CURMUDGUCATION: Recess Consultants. Seriously.

CURMUDGUCATION: Recess Consultants. Seriously.:

GA: Smiles

This post is not a rant, and I've set aside the snark for the moment. We don't have cable, so I miss some things until I stumble across them on line. This one in particular struck me somewhere around the left ventricle. I know these are often heavily massaged and we don't get the whole story, but this seems pretty straightforward to me.It speaks to the resilience of children, who are often way tou

5 by Peter Greene / 1h hide  //  save

FL: Another Charter Scam

This week news channel Local 10 in Florida has been reporting on the latest charter school to just take the money and run.On Monday, the station reported on a mass firing at Paramount Charter School in Broward County. About a month into the school year, one by one, the teachers at the freshly launched charter were called into the office of administrator Maia Williams (sister of the school's owner,

12 by Peter Greene / 3h 

Recess Consultants. Seriously.

Kids these days. They just can't be trusted to do anything on their own. We've done our best to structure the hell out of their day, making sure that every answer, every move, every activity is built around a specific uniform required response on their part. By controlling every classroom moment, right down to what books they're allowed to read and what they're supposed to say (stick to the script

52 by Peter Greene / 4h 

CURMUDGUCATION http://bit.ly/1hqZ7wL

Teachers' Unions Look to Clinton to Save Them? - US News

Teachers' Unions Look to Clinton to Save Them - US News:

Teachers' Unions Look to Clinton to Save Them 

To say the relationship between the Obama administration and the national teachers unions is strained would be an understatement.

Democrats and unions have historically enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with Democrats backing pro-union policies, such as protecting bargaining rights, and unions using their coffers and numbers to back Democratic candidates who support their causes. And the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers were critical in helping mobilize the youth vote to propel the then-freshman senator from Illinois into the White House.

But since his election, Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan haven't been what the unions were hoping for. Instead, they've overseen a period of significant change in the K-12 space, helping and even pushing states to adopt education policies that unions opposed. Among them, the expansion of charter schools, teacher evaluation and compensation systems based in part on student test scores, and shuttering poor-performing schools.

Unions foresaw the difficult relationship. After all, Duncan was part of the so-called reform movement, had been know to favor corporate-style education policies, and made a name for himself closing down some of Chicago's worst schools. But the changes, ushered in at such a rapid pace, caused the two major teachers unions last year to call for Duncan's resignation, and has left union leaders struggling to keep members.

"Duncan was a big driver of this," says Joshua Cohen, assistant professor at Michigan State University's College of Education. "He had a podium, he had access to the federal purse. ... But to see the unions turn on Obama the way they did was surprising for everyone, even given the push that the administration made."

Now, during the twilight of the administration, the NEA and the AFT are looking for someone to restore the balance and repair the fractured relationship – someone more sympathetic to their roots.

That person, both unions have decided, is Hillary Clinton.

The AFT endorsed Clinton this summer, and over the weekend, the NEA threw its support behind her. With that decision, Clinton locks up millions of dollars for her campaign war chest from the union's political action committees and millions of boots on the ground.

That both unions endorsed Clinton isn't a surprise. Clinton has been involved in education policy since the 1970s when she worked for what is now the Children's Defense Fund, an advocacy organization for children in poverty and those with disabilities.

"We have a long and very powerful relationship with Hillary Clinton and I think those are the things that came to the surface," says NEA president Lily Eskelsen Garcia. "What set her apart is her career-long advocacy for the students we serve and the families who have so many disadvantages and seeing education as that door to opportunity."

And AFT endorsed Clinton for president during the height of the Clinton-Obama Democratic primary war in 2008.

The real question, however, is if she's elected, would she come to their rescue, or would she keep in place much of Obama's and Duncan's education legacy?

"She could keep the same policies that the administration has but repair relationships," says Lanae Teachers' Unions Look to Clinton to Save Them - US News:

There Are Way More Homeless Students Than There Used To Be | FiveThirtyEight

There Are Way More Homeless Students Than There Used To Be | FiveThirtyEight:

There Are Way More Homeless Students Than There Used To Be

But that’s partly because states are better at finding them.

