Standards Based Grading Comes to St. Cloud

Our school district is introducing standards based grading in grades K-8.     We've been using a form of standards based grading in elementary schools in the past several  years, and this year, we begin the experiment in grades 7-8.   Let me begin by stating that I tend to approach sweeping innovations in education with a healthy dose of skepticism.   Not because I'm against change, per se.   No, its because we are dealing with so many changes in education these days, and because implementing reforms requires so much extra work, that I feel that new innovations must be justified by proof that they will lead to significant concrete improvements.   At times, public education is prone to adopting the latest fad proposed by one or more education gurus who travel the country claiming to have discovered a philosopher's stone which will revolutionize education.    So, when our leadership announces breathlessly that "the research says" that we simply must adopt an innovation, I feel its generally time to take a few steps back and ask searching questions.  

Standards-based grading involves measuring students' proficiency on well-defined course objectives.   Many districts adopt standards-based grading in addition to traditional grades, but manhy proponents insist that standards-based grading can and should replace traditional point-based grades.

Introducing standards based grading is easier said than done.  Guskey and Young explain:

With their curriculum standards articulated and assessment procedures to measure those standards in place, many elementary educators today are developing standards-based report cards. However, shortly after beginning the process most find themselves embroiled in controversy, particularly when parents see a standards-based report card for the first time. Discussions about the report card turn into heated debates and unexpected problems thwart their progress. Developing a report card that satisfies the diverse needs of parents and the school often seems impossible.

The idea of standards based grading seems sensible enough.   Instead of  summarizing a student's performance with letter-grades A-F, why not provide the student and parents a disaggregated list of the student's mastery of the particularized course objectives?   One is left, in theory, with a permanent record of whether the student mastered fractions, or decimals, or percentages, and so on.  Consequently, proponents argue, grading becomes more intentional, more objective, and much more complex. This accounts for resistance from many parents, who feel that they inherently understand what an A is, but really would prefer not to try to figure out what it means that their student got 4's in three objectives, and 3's in two others.  

Some arguments for standards based grading include the following:

• That they provide more coherent and precise information as to what the student has learned.
• That they force the teaching staff to focus evaluation on the key objectives of state adopted learning standards
• That they convert grades into formative assessments that focus the learner on what they still need to learn in order to be successful
• That it is possible to report more complex learning objectives 

Some arguments against standards based grading include the following:

• That it requires a tremendous amount of effort by teachers and curriculum staff  without a proven payoff..   
• That students who are far behind (or who have disabilities that prevent achieving standards) can work very very hard to achieve, yet receive grades that may suggest failure, no matter how hard they work. 
• That some parents simply don't like them and that they engender significant controversy
• That some implementations of standards based grading do not appropriately reward attendance, effort, and completion of homework
• That  not all students in any class are at the same level, and so evaluating students at grade level tends to focus assessment on what the kids in the middle are ready to learn

As a Board member, I approach implementation of standards based grading with significant trepidation.  One of my concerns is that reforms like this seem to gather momentum in a way that makes it difficult for the proponents to hear warning signs from dissenting teachers and parents.  As more and more effort is expended on these reforms, the proponents increasingly develop emotional attachment to successful completion of the innovation.    People who raise concerns may be perceived as obstructionists, instead of supplying warning signals of defects in the implementation strategy.   Proponents of reform are typically armed with "the research", often a monograph written by the reform's resident guru.  There is a tendancy when these reforms are brought to the board for discussion to present to us three or four of the most dedicated proponents of the reform, instead of providing us with a coherent summary of the arguments both for and against the reform.   Seldom are we presented with a clear understanding of the issues that are being raised by opponents.  

Most board members want to support reforms when the administration recommends them, because we feel that education needs to be run by educators.  In this case, it is my view that the change is big enough and difficult enough, that we would be well to keep the existing letter grade system along with the new standards based grading, until teachers and parents have enough experience with the new system to accept elimination of the old. 

