Control Experiment | EduShyster

Control Experiment | EduShyster:

Control Experiment

What is it that urban charter schools actually do?

Reader: if you happened to read this recent New York Times piece on urban charter success, you know that the upshot is that Boston charters are *crushing* the achievement gap and sending loads of kids to college. Close reader that I am, though, I couldn’t help but notice that something was missing. Like any description at all of what makes schools like Match Charter Public School, which gets a special NYT shout out, so different from, say, schools in the suburbs where, based on the contents of my mail bag, the NYT article and the research it cites has been greeted with great enthusiasm. Which gave me a wild idea: why not interview a student who attends Match and ask her to describe what her school is like?

The smartest kids in the worldFirst: a bit of context. Last year I embarked on an effort to talk to as many Boston students as possible, inspired by these students who were protesting the planned closure of several schools in the city. More recently I’ve been working with a group of students who are collecting stories from their peers about testing, school funding and discipline. These students have dazzled me with their keen grasp of what’s at stake in the debate over the future of public education in cities like Boston—issues that seem to elude many of the adults who have the mic. The downside of my experiment: I’ve all but lost interest in talking to said adults. Which is why, in the year ahead, you’ll be hearing plenty from students on this page, and in my finally-just-about-to-be-shared-with-the-world podcast series: Have You Heard? But enough about me. You want to hear from Match High School senior Rayauna Moss-Cousin. Rayauna: take it away. 

A love/hate relationship
My name is Rayauna Moss and I attend Match High School, a charter school in Boston. I’ve been in the Match system since middle school and I have a love/hate feeling for the school. I love that Match is so helpful with the college process. We have classes dedicated to doing college applications and applying for financial aid. I appreciate that the most because I feel like I wouldn’t be too far in the college application process without Match.

Often school can feel like a prison to me. When it comes to discipline, my school is very strict. We have a demerit and merit system that tries to teach us to be professional and get us ready for college. However, we are often given unnecessary demerits for offenses like hugging too long in the hallways, or not being in uniform. We aren’t treated as young adults. I’ve been given detention for not having a uniform, for being late, and for chewing gum. If you are not in uniform, you have to trade in your phone or T pass as a rental for Match’s clothes. But many students need their phones to contact their parents and a T pass to get home safely. I don’t understand how demerits and detentions prepare us for college. The school doesn’t have a valid answer about how their Control Experiment | EduShyster:

CURMUDGUCATION: MI: Reformster District Meltdown

CURMUDGUCATION: MI: Reformster District Meltdown:

MI: Reformster District Meltdown

Michigan is one of several states to attempt an "achievement" school district, a special collection of the very bottom schools, run by the state. It was set up in 2011 by Governor Rick Snyder, but its continued existence is now in doubt.

None of the Achievement school districts have been successful (and "successful" is a relative word here, since "success" is often about taking weak schools and turning them into charter/turnaround business opportunities). The head of Tennessee's ASD resigned because the work was taking a toll on his health; his goal of moving the bottom 5% of schools into the top 25% has been a complete and utter failure.

But Michigan, which used its Education Achievement Authority as a blunt instrument to club Detroit schools into submission, has been spectacular in its dysfunction from the very beginning when they hired a chancellor who had lied his way out of his previous job.

Through it all, the messes have been chronicled by Eclectablog, an indispensable resource for Michigan folks. In fact, Eclectablog just collected up all its EAA coverage in one list of links, and it is quite a deep swamp to wade through. But if you want to see just how messy and dirty this kind of state takeover district can get, take some time and work through this "sad, predictable, outrageous and infuriating history."

But now things seem to have really hit the fan. After old chancellor John Covington departed under a cloud, the state brought in Veronica Conforme, who has not exactly cleaned things up. EAA awarded a $1.7 million contract to the eighth-highest bidder-- a company created only to go after that contract and run by Conforme's old buddies (the FBI is on that one). A former EAA principal admitted taking a bribe. EAA administrators have been caught using a ludicrous lie to avoid FOIA requests, which they were doing to hide the fact that EAA schools shove students with disabilities out into public schools. EAA got caught "colluding" with Detroit schools to get control of another sixteen schools.