The number of homeless students in the country’s classrooms has more than doubled since before the recession, according to recently released federal data. That’s an alarming trend, but a new report offers some hope: At least part of the increase, the authors say, is not because more students have become homeless, but because states have gotten better at identifying homeless students.

There were about 1.4 million homeless students nationwide in the 2013-14 school year, according to the Department of Education, twice as many as there were in the 2006-07 school year, when roughly 680,000 students were homeless.

“Homelessness is growing, and we do need to pay attention to that,” said Maripat Finigan, assistant director of external affairs for the independent, nonprofitInstitute for Children, Poverty and Homelessness. “But on the other hand, states are getting better at identifying homeless students, which is the first step in helping them access the programs they need.”

The institute’s American Almanac of Family Homelessness, out Wednesday, includes an inaugural set of state rankings on overall family homelessness policy efforts and efforts specifically aimed at addressing homeless children’s educational needs.

“The idea is to provide people on a state and local level with a toolbox to be able to measure their progress, and to take that and go to the decision makers in their state to measure what’s successful and what are the different strategies they can try,” Finigan said.

The rankings are based on an array of indicators that range from the concrete, like the number of available rental units that are affordable for extremely low-income families, to the less so, like the number of policies that reduce homeless families’ barriers to accessing child care. Matthew Adams, the institute’s principal policy analyst, said that rather than try to measure the effectiveness of policies in each state, which can be hard to quantify, the goal of the report is to identify and compare the efforts being made by each state.

The report’s authors wanted to highlight certain policies that they think states can adopt without spending additional money, Adams said. For example, every state can develop its own eligibility rules on top of federal requirements for child care subsidies, and many require work participation. But unlike some states, Massachusetts counts looking for housing as work participation, thereby expanding eligibility — a policy that could serve as a model elsewhere.

The institute ranked Massachusetts highest on overall policy, but the state was 34th in the education-specific ranking. Alaska, conversely, ranked 42nd in overall homelessness policy but ranked best in education of homeless students.

That might seem counterintuitive. But Adams said we should expect some variation — just because a state gets high marks in some areas doesn’t mean it will perform well in all.

In the case of Massachusetts specifically, it ranked lower in the education category because it identifies a lower share of its extremely poor children as homeless than other states. Nationwide, 27.1 percent of extremely poor children were homeless during the 2012-13 school year. And the institute’s ranking assumes that those states that report significantly lower percentages of homeless There Are Way More Homeless Students Than There Used To Be | FiveThirtyEight:

Teacher: Testing is supposed to provide ‘rich’ student data — but here’s why it’s actually worthless - The Washington Post

Teacher: Testing is supposed to provide ‘rich’ student data — but here’s why it’s actually worthless - The Washington Post:

Teacher: Testing is supposed to provide ‘rich’ student data — but here’s why it’s actually worthless

One of the big ideas driving school reform today is that data is king, and the more the better for teachers who can use it to improve and tailor instruction to their students. The problem, according to many teachers, is that the data they are given from standardized tests doesn’t do much of anything to help them because it doesn’t have any meaning. This is clearly explained in  this post by Peter Greene,  a veteran teacher of English in a small town in Pennsylvania, who initially published this on his lively Curmudgucation blog,

Greene talks about value-added measurement, or VAM, which is the method by which teacher evaluations are now being linked to student standardized test scores. VAM formulas supposedly can tease out, by way of a mathematical formula using the test scores, how much “value” a teacher adds to a student’s academic progress while factoring out every other influence on a student’s test performance (including hunger, illness, etc.). Assessment experts say VAM should not be used to evaluate teachers because the method isn’t reliable enough, but school reforms are doing it anyway.