Why is Minnesota's School Finance Dysfunctional

Why is Minnesota Public School Dysfunctional

A few days ago, I was privileged to meet with a group of school finance experts to discuss why Minnesota's school finance system is broken.    Everybody knows that school leaders complain that school funding is not adequate, and that is certainly true.  But the problem is much more complicated than that.   Here is my own list of school finance dysfunctionalities:

• School Districts are increasingly relying on voter property tax referendums to balance their budgets.   Over 130 school districts have referendums up this year, and many of them are seeking to renew their referendums.  Since 1986, the percentage of school districts with referenda has risen from 47% to over 90 percent.  The average referendum dollars collected per student has risen significantly as well, with more and more districts collecting in the $700 to $1000 per student range.   Because referendum revenue has become so important to school districts, the failure of a referendum can have catastrophic impact on a particular district.  
• State funding formulas are not evidence based.    The legislature does not utilize evidence to determine how much money should be provided to accomplish a designated mission.   Formulas are based on politics and necessity.   We lawyers would describe this state of affairs by stating that the funding formulas lack a rational basis.    Nobody makes even a half-hearted attempt to connect the formula to data.    Funding for schools serving large numbers of students in poverty is not based on research or data showing the amount of money that can provide adquate resources to make up for the additional actual cost of educating those students.  Funding for students who don't speak English is not based on research or data showing the additional cost of educating those students.   Funding for students with disabilities is intentionally and knowingly set at rates substantially less than required to accomplish state mandated objectives.  
• The special education funding shortfall -- the difference between state-mandated spending and total revenues provided has grown to a projected $700 million per year.    
• The state's labor laws and bargaining system inherently produce labor cost increases at a rate faster than funding increases.    As a result, school districts are driven systemically to fund labor cost increases by making crippling cuts in programs, unless they can make up the difference in increased referendum levies.  The cost of these settlements is inadequately monitored and often reported in misleading ways so that policy makers don't focus on their true costs. 
• Many school districts have continuing contract obligations that force up labor costs beyond the revenues provided by the State even without bargaining  Steps, lanes, longevity pay, insurance costs have been driving labor costs up faster than state funding increases.  
• Fundamental changes in state mandates have drastically increased the cost of what school districts are required to do, without proportionate increases in revenue.  Since 1990, Minnesota has transformed its education system so that all school districts must educate all students to high levels of proficiency.   This has dramatically increased the cost of educating disadvantaged students, but funding for education has not recognized this fundamental change in mission.   
• Open Enrollment Has Destabilized School Finance in Challenged Systems.   Different students cost fundamentally different amounts to educate.  At the top of the cost scale are students with disabilities.   At the bottom of the cost scale are advantaged students who receive strong educational support at home.  The cost structure allows school districts to make a profit on the cheaper students and requires them to cross subsidize the more expensive students.    Open enrollment allows and encourages the cheaper students to migrate into the school districts where low cost students predominant, causing an ever worsening financial situation in the districts where high cost students are concentrated.    
• The special education funding formula also destablizes school finance in challenged Systems.   Migration of non-disabled students to charter schools and open enrollment into traditional publics create a situation where urban core districts have high proportions of high cost students. 
• Different school districts have significantly different tax bases.  As a result some districts can raise significantly more revenue with a low mil rate than others which require a much higher mil rate.   Different school districts have very different population demographics and consequently in some districts it is very easy to pass a referendum while in others it is virtually impossible.  
• Funding Pressures are bleeding down critical capital and capital-like assets.  School districts are increasingly cannibalizing their textbook resources, school libraries, staff development in order to make ends meet.   The State's system of assuring that these necessary components of education are provided is abysmal.   
• The State has mismanaged the funding of pension systems and forced school districts to increase contributions without compensating revenue increases

District Settles Charges with Office of Civil Rights

On Thursday, our Board of Education will be reviewing a proposed settlement agreement with the Department of Office of Civil Rights to resolve complaints filed by CAIR - Minneapolis about 18 months ago.    

At the time that the complaints were initially filed, the District carefully reviewed each of the complaints and it was quite clear that the District had not violated federal civil rights laws.  When we examined the facts, we found examples of  Somali students with legitimate grievances against fellow students.  We also found examples of non-Somali students with legitimate grievances against fellow students.  And,  we found many of the complaints were completely untrue.   But the overwhelming sweep of the evidence was that teachers and administrators had promptly and properly addressed issues that came to them.  