And now tomorrow could be a Very Bad Day for the EAA.

The EAA exists by virtue of an authorizing agreement between Eastern Michigan University and the CURMUDGUCATION: MI: Reformster District Meltdown:

Ohio Researcher Proves–Yet Again–That Test Scores Measure Primarily Family Income | janresseger

Ohio Researcher Proves–Yet Again–That Test Scores Measure Primarily Family Income | janresseger:

Ohio Researcher Proves–Yet Again–That Test Scores Measure Primarily Family Income

Like the rest the country, Ohio is trapped in a test-and-punish education accountability system that castigates public schools when students’ test scores are persistently low. It is a system that punishes already vulnerable institutions—closing and charterizing schools in the places where scores are low, giving vouchers to help children “escape” so-called “failing” schools, and rating teachers by students’ scores. Ohio practices all of these policies.  The flaw inherent in such a system is that standardized test scores continue to correlate with the aggregate income of the families whose children are enrolled in schools and school districts.  Researchers have demonstrated again and again that, despite that poor children surely can learn and many do thrive academically, aggregate test scores are pretty much an economic indicator, not a measure of the academic quality of the school.  Test score gaps are in place before children enter Kindergarten, and they rarely close as children move through the grades.

Now, once again, Howard Fleeter of Ohio’s Education Tax Policy Institute, has documented that in Ohio, the schools that can brag of the highest test scores are located in the wealthy suburban school districts and the so-called “failing” schools are those that serve children living in poverty.  The ratings attached to school districts by the state based on test scores thus create further incentives for more families to abandon poorer and mixed income communities and move to expensive outer ring suburbs. This blog recently covered how school ratings by Zillow, the online real estate guide, contribute to segregation in the same way.

Here is how the Cleveland Plain Dealer‘s Patrick O’Donnell describes Fleeter’s findings: “State test scores continue to rise right along with a school district’s affluence, and fall as poverty rates increase….  Ohio may have changed academic standards and its state tests last school year, but the recurring relationship between test scores and poverty remains the same…. Fleeter has reported the relationship between test scores and family income on an annual basis the last several years…. He repeated that analysis this week using preliminary test scores from the spring on Ohio’s new math, English, science and social studies tests…. As he Ohio Researcher Proves–Yet Again–That Test Scores Measure Primarily Family Income | janresseger:

Investigating Why So Many Black Preschoolers Get Suspended and Expelled - The Atlantic

Investigating Why So Many Black Preschoolers Get Suspended and Expelled - The Atlantic:

Why Are So Many Preschoolers Getting Suspended?

The frequency of punishment has a troubling racial skew.

Tunette Powell travels across the country counseling families and mentoring youth. An award-winning motivational speaker and author, her professional work in the education field ranges from training nonprofit leaders to consulting for colleges and universities. But none of Powell’s career-related skills could prepare her for the frustration and helplessness of seeing her two sons suspended from preschool, which she pegged to overly harsh and racially biased discipline. In a July 2014 Washington Post opinion piece that gained national attention, Powell relates how her boys—ages 3 and 4—were suspended from their Omaha preschool program eight times total in one year. Once published, the essay resonated with readers nationwide. “So many parents reached out [to me] … a lot of black mothers” who shared her experience with excessive suspensions, said Powell. “We live in a time when we just say, ‘Suspend them, get rid of them.’”

A glance at news headlines confirms that Powell and her sons are not an anomaly. From a 3-year-old suspended for too many toileting mishaps to a 4-year-old booted out of school for kicking off his shoes and crying, toddlers are racking up punishments that leave many parents and child experts bewildered. Overall the rise in school suspensions and disproportionate impact on youth of color has triggered a flurry of interest from activists and high-ranking government officials, and for good reason: A February 2015 report from UCLA's Civil Rights Project examined out-of-school suspension data for every school district in the country and found that nearly 3.5 million children—about six out of every 100 public school students—were suspended at least once during the 2011-12 school year, with close to half of those (1.55 million) suspended multiple times.

