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AASA to After-School Teachers: "You're Fired"
03/09/09
07:41:42 am, Categories: Announcements [A] "In five of the seven applicable districts, students scored better in both reading and math in the first year of participating in the services and even better in the second and subsequent years. Students participating for multiple years enjoyed gains twice as large as those of students participating for just one year. African-Americans, Latinos, and students with disabilities all recorded positive achievement results. All these gains were statistically significant."
Rand even went further to make a policy recommendation.
“Congress should make the option of tutoring and other supplemental educational services available to eligible parents in the first year of school improvement rather than waiting for the second year, because this option has shown positive effects on student achievement.”
I happen to think that raising tests scores is a pretty high bar for success for a tutoring program. Would the same usual suspects who say schools can’t be expected to raise achievement for poor and minority students have the chutzpah to turn around and say SES is a failure because not all programs are showing the success of those studied by Rand? Yep. They’ve already been doing it.
SES has a 90% satisfaction rating by those parents whose children have participated. But don’t expect opponents of SES to acknowledge that either, even though they themselves would like similar indicators to be used in rating schools.
More Funding Needed Now More Than Ever. One of the things that’s really astounding is that the Thompson/AASA assault comes at a time when demand seems to be exceeding capacity in some urban areas. On February 27th, the Hartford Courant reported that tutoring for 1,400 students in that city was in jeopardy because demand was exceeding capacity.
It’s not just students on whose backs AASA has painted a target. Everyone talks about how the stimulus money should, first and foremost, create jobs or forestall layoffs. School budget pressures threaten after school programs the same as every thing else. But when it comes to after-school tutors - many of which are certified teachers and union members - AASA and others are pushing policies that would create net job losses in the education sector.
Illusory Encroachment. School Administrators would have you believe that SES disproportionately "encroaches" on the "regular" Title I program. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the implementation of the Title I set-aside in 2002 helped to equalize the share of funding between Title I schools and after school programs, a distribution which up until then worked to the disadvantage of poor and minority students in Title I.
Below is a chart for appropriations for Title I and the separately authorized federal after-school program, created in the 1990s. Keep in mind that the after school program was a competitive grant program - not all Title I kids had access to it (not even close) - and that it was not focused on the highest poverty schools.
Year | Title I | After School |
1998 | $7,375 million | $40 million |
1999 | $7,767 | $200 |
2000 | $7,941 | $453 |
2001 | $8,763 | $846 |
2002 | $10,350 | $1,000 |
While after-school grew by leaps and bounds in the 1990’s - 500% in 1999, more than 100% in 2000, and almost 100% again in 2001, Title I increases barely kept pace with inflation. In 2000, the increase for after school actually exceeded the increase for Title I, even though the after-school program serves far fewer students.
Now, AASA is crying wolf by asserting that it is unfair that after-school programs get the same share of a record Title I increase. It’s not only intellectually dishonest; it actually borders on greedy.
Last week, Secretary Duncan said regarding school reform:
"The challenge isn’t an intellectual one, it’s one of political courage."
All the intelligence - the data presented at AERA, the Rand study, data collected by the Department of Education, parent satisfaction surveys, and budget history - all argue against the AASA (and to be fair, much of the rest of the Beltway insiders’) position. One key test of Secretary Duncan’s political courage is whether he will cave, or stand up to them.
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7 comments
Here's how I'd approach the problem. recognize that tutoring can be effective if a managable percent of the students require it. I've seen schools do great work with a few dozen kids every day after class. And the younger the students, the easier it is to remediate. But in a school where the overwhelming percentage require remediation, tutoring is impractical. My school, for instance, simply "can't get there from here" by remediation for 700 of our 750 secondary students.
Our poor kids need much more effective and engaging classroom instruction. Without bashing KIPP or charters, the more sustainable approach would be two effective teachers (or other effective adults) each putting in eight hour days. It would be difficult to administrator and staff a system where a second shift of educators takes over after 3:30, but that would be a challenge worth tackling and financing.
I look forward to your refutation of the Rand study's conclusions.
--- Charlie
"has increased substantially since NCLB began in 2002. However, only a small proportion of eligible students actually participated in the NCLB educational options, and a number of problems remain, including inadequate communication with parents about NCLB options and the lack of robust data systems that would enable rigorous evaluations of the effectiveness of the NCLB educational options."
Supplement their own words with Chicago evalution of their programs - and the reasons for the uneven reslts - and you get "studies of tutoring's effectiveness (that) are more ambiguous that you suggest."
1. The outcome data is good - 5 of 7 districts show gap closing. Perhaps the other two have something to learn. I would call that imperfect rather than ambiguous (the folks at Rand are no slouches).
2. Districts have made access difficult; and,
3. (previous posts) We need better data systems to evaluate educational policies (which most of us call accountability).
Get back to me when you have something specific to cite from the Chicago studies (your comments are awfully ambiguous), because when I read them I find they are similar to Rand.
My comments echo RAND because I lifted them from its report by cut and paste.
I mention Chicago because it discussed cost effectiveness, asking what does $1,800 per student produce. Although a $40 million investment produced “small significant” increases in reading, no increases were found in math. Chicago found tutoring to be more cost effective for the younger elementary students.
Another commentator emphasized that when RAND studied nine big-city districts, only one-half of 1% of eligible students made use of the choice option. RAND suggested that one reason for this is that many choice options, especially charter schools, predated NCLB, with the implication that “choosers had already chosen.”
The most relevant point is that SES did show greater impact for students had two or more years of tutoring. So, tutoring worked for those students where tutoring worked. It seems that we always get back to this, you citing successes for a very small group and I question whether those outliers are representative.
But, I’m really not trying to argue. Tutoring can be valuable. But for a far greater number of our poorest students, they need longer days of engaging classroom instruction. CAP has shown that we could increase the school day by 30% for as little as $750 per student. But, the extended day can’t just be more of the same instruction-driven work within the four walls of the classroom.
Think of the cognitive dynamic. Tutoring must be coordinated with classroom instruction. In schools where 90, 95%+ of students need remediation, it would be humanly impossible to coordinate the after-school remediation with the school’s instruction. The absolute minimum amount of tutoring to show any effectiveness is 30 hours, according to those studies, and the results of students below that number were dropped. But once you have enough tutoring to make a difference, why not invest a little more and offer the full classroom experience.
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