Representatives of the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) visited our district.  If they had found examples of civil rights violations, we would have taken prompt remedial action, but they did not identify any.  We instructed our attorney to bring us any evidence, any at all, identified by the Office of Civil Rights that suggested that the District violated civil rights laws.  To be blunt, we feel very strongly that if we demanded that the Office of Civil Rights go ahead with its charging process, we are very confident that we would prevail.   At the Board meeting on Thursday, members will most likely discuss why would then enter into an agreement, since the OCR has not provided us with any evidence that we have violated the law.  

Part of the reason for entering into an agreement is that the agreement doesn't require us to do anything that is bad for students or bad for our school district.   The concept of the agreement is this.  Why would we spend more taxpayer money examining something that happened 18 months ago (or should I say, something that didn't happen) when we can resolve the matter by doing things that we want to do anyway.  

• The agreement doesn't give any special class of students special rights.  The policies we have adopted will protect all students equally.  
• The agreement doesn't make us implement policies that we disagree with.  
• The agreement requires us to have policies in place that provide a remedy to any students (not just Somali students) who have harassment concerns.   We have adopted theses policies already, and we firmly believe that the policies we have adopted are good for all students.   
• The agreement does not require us to treat any students better than any other students.   If it did, we would not be signing it.   (this is worth saying twice)
• To implement the agreement, we have "agreed" to adopt a Code of Conduct.   We were happy to offer to make that proposal, because we had already developed a Code of Conduct and had decided to adopt it anyway.  After signing this agreement, we will have the same code of conduct in place that we adopted several months ago.  
• The agreement does not suggest that we have violated the law, does not require us to pay any money to anyone, nor does it require that we hire consultants to "fix" our school district.

The procedures we have adopted, and the few that we are about to adopt, create more consistent transparent procedures that give all students a venue to seek protection when they are being harassed by other students.   That means that if a student of any background, White, Somali, African American, or whatever, or their parents, have concerns about student safety, they will know where those concerns can be addressed.   By better documenting the resolution of concerns, we provide more protection for all our students.  Moreover, by establishing a more consistent documentation of internal resolution of future incidents,  we protect our staff against future bogus charges.

I want to emphasize that nobody in our school district is minimizing the issue of harassment in public schools.   When I say that there was clearly no civil rights violation, I am not suggesting that students are never harassed in our school district.   Of course that happens.  Nor am I suggesting that we should tolerate harassment, ever. Our community has some work to do to assure that we provide a welcoming environment for immigrants.  Some of our Somali students have some work to do, especially when they first come to our community, to understand what is expected of them in school.   What we must do--what all schools must do-- is to constantly work to create a welcoming atmosphere, protective of the rights of all students while maintaining high standards of student conduct.    The agreement we proposed to the OCR supports those things because doing that is good for students and teachers, and because it puts this episode behind us.

How is Integration Revenue Used in Minnesota?

A while back, the St. Cloud School District announced the replacement of its Director of Equity Services.   Since that announcement, I've noticed a bunch of online comments attacking the integration revenue program that are pretty far off the mark.  I think that the misunderstanding derives partly from the lack of clarity in the state law itself.   The legislative auditor issued a report on integration revenue and urged the legislature and Department of Education to clarify the intended uses of integration revenue, because different school districts are using the money in very different ways. So, I'm not blaming the folks who can't exactly figure out where the money is going.

In fact, some school districts are using integration revenue primarily to create opportunities for students from different racial and ethnic backgrounds to understand each other better.  In St. Cloud, we actually use a very small amount of integration revenue for this purpose -- the annual "respect retreat" being a specific example.    Other school districts are using integration revenue to strengthen educational results for disadvantaged students.   For example, some of the districts in the west metro area are funding the AVID (advancement through individual determination) program, which is a highly rigorous program that promotes better study habits and encourages participation in more demanding coursework.    Our district generally emphasizes use of integration revenue to fund improved educational programs and promote student achievement.   

The integration program is not a public relations program as one recent commenter contended.  Nor, in St. Cloud, is it primarily designed to promote inter-racial understanding, as the Times recently reported.  But before you get the idea that my purpose is to defend the state integration revenue program, let me begin, by saying that I think that the current integration revenue law has some major flaws. This year's legislature is requiring that the uses of integration revenue receive a comprehensive searching review.   And I support that review.   During the last legislative session  I wrote a letter to all of the leading legislators involved in education finance urging them to modify the integration revenue program to allow school districts to use that revenue more directly to impact learning.  I believe that by far the most effective way of "integrating" minority and disadvantaged students into the mainstream is to assure that they succeed academically.    If they succeed, then integration will follow almost automatically.  If they do not succeed, integration is a hollow objective leading to disappointment and failure. 