How VAM formulas generally work is that each student is assigned a “predicted” score — based on past performance by that student and other students — on a state-mandated test. If a student exceeds the predicted score, the teacher is credited with “adding value.” If the student does not do as well as the predicted score, the teacher is held responsible and that score counts negatively towards his/her evaluation. (You can read here about one teacherwhose top-scoring students actually hurt his evaluation.)

Here’s Greene’s piece on just how value-less supposedly valuable value-added data really is.

By Peter Greene

It’s autumn in Pennsylvania, which means it’s time to look at the rich data to be gleaned from our Big Standardized Test (called PSSA for grades 3-8, and Keystone Exams at the high school level). We love us some value-added data crunching in PA (our version is called PVAAS, an early version of the value-added baloney model).

This is a model that promises far more than it can deliver, but it also makes up a sizable chunk of our school evaluation model, which in turn is part of our teacher evaluation model. Of course the data crunching and collecting is supposed to have many valuable benefits, not the least of which is unleashing a pack of rich and robust data hounds who will chase the wild beast of low student achievement up the tree of instructional re-alignment. Like every other state, we have been promised that the tests will have classroom teachers swimming in a vast vault of data, like Scrooge McDuck on a gold bullion Teacher: Testing is supposed to provide ‘rich’ student data — but here’s why it’s actually worthless - The Washington Post:

Charter school reform bill tackles controversies over White Hat property, sponsor evaluations, new school rating measure | cleveland.com

Charter school reform bill tackles controversies over White Hat property, sponsor evaluations, new school rating measure | cleveland.com:

Charter school reform bill tackles controversies over White Hat property, sponsor evaluations, new school rating measure

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- There's no clear magic bullet in Ohio's new charter school reform bill that will go up for final approval from the state House and Senate Wednesday, but it addresses recent charter school controversies.

The bill makes several small changes that, as a whole, will tighten operations of a $1 billion charter school industry that lags behind traditional public schools and is the subject of national ridicule, even from national charter school advocates.

Among the items adjusted or added to the final compromise version, reached Tuesday afternoon, are a new "White Hat rule," an adjustment to how ratings of charter school oversight agencies are calculated and a cautious approach to a charter school request to evaluate schools with a new measure.

Still intact, with only minor adjustments, are changes designed to distance the often-cozy relationships between for-profit charter school operating companies and the school boards that govern the schools.

Among them:

-- Limits were put on contracts that schools can sign, aimed at preventing conflicts of interest.

-- Private and for-profit charter school operators will have to provide more information to the public about how they spend tax dollars they are paid to run the schools. In some cases, schools pay operators 90 percent or more of the tax dollars received, but the operators have been able to keep how they spend the money secret.

The books won't be anywhere near as open as a public school district's, but they will have to provide more detail.

-- The Ohio Department of Education will start to publicize which operators run each school and give information to the public about the academic performance of the schools that each operator runs. That will let families know the track record of the Charter school reform bill tackles controversies over White Hat property, sponsor evaluations, new school rating measure | cleveland.com:

THE DEBATE OVER CHARTER SCHOOLS

• No state pensions for some teachers under charter school reform bill; Ohio Federation of Teachers upset over the late change
• Charter school reform bill tackles controversies over White Hat property, sponsor evaluations, new school rating measure
• Charter school reform bill sails through to compromise; final vote Wednesday
• Ohio Department of Education is withholding e-school grade-rigging documents from Auditor Dave Yost
• Charter school reform changes on Tuesday won't grant many charter requests, House leaders say
• Ohio Democrats, including former Gov. Ted Strickland, angry over $71 million charter school grant
• Dealing with e-schools: How different are kids at online schools?
• Conference committee for much-delayed charter school reform bill named, negotiations to start Tuesday
• Ohio wins $71 million charter school expansion grant, drawing pride and distrust
• Ohio House rejects charter school reform bill, sends it for more negotiations

Chicago Teachers Union president running for re-election - Chicago Tribune

Chicago Teachers Union president running for re-election - Chicago Tribune:

Chicago Teachers Union president running for re-election

Karen Lewis, whose bid to challenge Mayor Rahm Emanuel was derailed by a cancer diagnosis a year ago, will run for re-election as president of the Chicago Teachers Union in May, a CTU spokeswoman confirmed.