But for some more astounding than these discipline statistics were the thousands of the nation’s youngest learners—nearly 8,000 preschoolers—suspended from school in the same year, often for relatively minor disruptions and misbehaviors. For researchers and educators immersed in this work, why preschoolers are put out of school and the entrenched racial disparity seems most closely tied to reasons such as teacher bias and children living in poverty whose hitting, biting, and pinching is frequently labeled misconduct rather than developmental delays.

“We live in a time when we just say, ‘Suspend them, get rid of them.’”

Walter S. Gilliam, a psychologist and researcher at Yale University’s Child Study Center, led the first expansive study of preschool expulsions a decade ago. In a random national sample of more than 4,500 state-funded pre-k classrooms in 40 states, his 2005 report revealed 3- and 4-year-olds were expelled from pre-k Investigating Why So Many Black Preschoolers Get Suspended and Expelled - The Atlantic:

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: WEEKEND QUOTABLES:

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Yesterday's protest: On State Street, that great street...

Rahm Emanuel

"I own the problem of police brutality, and I'll fix it." -- Chicago Tribune

BGA Pres. Andy Shaw

It’s been quite a firestorm, and it’s scorching Emanuel and Alvarez. But it’s unconscionable that so few others been held accountable, and so little has changed, after more than half a century of well-documented police misconduct that’s taken too many lives, wasted too many tax dollars, sown too much mistrust, and inflicted too much pain on our entire city. -- Toxic Chicago cop culture dates back decades

Ando should be indicted, not just fired.

Lorenzo Davis

,,, a former Chicago police commander and top IPRA investigator, has claimed he was fired this year for resisting [IPRA head, Scott] Ando’s orders to justify police shootings. Davis’ lawyer told the Sun-Times last week that Chatman’s shooting was the video that led to Davis’ ouster. Davis himself called Chatman’s death a “murder” — one that was officially Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: WEEKEND QUOTABLES:

Failing Students and the “At Risk” Label (Part 2) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Failing Students and the “At Risk” Label (Part 2) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:

Failing Students and the “At Risk” Label (Part 2)

“I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I wasn’t poor, I was needy. Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy. I was deprived. (Oh not deprived but rather underprivileged.) Then they told me that underprivileged was overused. I was disadvantaged. I still don’t have a dime. But I have a great vocabulary.”

Jules Feiffer  (1965)

In the previous post, I laid out the history of phrases used to describe students who did poorly in the age-graded school since the late-19th century. “At risk” is the current phrase. Like previous ones, the words have fixed upon mostly poor and minority students. The phrase has replaced “culturally deprived,” “socially disadvantaged, ” “educationally disadvantaged,” ones that policymakers, educators, and media outlets have constructed and used over the past half-century.  In this post, I describe and assess the widespread use of “at risk” for urban and rural poor and minority students.

Origins of Label

Some researchers see the phrase coming from epidemiology where individuals with heart disease, diabetes, lung cancer, and other ills display “at risk” factors. These individuals are “at risk” in displaying certain factors such as smoking, carrying around too much weight, exercising little, and genetic inheritance. It is a medical framing of the problem. Education is like medicine and student failure or poor academic performance is the disease. Children have “risk factors.” Keep in mind that the focus, then, is on the individual child. After all, seldom do I read or hear of a policymaker, researcher, or journalist calling a school, district, or state “at risk.” The label is intended to refer to individual and groups of children and youth that share similar characteristics, not the resources allocated or structures within which children learn or the community factors that impinge on both the teaching and learning. As past phrases of “culturally deprived” and “disadvantaged” has become synonymous with children of immigrant, migrant, and indigenous families who are mostly poor and minority so has “at risk.” In short, the medical reframing of the problem of academic failure as children being “at risk” is the latest incarnation of earlier labels all of which target the individual student (see here, here, and here).

Effects of Labels

In schools as in life, labels have consequences. I see two: stigma and focus on the individual rather than the structures in and out of the school.