You can find out more about the current integration revenue program by jumping to the Minnesota Department of Education's Questions and Answer  sheet on that topic.   School districts receive integration revenue one of two ways:

 Some Districts, like Minneapolis and St. Paul get integration revenue because those districts were defendants in a lawsuit which alleged that the district had become racially segregated and that racial segregation was leading to unequal educational educational results.   Ultimately, that lawsuit led to a legislative appropriation for those districts which supported some school bussing and racial transferring, designed to promote more racially balanced schools.  Minneapolis and St. Paul receive significantly greater integration revenue appropriations, per student, than any other school district in Minnesota.  

 Other Districts, like St. Cloud, receive integration revenue because they have a significantly higher percentage of minority students that adjoining districts.   When that happens, integration revenue is provided to the district with a higher percentage of minority students at an elevated rate (but lower than Minneapolis and St. Paul), and integration revenue is provided to the adjoining districts (like Sauk Rapids, for example) at a lower rate.   But none of these districts are required to conduct an integration program in the sense that most people understand it.  Students are not bussed or transferred from one district to another.   (I believe that these bussing programs are ineffective, divisive, and counterproductive).   Each District submits a plan to the State of Minnesota explaining how it intends to use its money during a four year grant period.  In St. Cloud, the school board has sought to use integration revenue, to the maximum extent possible, to improve educational achievement.  At times, we have had to wrestle with the bureacracy at the State Department of Education to get them to approve those objectives, giving rise to my argument that the law needs to be clarified and improved.

The Department of Education's position on using integration revenue for improving student achievement is as follows:

Can integration revenue be used to fund programs focused on improving academic achievement for students or closing “achievement gaps” among groups of students?

The Desegregation Rule states that both intra-district and inter-district integration plans “must be educationally justifiable.” (Please see Minn. R. 3535.0160, Subp. 3 and Minn. R. 3535.0170, Subp. 6.) In addition, one of the stated purposes of the rule is to “recognize that the primary goal of public education is to enable all students to have opportunities to achieve academic success.” (Minn. R. 3535.0100) MDE strongly encourages districts to develop programs and activities under their plans that simultaneously advance both the goal of improving student academic achievement and the goal of increasing opportunities for integration as stated in Minnesota Statutes, section 124D.86.

Integration revenue can also be used to accelerate the pace at which non-English speaking students become fluent in English, and in St. Cloud, that is one of the ways that we are using integration revenue.   I believe that the sooner that immigrant children become fluent in English, the sooner they will become integrated into school and society, and the sooner they will grow educationally.

Often I read postings by commenters who believe that integration revenue is for minority students only, and that too is not true.  The Minnesota Department of Education explains:

The Desegregation Rule does not require the use of race or ethnicity as a test for anyone’s participation in an activity funded with integration revenue. This includes school choice programs, magnet schools, teacher scholarship programs, or any other initiative or planning process. Districts may choose to use race-neutral guidelines for students, families, or staff to participate in programming, such as eligibility for the Free and Reduced Priced Lunch program or residency within a defined geographical area.

Public schools are in the education business.    For this reason, we must use our precious education dollars whenever possible to promote the educational success of all of our students.  Next year, we will be preparing our new four year plan for the use of integration revenue.  At the same time, the integration revenue program will be the subject of careful scrutiny at the State level.   I believe that we would do well to change the name of the program and reconfigure its purpose to target the revenue towards providing stronger more effective programs to promote educational success for students who come to school with educational disadvantages.  As I've said in my last post, I'm convinced that the key to improving student success is more hard work, more reading, better study habits, and more time learning.

Overwhelming Achievement Gap Before School Begins

In my last post I wrote about the gap in vocabulary among  incoming students at the Kindergarten level.   I argued that it is a mistake to believe that any teacher can wave a magic wand and make up this difference with good teaching alone.   Learning takes time, I argued.  Learning is hard work.  Students who are educationally disadvantaged aren't going to make up the gap, unless they compensate for their disadvantage with extra time learning, and lots of it.  A ton of research has been accumulating on the cumulative learning disadvantage arising from shortfalls in vocabulary among disadvantaged students.