Lewis, 62, has been the union's president since winning a runoff election against incumbent Marilyn Stewart in 2010. She brought fresh vigor to the 30,000-member union, taking on Emanuel following his election in 2011 and then leading her membership on a historic seven-day strike in September 2012.

Lewis won a second, three-year term as union president in May 2013. She was poised to run for mayor when she was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor last year. She sat out the mayoral election but has since returned to work and has appeared at a number of CTU events and rallies.

jjperez@tribpub.com

Twitter @perezjr
Chicago Teachers Union president running for re-election - Chicago Tribune:

Thousands gather at Brooklyn charter schools rally - US News

Thousands gather at Brooklyn charter schools rally - US News:

Thousands of charter school supporters gather at Brooklyn rally featuring Jennifer Hudson

NEW YORK (AP) — Grammy- and Oscar-winning star Jennifer Hudson is the headliner at a rally of charter school supporters in Brooklyn.

Thousands of people in red T-shirts filled Cadman Plaza on Wednesday as the event got under way with a performance by DJ Jazzy Jeff.

The rally includes many children and parents from the Success Academy charter school network.

Organizers say hundreds of thousands of city schoolchildren are trapped in low-performing schools. They're urging Mayor Bill de Blasio to support the growth of charter schools as an alternative.

Kimberly Hanley says her son Jaden just started Success Academy Harlem 2 after attending a local district school. Hanley says educators at the charter school take time with the third-grader and make sure he understands the lessons.

Will federal funding spawn more suburban charter schools? - DailyHerald.com

Will federal funding spawn more suburban charter schools? - DailyHerald.com:

Will federal funding spawn more suburban charter schools?

Could a proposal to create a charter school in Elgin, defeated last year, be revived with the injection of federal funding?

Illinois is among eight states selected to receive a grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The five-year, $42 million grant will provide financial assistance for the planning, program design and initial implementation of charter schools statewide.

As many as 60 new charter public schools could be established in Illinois in the next five years.

Illinois State Board of Education spokeswoman Laine Evans said the agency will issue a request for proposals at a later date.

Chicago Public Schools is reviewing proposals for new charter schools and approval decisions will be made late this month. There are no pending charter school applications outside of Chicago.

Had it been approved, the Elgin Math and Science Academy would have opened last month, offering classes from kindergarten through second grade. Its target audience was at-risk students from Elgin.

The school idea hasn't been dropped entirely, said Kerin Kelly, an attorney and vice president of the Elgin Charter School Initiative. But she could not confirm whether the group will be submitting a new charter application anytime soon.

A 12-member design team -- made up of parents, community volunteers and professionals in various fields -- spent three years preparing the first application. A state commission a year ago denied the group's appeal of a rejection of the plan by the Elgin Area School District U-46 school board.

At the time, Illinois State Charter School Commission members said they were impressed with aspects of the application but agreed the proposal was not "ready." They urged charter group leaders to take more time to address concerns raised about finances and how the school would cater to at-risk students.

The proposal did not meet the commission's standards in four categories: education plan, organizational plan, business plan and evidence of capacity.

U-46 CEO Tony Sanders then opposed the charter school proposal, saying it was not "economically sound."

Sanders said the charter group failed to appropriately budget for staffing needs or startup and maintenance costs. He also said the group was seeking too much funding from the district -- $8,115 per student -- and was not prepared to serve its diverse population of more than 40,000 students.