Stigma comes from labeling. Labeling individuals occurs because they deviate from the norm, i.e., students who fail in age-graded schools (see here). There are Failing Students and the “At Risk” Label (Part 2) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:

Picture Post Week: Follow up on who’s running America’s charter schools | School Finance 101

Picture Post Week: Follow up on who’s running America’s charter schools | School Finance 101:

Picture Post Week: Follow up on who’s running America’s charter schools

This post is a follow up on my previous post where I discussed which charter school operators are actually leading the nation in charter school enrollments. Here are a some slides breaking out the charter school enrollments by operator/manager for a handful of states.  These slides are made possible by my meticulous graduate student Mark Weber, who spent hours aligning operator classifications and school links first presented by Gary Miron and colleagues, and merging those classifications to the 2011-12 National Center for Education Statistics Common Core of Data and Civil Rights Data Collections.

The data are likely imperfect in many ways. For one, It’s not always easy to figure out exactly who’s managing what school. In addition, charter school enrollments have continued to expand rapidly since this time. But, we have little reason to believe, for example, that the distribution of operators within the charter sector has shifted dramatically. Bottom line – we should have better – “officially” (USDOE/NCES, SEAs) gathered data on such things.  For now, we don’t.

In later posts, I will, time permitting, spend a bit more time discussing some of the operators I’ve highlighted in red (w/yellow font) on these slides. My previous post includes some links and to some, these names will be familiar.

Picture Post Week: Follow up on who’s running America’s charter schools | School Finance 101:





Picture Post Week: Who’s granting all of those education degrees?

This post is an update to a series of earlier posts in which I summarized the production of education degrees over time. As policymakers continue their critiques of the supposed decline in the quality of teacher preparation, as if teacher and leader preparation has been static since the 1950s, it’s worth again looking at trends of the last 20+ years to see just what has changed.  The following graphs summarize undergraduate and graduate degree production classified by a) undergraduate institution selectivity as reported in Barron’s guides and b) institutional classifications from the 1994 Carnegie Classification system, which was more hierarchical (read: elitist) than later versions.

Picture Post Week: Who’s granting all of those education degrees?

#Coops Build Stronger Communities, New Economy, And Better World | PopularResistance.Org

Co-Ops Build Stronger Communities, New Economy, And Better World | PopularResistance.Org:

Co-Ops Build Stronger Communities, A New Economy, And Better World

Above Photo: From PopularResistance.org.

Cooperatives are businesses and organizations democratically owned and managed by the people they serve. They come in many shapes and sizes: from a handful of people to thousands upon thousands of members. Some are owned and run by workers, others are owned and governed by consumers, still others are for producers (like farmers and artists). But no matter what, cooperatives always have the same foundation: one member, one share, one vote.

Recently, we at The Toolbox for Education and Social Action (TESA) (a worker co-op) launched a new poster series to highlight and celebrate the power of the cooperative movement. Below, we’re sharing each of the posters while also going further into depth about how co-ops build stronger communities, a new economy, and a better world.

Cooperatives build stronger communities by keeping money, resources, jobs, and economic control local. Their impact has been so widespread and significant that more businesses are electing to transition into cooperatives. Like the Island Employee Cooperative (IEC) in rural Maine, where the retiring owners decided to sell their businesses to their employees, rather than an outside investor who would surely have made lay-offs and service cut-backs. Since buying-out their jobs, the retail workers at IEC have increased their pay, acquired benefits, shared in the business’s profits, and even brought the local community college system into their stores to help teach the new owners (the employees!) practical business skills. All of these things are rare in the retail world for workers, but it’s possible at the IEC in Deer Isle, Maine, thanks to the cooperative model.

And in Chicago, when window factory employees had their jobs ripped away from them not once but twice, they decided to found their own business: “Everyone decided enough was enough,” New Era’s website declares. “If we want to keep quality manufacturing jobs in our communities, perhaps we should put in charge those who have the most at stake in keeping those jobs — the workers. The plan to start a new worker owned cooperative business began.”