How big is this gap and what are the significance for public schools.  Many studies of incoming kindergartners seem to show that gap between advantaged and disadvantaged populations is approximately one standard deviation.  Some of you remember the standard deviation from college statistics.   Here's a picture of the familiar bell-shaped curve

The idea is that in a so-called "normal distribution," just about one third of the population is within one standard deviation above the median and another third, within one standard deviation below. Put differently, more than two thirds of the normally distributed population is less than one standard deviation of the median.  So, what does it mean if we say that the mean score of disadvantaged students is a full standard deviation below the median of advantaged?   Consider two populations, advantaged and disadvantaged.  The advantage might be economic, linguistic, racial or some other factor that results in a standard deviation difference between the advantaged group and the disadvantaged group.

First, randomly selecting one disadvantaged child and one advantaged child and comparing their scores will show the advantaged child exceeding the disadvantaged child 76 percent of the time and the disadvantaged child exceeding the advantaged  child only 24 percent of the time. Second, 84 percent of advantaged children will perform better than the average disadvantaged child, while 16 percent of disadvantaged children will perform better than the average advantaged child. Third, if a class that is evenly divided among advantaged and disadvantaged is divided into two equal-sized groups based on ability, then disadvantaged students will compose roughly 70 percent, and advantaged 30 percent, of the students in the lower performing group. Fourth, if a school district chooses only the top-scoring 5 percent of students for “gifted” courses, such classes will have thirteen times more from the advantaged group than the disadvantaged group.  Finally,  assume that a reading textbook is written so that the average advantaged student will read it at a 75 percent comprehension rate. The implied comprehension rate for the average disadvantaged student will be 53 percent, virtually guaranteeing that such a reader will not engage with the text. Rock and  Stenner, Assessment Issues in the Testing, of Children at School Entry (2005).

A full standard deviation between advantaged and disadvantaged groups is a huge gap with grave consequences for the disadvantaged group.  It doesn't mean that members of the disadvantaged group can't succeed, because some will.    But it means that the disadvantaged group faces overwhelming disadvantages right from the start of school, and that these disadvantages compound themselves, year after year, unless the disadvantages are attacked at the very beginning.  And, I am arguing that the attack on the disadvantage requires compensatory time -- more time learning during school and after school.  

The achievement gap is not a product of public schools, it is a product of the disadvantages that arise in families where the parents are themselves educationally disadvantaged.   Mastering the achievement gap requires improving public schools so that they can overcome overwhelming disadvantages.  They need to be massively better, not because they are terrible schools, but because we have set them a mission that is overwhelmingly difficult and challenging.   They need to move a group of children who come to school, on the average, a standard deviation behind, and whose disadvantages continue throughout their schooling.   

Suppose for example, half of the students who came to school practiced dribbling and shooting a basketball one hour a night throughout elementary school, while another group never touched a basketball at home.   How would those two groups perform on tests of dribbling and shooting?   I'll have more to say about this in the next post.....

Attacking the Achievement Gap with More Learning Time

For the last several decades, education elites in Washington DC and state capitols have propagated the idea that the the achievement gap can be closed simply through better leadership, better curriculum and better teachers.   But more and more, overwhelming evidence argues that closing the achievement gap requires us to provide disadvantaged students with significantly more learning time.

Children who do well in school come to us, generally, with some special advantages.   Most of them accumulate thousands of hours of informal learning at home before they come to school.   They have larger vocabularies, better understanding of phonics, superior preparation for the classroom experience.

This discrepancy between home learning experiences continues unabated throughout school.     It is a mistake to believe that any teacher can wave a magic wand and make up this difference with good teaching alone.   Learning takes time.  Learning is hard work.  Students who are educationally disadvantaged aren't going to make up the gap, unless they compensate for their disadvantage with extra time learning, and lots of it.  A ton of research has been accumulating on the cumulative learning disadvantage arising from shortfalls in vocabulary among disadvantaged students.  