Other suburban charter proposals also have Will federal funding spawn more suburban charter schools? - DailyHerald.com:

 MORE, AND MORE, AND MORE  FEDERAL FUNDS FOR CHARTERS

Tell the New Education Secretary: Charter Schools Flunk Out in New Orleans | Black Agenda Report

Tell the New Education Secretary: Charter Schools Flunk Out in New Orleans | Black Agenda Report:

Tell the New Education Secretary: Charter Schools Flunk Out in New Orleans

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford

Arne Duncan said Katrina was the best thing to happen to New Orleans schools, and his successor, John B. King, doubtless feels the same. But “it’s all propaganda and phony numbers.” Even with more than a third of its poor Black students in exile, the New Orleans all-charter system ranks significantly lower than Louisiana public schools – and that’s after controlling for factors of race, class and qualifications for special education.

Tell the New Education Secretary: Charter Schools Flunk Out in New Orleans

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by executive editor Glen Ford

“The gap between Louisiana charter schools – meaning, mainly, New Orleans – and public schools was the biggest in the country.”

Arne Duncan, the outgoing U.S. secretary of education, will be succeeded by an even more rabid professional privatizer of public education. John B. King, a Black and Puerto Rican native of Brooklyn, New York – and, like President Obama, a product of Harvard and Columbia universities – has spent his entire teaching career in the charter school business. King is a hit man for school privatization – the perfect credentials to take over from presidential buddy Arne Duncan, the ghoul who obscenely declared that “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina.”

Corporations stand to make hundreds of billions of dollars from privatization of education, so it pays to tell lies about what happened when Katrina provided the opportunity to illegally fire 7,000 New Orleans teachers, the majority of them Black, replacing them with young, largely white, non-union and ultimately temporary staff, and then converting all of the city’s schools to charters. The privatizers claim that test scores are way up in New Orleans, but studies show that it’s all propaganda and phony numbers. Charter schools do what they have always done: they select and retain students that tend to do well on tests, and discard the rest. That’s called “creaming” – taking the better-performing students right off the top. But, in New Orleans, the creaming preceded the charter school coup. One-third of the Black population was driven from the city, never to return. The schoolchildren among these displaced Black persons were disproportionately poor – precisely the demographic that does relatively worse on standardized tests. They never showed up for class in New Orleans newly charterized schools, leaving a more affluent mass of students to take the standardized tests. But, the charter schools continued the creaming students, in an attempt to boost the test numbers, especially at selected schools – all the while claiming that underperforming students were not being displaced.

That was a lie. For example, a study by the Education Research Alliance showed that a preparatory high school somehow lost-two-thirds of its students when it converted to charter. The school claims it doesn’t know where they went, but keeps bragging about how great things are for the kids that remained and for the new students, many of them non-Black.

“New Orleans’ charter school system flunks.”

Most of Louisiana’s charter schools are located in New Orleans. A study by the Network for Public Education found that the state’s charter schools performed significantly worse than conventional public schools. The gap between Louisiana charter schools – meaning, mainly, New Orleans – and public schools was the biggest in the country – which had a lot do with Louisiana overall scoring the fourth lowest in the nation. Even by Tell the New Education Secretary: Charter Schools Flunk Out in New Orleans | Black Agenda Report:

Test Scores Under Common Core Show That ‘Proficient’ Varies by State - The New York Times

Test Scores Under Common Core Show That ‘Proficient’ Varies by State - The New York Times:

Test Scores Under Common Core Show That ‘Proficient’ Varies by State

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ohio seems to have taken a page from Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average.

Last month, state officials releasing an early batch of test scores declared that two-thirds of students at most grade levels were proficient on reading and math tests given last spring under the new Common Core requirements.

Yet similar scores on the same tests meant something quite different in Illinois, where education officials said only about a third of students were on track. And in Massachusetts, typically one of the strongest academic performers, the state said about half of the students who took the same tests as Ohio’s children met expectations.

It all came down to the different labels each state used to describe the exact same scores on the same tests.

That kind of inconsistency in educational standards is what the Common Core — academic guidelines for kindergarten through high school reading and math that were adopted by more than 40 states — was intended to redress. But Ohio is not alone in adjusting the goal posts. In California andNorth Carolina, state officials reporting headline results lumped together groups of students who either passed or nearly passed the tests. And in Florida, the education commissioner recommended passing rates less stringent than in other states.