And so New Era Windows was born, where no workers could be fired simply because the bosses wanted to save money. The late Ricky Macklin, who was instrumental in organizing the founding of New Era, said in Own the Change, the documentary TESA co-produced with The Laura Flanders Show about cooperatives, that the co-op model opened new frontiers for the factory workers:

All of our lives, we’ve been told we was only this, and we was only that. And New Era Cooperative allowed us to see that we was much more than that. Actually, what really surprised all of us… at Republic, we only thought we only knew how to make windows, because this is what we were told – is that we were window makers. When we moved into our own plant, we found out that we was electricians, we found out that we was plumbers, we found out that we were people of industry. I found out I was a salesman.

But even taking a step back, we can see that cooperatives are helping to transform not only individual businesses and lives, but entire communities – cities, towns, and regions. Cooperatives in Madison, WI have a strong history of working together to make it easier for more people to start co-ops as well as to improve the situation of their other fellow co-ops in the city. More efforts like these have sprung up around the country – like with the Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance.

In fact, cooperatives are taking center stage in the effort to build community wealth that is controlled and owned by the people. And their cities are beginning to take notice. In 2011, the Mayor of Richmond, CA, a highly impoverished post-industrial city, hired a cooperative developer to help launch more co-ops, with the aim to build and retain equitable wealth for community members. Over in the rust belt, Cleveland’s municipal government helped fund the launch of theEvergreen Cooperatives: eco-friendly businesses that are rooted in serving local institutions, like hospitals and universities. Intrigued by Evergreen’s success, Rochester, NY contributed $100,000 towards replicating the model in their city. Madison, WI was so impressed by the impact of cooperatives that they decided to invest $5 million in launching more democratically-owned and governed businesses. And New York City, compelled by worker cooperative advocates, has twice agreed to contribute millions to launching co-ops. Already, this contribution is improving New York communities: like the neighborhood of Bed-Stuy, which is using cooperatives to challenge gentrification.

Indeed, cooperatives can often build stronger communities by directly serving those that have been disenfranchised or persecuted. This includes providing reasonable and healthy food access to people who live below the poverty line and those in food deserts. This is what the Mariposa Cooperative in Philadelphia does and the Renaissance Cooperative, which is trying to launch in Greensboro, NC, will aim to achieve. In Queens, NYC, eight transgender Latina women are founding a worker cooperative together that will be a beauty-focused business: “Their business, the first of its kind in New York City, aims to provide stable and dignified jobs for the women and to serve as a model to other Co-Ops Build Stronger Communities, New Economy, And Better World | PopularResistance.Org:

AFT contest winner Greg Cruey asks Hillary Clinton about community schools

AFT contest winner Greg Cruey asks Hillary Clinton about community schools

AFT member Greg Cruey of McDowell County, W.V. submitted his question for Hillary Clinton on community schools through the AFT eActivist network contest and was selected to join 25 AFT members for a conversation with Hillary Clinton. Greg’s question for Hillary Clinton and her answer are featured here.

Teachers Say They Have Less Autonomy, Fed. Data Show - Teacher Beat - Education Week

Teachers Say They Have Less Autonomy, Fed. Data Show - Teacher Beat - Education Week:

Teachers Say They Have Less Autonomy, Fed. Data Show

By guest blogger Sarah Sparks

Teachers can still close the classroom door, but after more than a decade of federal and state accountability systems, teachers feel they have less independence in what they do inside, federal data show. 

In everything from instructional and discipline strategies they use each day to how much homework students receive each night, teachers reported in the federal Schools and Staffing Survey that they feel they had less professional autonomy in 2012 than in 2003.

The survey included a nationally representative sample of more than 37,000 American public school elementary and secondary teachers.

Teachers felt they had a "minor" amount of control over curriculum and materials, while they reported a "moderate" degree of control over more day-to-day decisions like their own instructional techniques. In an era in which state and the federal governments are scrutinizing disciplinary practices that could disproportionately target poor or minority students, teachers reported the sharpest drop in their discretion in class discipline. 

Veteran teachers of 10 years or more showed the biggest sense of loss of control, and white and black teachers were more likely than other teachers to feel they had less autonomy than they had before. Hispanic teachers, interestingly, reported feeling slightly more in control in 2011-12 than in 2007-08.

