During last week's media conference over at U of I several speakers bemoaned the death of investigative journalism. Apparently these folks believe that reporters don't have the sack to challenge the people in power with hard questions, and rabid fact finding.

While I think this notion is generally true, I read one of the bravest interviews ever this morning in the Trib. Imagine the scene: Bono from U2 calls you up, says he's pissed about what you've been writing about his band, and demands a sit down. What do you do?

Well, if you're Greg Kot, apparently you do your job. Read this for insight into how real reporters work. 0 comments

Yesterday's lead story in the News-Gazette, "Thousands Rally for Reform" touched on some important educational issues here in the State. It seems Senators Winkel (R-Urbana) and Meeks (I-Chicago) are proposing the following:

The legislation would increase the personal income tax from 3 percent to 5 percent and raise the corporate income tax rate from 4.8 percent to 8 percent, raising a projected $5.8 billion a year.

Of that, $3 billion would be used to reimburse school districts for reducing the elementary and secondary education portion of every residential and non-residential property tax bill in the state by 30 percent.

Another $1.7 billion would be used to raise the per-pupil minimum spending level from $4,964 to $6,100.

The rest of the revenue would be used to contribute $120 million a year to special education and other services schools are required to provide; give $370 million a year to universities and community colleges ...

Note the third paragraph of this quote: per pupil spending in this state averages $5000 a year, which ranks Illinois 48th in the percentage of funding the state provides for education. But even this number is misleading. In actuality, spending in the state ranges from a low of $4000 a year in some downstate districts to a high of $18,000 a year in suburban Chicago (Urbana's rate is around $7200). Illinois actually ranks 49th in the nation in the size of the per-pupil spending gap between wealthy and poor school districts.

All of which makes Winkel's legislation seem like a pretty good idea. Since the current funding system relies heavily on property taxes, districts like 214 in suburban Chicago can afford high tech computer labs, PhDs who oversee departments but don't actually teach, and budget surpluses up to $40 million. Meanwhile districts in, say, the East St. Louis area continue to struggle just to keep the lights on.

So what to do? HB755 is a good start. Educators have long advocated a move away from property tax-based funding, and this is a way to make it happen. This legislation will also increase the amount of money going into Illinois schools, helping us move out of the national basement. But passage is not guaranteed, and the Governor, in another hair-brained move, has vowed to veto any income tax increases (even if they are offset by a reduction in property taxes, apparently).

Action needs to be taken. I urge you to write (207 State Capitol Bldg. Springfield, IL 62706), email (governor@state.il.us), or call (217-782-6830) the Governor and tell him where you stand on this issue. Though he has taken significant steps to increase education funding in this state over the last two years, it is a systematic reform that is needed. Let the man know where you stand.

Finally, a quote from Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities to hopefully give us some perspective:

Anyone who visits in the schools of East St. Louis, even for a short time, comes away profoundly shaken. These are innocent children, after all. They have done nothing wrong. They have committed no crime. They are too young to have offended us in any way at all. One searches for some way to understand why a society as rich and, frequently, as generous as ours would leave these children in their penury and squalor for so long -- and with so little public indignation. Is this just a strange mistake of history? Is it unusual? Is it an American anomaly? [...]

These are Americans. Why do we reduce them to this beggary - and why, particularly, in public education? Why not spend on children here at least what we would be investing in their education if they lived within a wealthy district like Winnetka, Illinois, or Cherry Hill, New Jersey, or Manhasset, Rye, or Great Neck in New York? Wouldn't this be natural behavior in an affluent society that seems to value fairness in so many other areas of life? Is fairness less important to Americans today than in some earlier times? Is it viewed as slightly tiresome and incompatible with hardnosed values? What do Americans believe about equality?

What do you believe about equality? Contact the Governor. 6 comments

This story ran on Monday in the Trib, and has a good explanation of one of the fundamental problems with NCLB. Here's the good part:

No Child Left Behind requires schools to test students annually in math and reading in 3rd through 8th grade and once in high school. By law, the entire school as well as specific subgroups of children--based on race, income and special education status--must meet standards on state exams. If even one subgroup fails to measure up, the school is tagged as troubled. The achievement targets inch up every year, until 2014, when 100 percent of children are expected to pass the exams. [....]

By law, schools that fail to meet state goals two years in a row are tagged as "needs improvement" and must allow students to transfer to better campuses and pay for their transportation. The federal sanctions apply only to schools that accept federal poverty money.

In Illinois, a school lands on the "needs improvement" list if the school or a subgroup fails to meet state standards two years in a row in reading, or two years in a row in math. If, for example, a school's white students fail to measure up in reading one year and the Asian-American students fail reading the next year, the school goes on the list.

This is as well written an explanation of the core problems with NCLB as I have read. To clarify, in the United States of America, by 2014 if one of your sub groups, or 40 students, do not "meet or exceed" expectations on the reading or math test the entire school will be shut down. Right now a school with, say, 40 special ed. (LD, BD, etc.) students who fail to adequately read at their grade level must pay the transportation costs for other students to go to an alternative school.

One might be tempted to believe that this is designed to help schools "leave no child behind," but these ridiculous expectations just serve as a way to funnel monies out of the public schools and into the private schools.

Meanwhile we wait for the conservatives to build a movement to overturn this legislation. We liberals can't do it - we are elitists who are fighting for our union, apparently. It's up to the conservatives.

Anyone out there? 1 comments

Much has been written and said recently about the woe that is public education in this country. If one listens to the complaints of folks on both sides of the political spectrum one might become convinced that our schools are evil, godless, torture chambers where children are taught to be gay . Unless you are a black student, of course, then you are taught to be white. It is a pretty depressing story. Luckily, it's pretty much fiction.

I work at a public school. I walk through the halls every day, talk to the people, try to teach my kids the best I can. I'm a born-again Christian and most of my kids know it. I teach American History, but I throw in some evolution here and there, and some creationism on occasion. I persuade my kids that Columbus was a brave guy who believed he was following God's will, but that he was also personally responsible for the enslavement and murder of thousands of Native Americans. It's a fun job.

The best part of my job is seeing children from a wide variety of backgrounds work and play together. We get them all in Urbana, and it is quite the educational experience. One day you look up and see that white girl from Yankee Ridge laughing and working with the black girls from the north end. The next day it might be the Asian boy who was living in South Korea a month ago practicing his English with the jock from the state streets area. It's good stuff.

Public school might not be the best place to get a textbook education. I have no doubt that the students at Uni, for example, pop out at graduation with better math and science skills than most of the kids at Urbana High. Heck, I'll gladly concede that a student who gets two years of Bill Sutton and a year of Chris Butler at Uni is going to get a better history education than the groups that go through Urbana. (note: I'll concede nothing to Judah.)

But there is always something missing from these private school kids who, for the most part, are sheltered from the reality of the world around them. Taught to hate Muslims at Christian schools, taught to consider science more important than social skills at Uni, students who seek their education out of the public school setting are missing a major part of their education: the ability to relate to others. If public schools are worth anything, they are worth the education that is given to students who must work together.

Years ago it would have been taboo for a black boy and a white girl to date in this country. These days my kids date whomever they choose and are befuddled when I tell them the racist stories of our past. Years ago a white kid in Urbana would have rolled up their windows and locked their door if they took a wrong turn into "the hood" with their parents. These days white girls and black girls are best friends and have sleep overs in "the hood."

Times have changed. Public education has helped to make this society more tolerant, less racist, and a better place for all of us. Before you judge the schools in this country I invite you to come by my classroom and see what we are doing to your kids. You might just leave me an apple! 2 comments

Last night's School Board meeting in Champaign found veteran teacher Kathleen Smith submitting her resignation in protest of the district's handling of the NCLB requirements. Mrs. Smith made it clear why she resigned:

"Each year students come to me with different skills, different strengths and different weaknesses," Smith said. "It's always a learning process. They learn about me and I learn about them. Now I find myself constrained by a mentality that says all students will learn the same material at the same pace and prove it by taking the same multiple-choice test within a given time frame.

"I do not believe a student's understanding of mathematical concepts can be assessed by a multiple-choice test, nor do I believe that such a test is fair for all learners," she said. "I'm resigning because I'm caught in a moral dilemma."

Illini Pundit asked in a recent comment how I would hold school districts accountable for the Federal money they receive. This is a legitimate question, though it is rooted in what I would consider a naive notion of federal financing of education. The US Department of Education will probably receive $56 billion for education in 2006. This will be distributed amongst the 50 states. This is obviously far less than the $80 billion emergency spending for the "War of Terror" and is less than 20% of the military budget for 2006. This amount is so far removed from the billions in tax cuts pushed through by the Republicans that comparison is mute. Yet no one seems to be as concerned about "accountability" in the military, much less for our economic steward. Strange logic we have here. But I digress.

Assuming that school districts need to be held accountable for the money they receive from the US government, the question becomes "is this money being well spent?” And, more importantly, how do we know?

The current answer is the multiple choice test, which is notoriously unreliable. I won’t go into specifics here, but it has become clear through research over the last 30 years that students who perform well on standardized tests are usually good test takers, not necessarily good students. Any prof at the U of I could tell you that much. So why rely on the standardized test?

Well, it’s easy, and cheap. Plus the testing companies make craploads of money off standardized tests. But there is a better way.

Since each student learns differently, why couldn’t we create assessments for each student that are not based on the test model? For example, students could be asked to prepare portfolios of their work and demonstrate to assessors their knowledge of the material they have been taught. These portfolios could travel with the students from grade to grade. This idea would eliminate one of the major problems with standardized tests: the test date. Many are the stories told of students with the flu on the test date, or students who did not get enough sleep the night before. These variables can greatly effect the student’s performance. A portfolio would be a way to show true progress through the course of the year, not just what the student managed to pull out of his or her ass on the test date.

Portfolio assessment will only work if the government creates adequate standards for learning. Currently, in Illinois, we are required to teach around 200 "benchmarks" in the course of one year of 8th grade American History (my subject). Here is a typical benchmark we are instructed to teach:

Place events from a chronology on multiple tier timelines that are organized according to political, economic, environmental, and social history.

Ok - you have 199 of these waiting to be taught and you have no other information than the sentence above. You have less than one class period to teach this benchmark. How do you do it? What part of this deep, deep question will be on the test? (you might wonder) Don't bother asking, they won't tell you.

With clearer objectives, input into questioning and a copy of the test in my hand I might be able to get most of my kids to pass a standardized test. With hundreds of muddy objectives, not input into questioning, and no idea what the test will look like the job becomes next to impossible. This is the problem.

There are other ideas out there, but I think the portfolio idea is helpful in showing the hypocrisy of NCLB. While the administration claims it wants to raise student achievement, it is not willing to really address the needs of individual students, as portfolio assessment would. To truly refuse to leave children “behind” requires energy, money, and dedication. It does not require more bureaucracy and homogenous performance standards. 8 comments