"One of the most persistent findings in reading research is that the extent of students’ vocabulary knowledge relates strongly to their reading comprehension and overall academic success (see Baumann, Kame‘enui, & Ash, 2003; Becker, 1977; Davis, 1942; Whipple, 1925). This relationship seems logical; to get meaning from what they read, students need both a great many words in their vocabularies and the ability to use various strategies to establish the meanings of new words when they encounter them. Young students who don’t have large vocabularies or effective word-learning strategies often struggle to achieve comprehension. Their bad experiences with reading set in motion a cycle of frustration and failure that continues throughout their schooling (Hart & Risley, 2003; Snow, Barnes, Chandler, Goodman, & Hemphill, 2000; White, Graves, & Slater, 1990). Because these students don’t have sufficient word knowledge to understand what they read, they typically avoid reading. Because they don’t read very much, they don’t have the opportunity to see and learn very many new words. This sets in motion the well known “Matthew Effects,” Stanovich’s (1986) application of Matthew, 25:29–“the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”  .  Lehr, et al, A Focus on Vocabulary, Pacific Resources for Education and Learning

The achievement gap comes, in part, from a gap in learning time, informal and formal, at home.   You can find some resources on the cumulative impact of the vocabulary gap in "Big Ideas in Reading", an on line resource maintained by the University of Oregon College of Education:

• The importance of vocabulary knowledge to school success, in general, and reading comprehension, in particular, is widely documented. 
• The National Research Council  concluded that vocabulary development is a fundamental goal for students in the early grades.
• Hart and Risley's seminal study tells us that there is a vast difference in the number of words heard by pre kindergarten children at home, with some children hearing three times as many spoken words than others.  A child living with well educated parents will hear 30 million more spoken words in four years than chlidren coming from less well educated families.  They compared children from advantaged families to those in disadvantaged families and found that three year old children in the advantaged families used a greater vocabulary at age 3 than the parents of disadvantaged children.  
• The discrepancy in vocabulary gets larger and larger as children get older, building greater and greater disadvantages.  

Big Ideas in Reading says: "Research has shown that children who read even ten minutes a day outside of school experience substantially higher rates of vocabulary growth between second and fifth grade than children who do little or no reading. (Anderson & Nagy, 1992, see References)"  The achievement gap cannot be closed without closing the gap in learning time that begins at home.  For students who are deprived of that precious learning time at home, we need to provide make up time in school and after school.    Look at the difference in the number of words read by the most active readers and least active readers.   

Percentile Rank	Minutes Per Day		Words Read Per Year
	Books	Text	Books	Text
98	65.0	67.3	4,358,000	4,733,000
90	21.2	33.4	1,823,000	2,357,000
80	14.2	24.6	1,146,000	1,697,000
70	9.6	16.9	622,000	1,168,000
60	6.5	13.1	432,000	722,000
50	4.6	9.2	282,000	601,000
40	3.2	6.2	200,000	421,000
30	1.8	4.3	106,000	251,000
20	0.7	2.4	21,000	134,000
10	0.1	1.0	8,000	51,000
2	0	0	0	8,000

What does all this mean for closing the achievement gap?   We need to attack educational disadvantages with more time learning, but we can only justify spending public money to do that for students and families who are willing to reward our investment by meeting high expectations.  

• Students with educational disadvantages must spend more time in school engaging in reading, math and science.    
• We need to lengthen the school day and lengthen the school year for those students, the achievement gap is a manifestation of less time learning.  
• We should create after school programs with academic focus to assist students 
• Students who don't speak English need extra time to learn English and the sooner that they learn English fluently the better.   We should accomplish this objective with extra immersion time in the early grades.  
•  We should offer increased learning time opportunities to students and families who make good use of that opportunity.    If we provide increased learning time at public expense, the students who receive that opportunity should meet high expectations of attendance and hard work during school and after school.  Parents and students who benefit should sign contracts promising to meet high expectations.   
• As a community, we must expect parents, day care providers and early childhood programs to provide learning rich environments.   
• We should assign more homework, and especially homework that increases the amount of home-reading that students do. Not copying lists and doing endless drill, but reading literature that builds vocabulary and reading fluency.   
• As a community we need to provide more adult mentors to disadvantaged students.   

I'll have more to say in future posts about making up the achievement gap with more learning time.

Expanded Learning Time Links
Expanded Learning Time Matters
Expanded Learning Time "Rocketship Education"
Apollo 20 Project  Creative expanded learning time program

Mass 2020   Massachusetts 2020's mission is to expand educational and economic opportunities for children and families across Massachusetts
Expanding Learning Time in High School
National Center on Time and Learning