NCES analysts found music educators were the most independent bunch of all teachers. Thirty-four percent reported being "highly autonomous" in 2012, down only 2 percentage points from in 2003. By comparison, 25 percent of special education teachers felt autonomous in 2003, but only 16 percent did nearly a decade later.

Chart: Across many aspects of instruction, teachers feel they have less autonomy now than a decade ago, according to data from the federal Schools and Staffing Survey. Source: National Center on Education StatisticsTeachers Say They Have Less Autonomy, Fed. Data Show - Teacher Beat - Education Week:

How A School's Attendance Number Hides Big Problems : NPR Ed : NPR

How A School's Attendance Number Hides Big Problems : NPR Ed : NPR:

How A School's Attendance Number Hides Big Problems

Every morning, the familiar routine plays out in hundreds of thousands of classrooms: A teacher looks out over the desks, taking note of who's in their seats and who isn't.

On any given day, maybe there are one or two empty chairs. One here, one there. And that all goes into the school's daily attendance rate.

But here's what that morning ritual doesn't show: That empty desk? It might be the same one that was empty last week or two weeks ago. The desk of a student who has racked up five, 10, 20 absences this year.

It's called chronic absence. The official definition: missing more than 10 percent of the school year — just two days a month.

And the real-life implication: a warning sign for a student on the brink of failing or dropping out.

Experts call chronic absence an "unseen force" hidden behind average daily attendance figures of 90 or 95 percent that schools hail as a sign of success.

"Daily attendance averages tell you how many students show up every day," says Hedy Chang, who heads Attendance Works, a nonprofit education policy group. "But not how many are missing so much school that they are headed off track academically."

Yet there's a growing effort to pull that chronic absence figure out of the shadows. The U.S. Education Department has taken note: Next year, for the first time ever, it will release school-level data on how many U.S. students missed 15 or more days of school.

The Math Problem

To understand how deceptive attendance numbers can be, take a look at Baltimore. This year, the elementary attendance rate in the Baltimore city public schools is 93 percent. Anything in the 90s is an A – so that's good, right?

But, look more closely and you find that nearly 20 percent of students in grades one through five have missed more than 20 days of school. That's more than 6,000 children.

"As a statistic, attendance can hide patterns," says Mark Gaither, principal at Wolfe Street Academy, an elementary school in Baltimore. He would know. Ten years ago, his school was in bad shape: Test scores were terrible, and the state was threatening to take over.

But when he arrived, he focused on attendance, then in the low 90s. "Not abysmal," he thought at the time.

But he soon discovered that day in, day out, it was the same students who were not showing up. And these kids, he says, "were missing 30 percent of their education." Not surprisingly, these were the students struggling the most in basic things like learning to read.

"That was the performance gap," Gaither says. "The devil is in the details — the devil is in the individual child. If we don't get this kid to school, they're going to fail."

So he launched a kid-by-kid campaign — heavily focused on data — to raise attendance. And today, the school has just a handful of chronically absent kids — and much higher test scores.

Taking A Different Approach

A growing number of school districts are doing what Gaither did: using data to attack How A School's Attendance Number Hides Big Problems : NPR Ed : NPR:

When it comes to education, Finland is not as perfect as we think it is - Quartz

When it comes to education, Finland is not as perfect as we think it is - Quartz:

When it comes to education, Finland is not as perfect as we think it is

Girls score higher than boys on reading tests at every grade and every age in pretty much every country. This has been the case for a very long time.

But the largest gender gap in reading ability in the world can be found in Finland, a country whose education system has been celebrated ad nauseum since it rose to first place in a key international test of skills among 15 and 16-year-olds, the OECD’s Program of International Student Achievement (PISA), in 2000.

The latest rankings reveal some not-so-sunny findings for Finland. In reading assessments, their girls outperformed their boys by 62 points, the largest gap of any country and twice that of the US. Girls scored 556 and boys 494, according to an analysis by Tom Loveless at the Brookings Institution Brown Center on Education Policy.

