psychology at Boston College. “But let’s look at other solutions.” He added, “Whatever job we give to the school system, they ruin it.”

(emphasis added)
I will resist the temptation to toss some psychology into why we'd have a professor of psychology making such a generalization, but...really, Professor Gray? Every single thing? Ever?

And regarding summer learning loss, be sure to read Alfie Kohn on just what it is we're losing.

Chester Finn has an opinion about exam schools

With thanks to the indomitable Jackie Reis for catching the Education Next report before I'd seen it!


I see that we're getting a report in tomorrow's paper on a new article in Education Next on exam schools (which itself is a summary of a forthcoming book).
Well, Chester Finn has an opinion on exam schools, doesn't he?
Let's see...he's compared the population of exam schools to the population of students in the country, not in their sending population. Yes, Mr. Finn, that would give us a population higher in minority students than that of the country, as most exam schools are in urban areas...with higher proportions of minority students. What an atrocious excuse for analysis!
Dear me, what a use of quotation marks: "affirmative action," "special ed," "elitism," and--shudder--"contract scale"...
In sum, though, Mr. Finn is forced to come to the same conclusion that the other (few) research articles on exam schools have come to: we don't know that we add value for the kids who are there, 'though they do improve the perception of the district.

Auditor Bump on Central Mass Collaborative

Speaking of audits, you may have seen the report that State Auditor Suzanne Bump has come out with her office's audit of the Central Mass Special Education Collaborative, of which Worcester is a member.
I'll put all of her office's press release below the jump, and I've put up the full report here.
The press release and the article give you the jist what what they found and what has subsequently happened. Those of you who follow School Committee closely may remember that we voted a few months ago on a designee to sit on the Collaborative's board; Superintendent Boone now sits on their board. We also saved a million dollars this year in contributions.
Many of the rest of the issues have already been fixed.
There's an item on the upcoming School Committee agenda, requesting that the Collaborative board meet with the Worcester School Committee, which should sort more of this out publicly.

Wachusett subcommittee proposing a forensic audit

A motion  for a forensic audit from Juli Kelley at the Business Finance subcommittee of Wachusett Regional passed earlier this week. This is in response, of course, to the news last month that several years of projections were off, with this past year's running more than a million dollars under.
Since the term "forensic audit" brings to mind some sort of CSI: Finance Office with a bunch of guys in suits running around with spreadsheets and adding machines*, I did some checking into definitions. A forensic audit goes back through the books and the finance history with an eye to legal culpability and legal recourse.



*Yes, those are still around.

Can you help Goddard Scholars buy clarinets?

Mrs. Lord over at Sullivan Middle has submitted a project through DonorsChoose for 10 clarinets for the Goddard Scholars band. The band is expanding next year due to the addition of sixth grade. You can find it here.
If you can help, they'd appreciate it!