I read The New York Times education section regularly, and it’s usually great. Michael Winerip in particular is definitely one of the best ed reporters out there. (Check out his depressing story from earlier this week about sub-literate work that earns passing scores on the New York State English Regents exam.)

I also appreciate that the Times still features an education section on their homepage; CNN, The Washington Post, and many other major news outlets have buried theirs. The Times has actually gone even further to establish SchoolBook, an excellent site dedicated to “news, data, and conversation about schools in New York City.”

However, on the nytimes.com homepage at 1 p.m. on Wednesday, February 8, 2012, here were the three features headlines:

“Aide Accused of Taping Sexual Acts With Students”

“California: More Sex Abuse Charges”

“School Linked to Abuse Claims Will Replace Entire Faculty”

Fifty million students. Four million teachers. Three top stories. I’m hanging my head.

Am I an unfair cherry-picker or does it feel like bad apples and sex scandals receive outsized education media attention?

Last night in the State of the Union address, President Obama directly addressed the dropout crisis:

We also know that when students aren’t allowed to walk away from their education, more of them walk the stage to get their diploma. So tonight, I call on every State to require that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn eighteen.

Forcing students who want out to stick around will have limited returns. Reversing the dropout crisis, a crucial goal, would take a extraordinarily comprehensive effort to undo the systemic elements to facilitate students’ decisions to walk away from school. Many young people (7,000 per day; 30% of all students) may wait until high school to disappear physically, but the damage that ultimately manifests in dropping out has likely been done much earlier in their lives.

Russell W. Rumberger has answers. The University of California professor has written Dropping Out: Why Students Drop Out of High School and What Can Be Done About It, published last year by Harvard University Press. In the Washington Post, Jay Mathews called it a “masterpiece” and summarized Rumberger’s key takeaways on how to reverse the dropout crisis:

1. Redefine high school success. The measure of a school should not be just mastery of reading, writing and math, but what are called noncognitive skills, such as motivation, perseverance, risk aversion, self-esteem and self-control. This would help both potential dropouts and kids going to college who need work on their social skills.

2.Change the dropout accounting system so schools aren’t rewarded for transferring problem kids. Even students who spend only a semester in the ninth grade before transferring to another school should be counted when the original school calculates how many ninth-graders completed high school four years later. Otherwise, schools will have an incentive to send students most likely to drop out to other schools rather than try to help them.

3. Stop trying to improve schools by forcing them to change their practices over the short term. Instead, help them build their capacity to improve, with more money and staff, over the long term.

4. Work harder to desegregate schools. Rumberger cites a study that found two-thirds of high schools with more than 90 percent minority enrollment had fewer than 60 percent of their students remain in school from ninth to 12th grade. “In short,” he writes, “it matters with whom one goes to school.”

5. Strengthen families and communities. Compared with other developed countries, the United States has one of the highest rates of children living in poverty. Those are the kids most susceptible to dropping out. Anything that improves the health and job security of school neighborhoods improves graduation rates. More early children education and preschool are also useful.

Sign me up as a supporter. The Obama Adminstration should be all over this!

Georgia may still be reeling from the eye-popping cheating scandal uncovered this year in Atlanta, but things are getting worse.

The governor’s Special Investigations division has just released a bombshell report detailing systemic corruption in the administration of the state exans, I’ve reprinted most of the overview below. Check out the whole crazy thing here and here.

How can anyone say with a straight face that these are just bad apples and this high-stakes testing regime is the right thing for kids?

(The italics and bold print below are mine. Hat tip to Bob Schaeffer at FairTest for the links.) 

The disgraceful situation we found in the Dougherty County School System (DCSS) is a tragedy, sadly illustrated by a comment made by a teacher who said that her fifth grade students could not read, yet did well on the Criterion Referenced Competency Tests (CRCT). This incredible statement from a teacher in a school where the principal flatly refused to cooperate with our investigation is indicative of what we found in many of the schools we visited.

To our amazement, this top-level administrator would not even answer questions about how she mishandled her duties as the person who is most responsible, at that school, for overseeing all testing activity. 

Another school principal, whose salary was over $90,000 per year, allowed her family to falsely claim that they were eligible for a federally-funded free lunch each school day, even though official guidelines required the annual income to be no more than $24,089.  

Yet another principal, with regard to our interviews, told a teacher:  “Don’t you tell them anything, you hear?”   