“This was exactly the problem that a lot of policy makers and educators were trying to solve,” said Karen Nussle, the executive director of the Collaborative for Student Success, a Common Core advocacy group, “to get a more honest assessment of where kids are and being transparent about that with parents and educators so that we could do something about it.”

The Common Core was devised by experts convened by state education commissioners and governors to set uniform benchmarks for learning. But as it has been put into place, it has faced increasing backlash, both from politicians, who argue that it infringes on states’ independence to determine education policy, and from parents and teachers, who object to the more stringent testing that has come with the new guidelines.

Before the Common Core, each state set its own standards and devised its own tests. Some states made the standardized tests so easy or set passing scores so low that virtually all students were rated proficient even as they scored much lower on federal exams and showed up for college requiring remedial help. Here in Columbus, the school district is still recovering froma scandal in which many principals removed low-performing students from enrollment records in order to improve school ratings.

But as the results from the first Common Core tests have rolled out, education officials again seem to be subtly broadening definitions of success.

“That mentality of saying let’s set proficient at a level where not too many people fail is going to kill us,” said Marc S. Tucker, the president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, a nonprofit think tank. “The global standard of what proficient is keeps moving up.”

Last spring, Ohio, 10 other states and Washington, D.C., used tests devised by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or Parcc, one of two groups responsible for creating Common Core tests. Before the grading process began, Parcc convened a group of educators from participating states to set five performance levels. Students scoring at the lowest level “did not yet meet expectations,” according to the Parcc Test Scores Under Common Core Show That ‘Proficient’ Varies by State - The New York Times:

Congress in Chaos: Don't Leave Our Students Behind! | Heather Hiles | LinkedIn

Congress in Chaos: Don't Leave Our Students Behind! | Heather Hiles | LinkedIn:

Congress in Chaos: Don't Leave Our Students Behind!

“If my future were determined just by my performance on a standardized test, I wouldn't be here. I guarantee you that.” - Michelle Obama

The No Child Left Behind Act, the sixth and most recent reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), was designed with the grand aspirations of closing achievement gaps and highlighting inequities in our educational systems. While it set fundamental expectations that all children can learn and every school should be held responsible for their students’ academic performance, it completely failed to deliver on its espoused objectives.

After more than a decade, the era of “No Child Left Untested” finally appears to be ending. In July, both chambers of Congress passed versions of a reauthorization bill for the ESEA, ending federal test-based accountability and allowing states to decide the weight of those standardized tests in their accountability systems. While the bill does maintain that states must still use some standardized testing, it also leaves room for other types of academic assessment. However, some are worried that recent developments in Congress could lead to a delay in ESEA’s reauthorization, notably, John Boehner’sresignation announcement. As the last of the original architects of No Child Left Behind, who bipartisan ranks included former Representatives Ted Kennedy and George Miller, Boehner’s presence assuaged concerns over compromise efforts between the House and Senate’s versions of the ESEA rewrite. Unfortunately, many are now worried that his sudden departure will cause a delay in the reauthorization, as less-experienced members of the polarized parties duke it out over details in the disparate versions of the bill.

This is not the time to let party politics get in the way of actual progress.

While NCLB was designed with noble intentions, its emphasis on standardized testing as the main form of accountability prevented it from meeting its objectives. I’m not a fan of standardized testing as the only form of assessment; it’s part of what led me to found a lifelong learning portfolio company Pathbrite, and I’m not surprised to hear that many educators and parents aren’t fans either. A Gallup survey shows that 61% of the American public oppose using students’ scores on standardized tests to evaluate a teacher’s performance, and a separateNEA survey found that 45% of teachers in the study have considered leaving the profession due to the emphasis on standardized testing.