Loveless writes:

To put this gap in perspective, consider that Finland’s renowned superiority on PISA tests is completely dependent on Finnish girls. Finland’s boys’ score of 494 is about the same as the international average of 496, and not much above the OECD average for males (478) … Finnish superiority in reading only exists among females.

If there were a country that people would bet on to close the gender gap in reading, it would probably be Finland. Almost everything about the country’s education system has been put on a pedestal: kids start school at seven years old and are permitted ample time to play; they are barely tested and not deluged with homework; teachers are well paid, well-trained, and rigorously selected. The system is so amazing that thousands of educators flock to Finland every year to study the country’s supposed secret sauce.

But boys in Finland (who scored an average of 494 in the latest PISA test) perform roughly the same in reading as boys in the US (482) or the When it comes to education, Finland is not as perfect as we think it is - Quartz:

Course Correction for School Testing - The New York Times

Course Correction for School Testing - The New York Times:

Course Correction for School Testing

Congress missed a crucial opportunity eight years ago when it failed to reauthorize the deeply unpopular No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, which required the states to administer yearly tests to public schoolchildren in the early grades and to improve instruction for underprivileged students in return for federal education aid.

When federal lawmakers took up a draft proposal earlier this year, they seemed poised to weaken the law by watering down its protections for impoverished children. Fortunately, the compromise version that passed the House last week and that deserves to pass the Senate as well preserves important parts of the original law while eliminating some significant flaws.

Historically, the federal government kept doling out education money to the states no matter how abysmally their schools systems performed. Alarmed that American students were falling behind their counterparts abroad, Congress in 2002 required states to give annual math and reading tests in grades three through eight (and once in high school) to make sure that students in all districts were making progress and that poor and minority students were being educated.

The part of the law that labeled schools in need of improvement and subjected them to sanctions was flawed. It did not distinguish between truly abysmal schools and otherwise strong schools that missed performance targets with certain groups of students, like special education students. As a result, half the schools in some states were labeled in need of improvement and viewed as failing.

Herein lie the roots of overtesting. School officials who were afraid of the failing label deployed constant waves of so-called diagnostic exams that were actually practice rounds for the real thing. These were often junk tests that were useless for measuring the writing and reasoning skills. The alarming scope of the problem is outlined in a recent study by the Council of the Great City Schools, whose members are large urban districts. It found that the typical student takes about eight standardized tests per year — only two of which are federally required — and an astonishing 112 standardized tests between prekindergarten and 12th grade.

The backlash against testing that has swept the country in recent years was fully justified. But it manifested itself in counterproductive ways in the congressional debate over reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act. For example, one of the early proposals circulating in the Senate would have allowed states to end annual testing altogether, which would leave the country no way of knowing whether students were learning anything or not. Another would have relieved states of the responsibility to intervene in genuinely failing schools. And a particularly disastrous proposal would have permitted states to move Title I poverty funds out of the low-income districts where they are desperately needed. Fortunately, those provisions did not survive.

The compromise bill still requires annual math and reading tests in grades three through eight (and once in high school) to make sure that students are progressing. But it takes some emphasis away from testing by requiring states to rate schools on other measures of student progress, including graduation rates, advance courses and so on. States are still required to take steps to improve the lowest performing schools and to make clear when subgroups are performing poorly in any school. The bill also permits states to use federal money for audits that will eliminate useless or excessive tests. And it discourages the testing opt-out movement by making it clear that schools must test at least 95 percent of students to achieve the highest ratings under the accountability system.

The bill isn’t perfect. But it is a considerable improvement over the original law and would continue pushing schools toward better performance.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for theOpinion Today newsletter. 

A version of this editorial appears in print on December 7, 2015, on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Course Correction for School Testing. Today's Paper|SubscribeCourse Correction for School Testing - The New York Times:

Charter schools in state may join small district near Spokane | The Seattle Times

Charter schools in state may join small district near Spokane | The Seattle Times:

Charter schools in state may join small district near Spokane

Such an arrangement would keep them open as public schools despite a state Supreme Court ruling declaring their funding source unconstitutional.

Charter schools in Washington may join the Mary Walker School District near Springdale, Stevens County, in the far northwest corner of the state this month.

Such an arrangement would keep them open as public schools despite a state Supreme Court ruling declaring their funding source unconstitutional.

“Several of our schools have been in communication with the Mary Walker School District,” said Washington State Charter Schools Association spokeswoman Maggie Meyers. “At this stage nothing has been formalized.”

If the schools do join the Mary Walker School District, they would be classified as Alternative Learning Environments (ALE) under state law. ALEs allow for off-campus instruction, with the schools reporting student progress to the district.

A school district receives state money for students enrolled in an ALE program.

The Mary Walker district’s superintendent, Kevin Jacka, served on the Washington State Charter School Commission until resigning Wednesday.

Jacka said in an email the “Mary Walker School District is still exploring opportunities” around hosting charter schools. Its school board passed a resolution Nov. 30 allowing Jacka to explore the feasibility of hosting charters as Alternative Learning Environment programs.

Part of the resolution read, “the District believes that all students should have a choice in their educational program.”

As of May, the Mary Walker School District had 500 students in kindergarten through high school north of Spokane.

The nine charter schools in the state have a combined estimated enrollment of 1,300 students.

Adel Sefrioui, school director for Excel Public Charter School in Kent, said he’s been in communication with the Mary Walker School District, but no decision has been finalized.

The Supreme Court decision is expected to go into effect Dec. 14, at which Charter schools in state may join small district near Spokane | The Seattle Times:

Could this be the new odd couple of Newark school reform? | Editorial | NJ.com

Could this be the new odd couple of Newark school reform? | Editorial | NJ.com:

Could this be the new odd couple of Newark school reform? | Editorial

Christopher Cerf (far left), the new superintendent of Newark schools, is teaming up with Mayor Ras Baraka on an education project. (AP Photo/Mel Evans)

There's a new reform project underway in Newark schools, with an unlikely partnership behind it: The superintendent and the mayor.

This was unthinkable only a year ago. The state took over the city's school system in 1995, and most people in Newark regard it as an offense that Trenton still calls the shots 20 years later.

Relations spun out of control during the contentious reign of former Superintendent Cami Anderson, who became a key political target of Mayor Ras Baraka. That blocked any hope of a constructive partnership.

MORE: Recent Star-Ledger editorials

So mark this as a political milestone that will benefit children, with credit to both Baraka and Superintendent Chris Cerf, the former state education commissioner.

This week, they announced their intention to use $12.5 million of the remaining Facebook money donated to Newark to fund a joint initiative, addressing both school quality and poverty, at the same time.

We don't yet know the details, and execution matters. But this plan will center on the South Ward, where the need is greatest.

Cerf wants to give principals more control of their budgets and staff. He also wants to provide more help addressing the impact of poverty, including parent workshops and health clinics. The rest of the money, $2.5 million, will fund a program to prevent dropouts, and try to lure back those who have already left school.

All this is promising. The fight for education reform often cleaves into those who believe improving schools is the key, and those who believe addressing poverty is more important. In reality, both matter. Kids suffer when they're stuck with mediocre teachers and schools, just as they suffer from family instability or poor health care.

Baraka is opposed to the expansion of charter schools, a mistake in our view, given the remarkable success of the charter sector in this city, which educates more than 1 in 4 kids.

But this reform could help the district schools catch up. The autonomy for principals, and the services aimed at addressing poverty are both hallmarks of the successful charter schools. They get less money than the district schools for operating costs, and none at all for capital costs. Yet they outperform the district's schools, in part because more money reaches the classroom.

Newark schools are facing a budget crisis, mostly because state aid has been frozen for years. The expansion of the charter sectors has created a challenge, as well, since state aid moves with the students, forcing the district schools to make do with less.

But the answer is not to choke off the expansion of charter schools, which have proven to be immensely popular among Newark families. The answer is to lift the performance of district schools, borrowing the successful tactics of charter schools whenever possible. With open minds, each sector could strengthen the other.

Our hope is that this Facebook money helps to grease that transition. Cerf and Baraka both deserve credit for moving in that direction.

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