Notwithstanding these examples of misconduct, there are skilled, dedicated and well-meaning educators in this school system.  But their work is often overshadowed by an acceptance of wrongdoing and a pattern of incompetence that 1is a blight on the community that will feel its effects for generations to come.   This is the Dougherty County School System.        

Hundreds of school children were harmed by extensive cheating in the Dougherty County School System. In 11 schools, 18 educators admitted to cheating.  We found cheating on the 2009 CRCT in all of the schools we examined.  A total of 49 educators were involved in some form of misconduct or failure to perform their duty with regard to this test.     

While we did not find that Superintendent Sally Whatley or her senior staff knew that crimes or other misconduct were occurring, they should have known and were ultimately responsible for accurately testing and assessing students in this system.  In that duty, they failed.  

The 2009 erasure analysis, and other evidence, suggests that there were far more educators involved in cheating, but a fair analysis of the facts did not allow us to sufficiently establish the identity of every participant.  

The statistics, and the individual student data, leave little room for any other reasonable explanation, save for cheating.  For example, the percentage of flagged classrooms for DCSS is ten times higher than the state average.   

Where’s Hunter S. Thompson when you need him? Our national discourse has gone gonzo, hijacked by maniacs. 

I’ve done my best to tune out the cynical cluelessness permeating the Republican primary race, but these guys are actively working to ruin the country. It’s hard to single out only a few howlers, but just this month we’ve seen:

Mitt Romney: brazen distortion and lies about President Obama’s positions

Herman Cain: knew from the beginning this was only about self-promotion

Rick Perry: wants to radically reform government but can’t remember how. (Oops.)

New Gingrich: Child labor laws are in the way of really making our economy work.

The disingenuousness takes your breath away.

I feel an indirect link between these out-of-touch corporatist ideologues and a New York Daily News story by Ben Chapman this week on the insane new expansion in New York State testing. Check out this lunacy:

State Education officials are expanding mandatory reading exams that students across the state take each spring, according to documents posted on a state website Monday.

Third graders would spend 245 minutes on a reading test given over two consecutive days in April 2012 — up from 150 minutes over two days last year. Other grades will see similar gains.

Teachers and parents slammed the state’s new, super-sized testing schedule.

“It’s insane to make third graders sit still and take a test for that long,” said Lisa North, a reading teacher at Public School 8 in Brooklyn who administers the tests. 

I truly don’t know what’s next in this brave new world: four-hour reading tests in second grade? Why not in first grade too? Why not a three hour reading test in kindergarten? Capture the data early! Where is this all leading? How much of our soul are we selling in the name of data?

No one wins here— except for-profit corporations selling tests and test prep. (And privatizers who cheer the demise of public education.)

I recently received an email from Peggy Robertson, an administrator for the grass roots group United Opt Out National. They’ve got something strong to say about this.

I recently had dinner with a couple who were incredibly smart, friendly, funny… and conservative. They are active members of Tea Party organizations. My politics range from pretty liberal to very liberal, and I gravitate to the like-minded, so our candid conversation hit me as a shock to the system.

Since I’m a teacher and we all have opinions about education, the inevitable, guaranteed, stone-cold-lock cocktail party question was posed to me:

So Dan, what do you think of Michelle Rhee?

I find it really hard to give a short answer to this question. I’m critical of many of Rhee’s policies and I believe her legacy (hushed-up cheating scandals, stagnant test scores, disenfranchised parents, alienated veteran teachers, a viciously anti-union ideology) is problematic.

This tends not to go over well with the ballroom set who have been conditioned to revere her brand by Waiting for Superman and cover stories in Time and Newsweek. So I start with the positive: the status quo was no good and Rhee brought much-needed attention into DC Public Schools. She got people talking about school reform.

As I was falling all over myself in an attempt to be even-handed, diplomatic, and still true to my beliefs, the couple politely and directly asserted their vision for inner-city education.

It involves (and I’m paraphrasing as best I can):

• Allowing individuals to donate to private charities that will choose how to allocate funds in schools;

• Narrowing the vision of the school day to teach basic skills reading and math (and occasionally the arts) while providing two good meals per day;

• Eliminating all government assistance programs because they enable laziness and bad parenting;

• Encouraging all parents to get jobs.

Each suggestion contained a grain of reasonableness surrounded by skewed assumptions and a vision shaped by ideology rather than understanding. We were at the same dinner table but evidently living in two different universes. When one side believes that all public funds are at best suspect, and at worst actively ruining society, it’s hard to imagine truly strengthening a public school system.