Overuse of standardized testing leaves little room for formative, real-time assessment of learning, where information can have the most impact, and corrupts the learning process for students. What we need now is to limit the deployment of bubble tests in favor of more holistic methods of teaching and learning. If we want to hold schools accountable and show that all students canlearn, then what we need now is continuous evidence-based assessment.

Students deserve an engaging learning experience that gives them the tools they need to succeed in the real world. Unlike standardized testing -- a form of assessment that we rarely, if ever, would face in the real world; evidence-based assessment methods such as digital portfolios provide an authentic and realistic means of assessing students’ effort, applied knowledge, achievement, and growth over time.

As students move through their academic careers, the process of submitting work to their portfolios offers reflective learning opportunities, encourages the development of critical thinking, meta-learning and metacognitive skills, and demonstrates proof of their progress and growth. Instead of graduating with just a GPA and a set of test scores, students would leave school with actual evidence of everything they have learned -- evidence they can leverage for college applications or future professional opportunities.  

We have an opportunity now to make some real changes in America’s educational Congress in Chaos: Don't Leave Our Students Behind! | Heather Hiles | LinkedIn:

Dan Walters: Does early education truly help? | The Sacramento Bee

Dan Walters: Does early education truly help? | The Sacramento Bee:
Dan Walters: Does early education truly help?

The New America Foundation urges California in a new report to spend more on training and paying pre-kindergarten teachers.

“Our bottom line is that California is not doing enough to educate early childhood educators so that kids don’t fall way behind in school,” the report’s author, Sarah Jackson, told EdSource, an online educational news site.

The operative phrase is “so that kids don’t fall way behind in school.”

It reflects a strong consensus among educators and politicians that early childhood intervention is needed to close the oft-mentioned “achievement gap” separating poor and English-learner students – Latino and black, mostly – from their more affluent white and Asian American classmates.

Half of the state’s million-plus pre-kindergarten age children are Latino or low-income and the state has been slowly ramping up educational programs for them, including “transitional kindergarten.” Another expansion bill is sitting on Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk.

It should be noted, too, that school unions are pushing politicians hard on the issue, because they anticipate gaining members among child care workers and pre-K teachers.

So the die is cast, right? California will someday join a few other states in offering virtually universal early childhood education and reap the benefits in a narrowing, or even closure, of the achievement gap.

The former may occur, but the latter may not, a disturbing new study out of Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University indicates.

Tennessee has one of the nation’s more extensive early childhood education programs for low-income children. And Vanderbilt’s Peabody Research Institute was given a federal grant to gauge its impacts.

The exhaustive study compared youngsters receiving early childhood attention to a control group that didn’t. It found that initially, the kids included in the program had “significantly higher achievement scores on all six of the subtests, with the largest effects on the two literacy outcomes.”

However, the study team’s report added, “By the end of kindergarten, the control children had caught up to the (early education) children and there were no longer significant differences between them on any achievement measures. The same result was obtained at the end of first grade using both composite achievement measures.

“In second grade, however, the groups began to diverge with the (early childhood education) children scoring lower than the control children on most of the measures. The differences were significant on both achievement composite measures and on the math subtests.”

Tragically, in other words, the efforts devoted to raising the academic achievement of low-income children went for naught. Other factors, such as poverty and familial and peer influences, prevailed.

Before California spends billions on pre-kindergarten, perhaps the Capitol’s politicians should read the Vanderbilt study and consider whether the money would be better used elsewhere.

Dan Walters: 916-321-1195, dwalters@sacbee.com, @WaltersBee

Read more here: Dan Walters: Does early education truly help? | The Sacramento Bee:

Our work is made possible through generous grants from the Alliance for Early Success; the Annie E. Casey Foundation; the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; the David and Lucile Packard Foundation; Evelyn & Walter Haas, Jr. Fund; the Foundation for Child Development; The Heising-Simons Foundation; the Joyce Foundation; the Kresge Foundation; the Lumina Foundation; the Pritzker Children's Initiative; the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; the W. Clement and Jessie V. Stone Foundation; and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation.