Education is Your Business

Preparing for the working world

Steve's been sharing his thoughts on the National Journal education blog. Here's his suggestion for how colleges can better prepare kids for life after graduation: http://bit.ly/TzIlN.

Also, Pres. Obama's script for today's school address: http://bit.ly/z2Bo6. How is this a bad thing?

Who's in charge here?

Steve's article from this week's Carrboro Citizen:

Who's minding the school?

By Steve Peha

Do you ever wonder who really runs a given school or district? I do. And I’m in them all the time. For all the sound and fury of testing and standards, what we have achieved is an ineffective accountability system that is at best a pale form of collective wrist slapping, where entire schools must fail for many years before any action is taken — and even then, this action rarely addresses the root causes of failure.

When most people think of accountability in the workplace, I believe they think of personal accountability: How well do I do my job? What does my boss think? What are my responsibilities and how effectively do I deal with them?

But this is not the way it is in the culture of most public school systems.

At the top of the food chain, we often find a superintendent who makes few public statements, rarely takes specific positions on important issues, sets few if any goals and generally leaves the administrative workings of the district to others in the district office.

For their part, assistant superintendents, some of whom have direct management responsibility for principals, also engage in a fair amount of reverse buck passing. Other than “get those test scores up,” meaningful oversight of principals is often minimal.

In many schools where I have worked, principals are typically on their own to do more or less what they want. As long as suspensions are low and teacher grievances even lower, principals often are given wide latitude as to how they run their buildings. Sadly, most fail to take advantage of that to their students’ advantage.

With direct oversight of teachers, principals are the critical fulcrum point in the system. Principals with the skill and the will to make substantive changes can quickly turn around failing schools. But without meaningful personal accountability to their superiors, few principals feel it is worth the risk of upsetting a teacher (or a powerful parent) to do what needs to be done.

Making a difference at school

It's nice to go read to kids or participate in career day, but you've got to do more if you want to actually have an impact.

Making more of a difference in schools, today on The Word Factory blog: http://bit.ly/qyPJY

Investing in teacher training

There's a lot of talk about improving student achievement by improving teachers' effectiveness. And you'll get no argument from me on that. But as someone who's been working in schools for five years now, I can tell you that most teachers tell me they're woefully unprepared to meet the needs of their students. Yes, the ones that are furthest behind are the hardest to help, but it's just as challenging for some teachers to keep their high-performing kids engaged. We simply don't do enough to help teachers be successful in terms of effective and efficient practice or basic classroom management.

Heck, in our state, most of the funds for professional development have been slashed to help make up for a huge budget shortfall. This not only hurts teachers, but it punishes their students for the mistakes of free-spending legislators.

Steve Peha makes the case for more investment in better teacher training in this comment on the Eduwonk blog today: http://bit.ly/xR7PP.

ACTION ITEMS:

1. Read the piece.
2. Write your district and school board and ask them to look at how teachers in your area are trained.
3. Lobby for more effective teacher training.

A gathering storm

Interesting article in the Raleigh N&O yesterday morning about the state’s changing demographics. A new Census report estimates that minorities -- mostly blacks, Hispanics and Asians – comprise about one-third of the Tar Heel populace. And the non-white population is steadily growing -- almost half (45 percent) of North Carolina's children below age 5 are minorities.

North Carolina's 2008 population
Black: 21 percent
Hispanic: 7 percent

Orange County’s 2008 population
Black: 13.32 percent
Hispanic: 6.29 percent

This shift has all kinds of implications for business. I’m going to focus on just one: workforce preparedness. The state’s challenges with low-income and minority achievement are well-documented. And recently attention has been given to the problems we’re facing here in the cradle of public higher education, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools. We’re not doing a good job educating most of our minority kids. So how can we expect to have an educated candidate pool in the job market? We can’t.

Personally, I think education for kids – all kids – is a civil right, but that belief only gets me so far with business folks. So I’ll put that argument aside in favor of the more compelling back-pocket issues of competitiveness and bottom-line concerns.

The business community cannot continue to allow the schools it funds to pay lip-service to the growing problem of under-educating the fastest-growing segment of the population. The minority kids in school today will be the minority employees of tomorrow. And we need a workforce skilled in critical thinking and problem-solving (not to mention basic math, reading and writing) to remain competitive in the tight global economy. And putting the burden for remedial training on employers holds will have a huge bottom line impact. (The National Association of Manufacturers estimates it costs $1.4 billion annually to provide remedial courses to recent high school graduates in the workforce). From another angle, poorly educated people typically earn less, meaning they have less money to spend on consumer goods and services. Examined from a purely business perspective, then, it’s clear that businesses need to be more involved in ensuring that schools education ALL children.

ACTION ITEMS: 1. Contact your local schools’ superintendent and find out what the achievement gap is in your community. 2. Pressure your school board to investigate effective methods for differentiated instruction so that all children are pushed to their highest potential. 3. Encourage your district to explore programs and approaches that can accelerate learning for low-performing kids. 4. Contact us (Teaching That Makes Sense, Inc.) to find out how we’ve worked with schools and teachers to improve achievement of all children. margotlester@ttms.org

The price of the achievement gap

Last month, ginormous consulting firm McKinsey & Co. released The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America's Schools, a report that estimates the achievement gap's impact. The report found that the difference in academic achievement of high-and low-income students equals a $700-billion "cost" that is the equivalent to a “permanent national recession” in terms of its impact on GDP.

Here's a good take on disconnect between schools and the business world from Stanford (Former Foes Unite in Battle to Bridge K-12 Achievement Gap). Ouch.

Here in Chapel Hill-Carrboro, we're content to point to high graduation rates and rest on our laurels and the most successful public school district in the state. But buried in the data, and belying the reputation, is a widening gap between our low-income students and their more affluent counterparts.

The Daily Tar Heel reported the gap last month (Test Score Gap Keeps Growing). And Steve Peha wrote a scathing op-ed in the Carrbor Citizen last week (From Gap to Chasm).

All are worth reading -- and worth acting on.