John Thompson is a former Oklahoma historian and inner city teacher who is now an education writer focusing on inner city schools.

When Oklahoma’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waiver was granted, local news celebrated a new era of “freedom and autonomy,” apparently believing that standardized testing will become less ubiquitous. But the waiver does not mean that educators who are tired of standardizing testing should be smiling, or that we will begin “a whole new way of educating children”. Neither, however, does it mean that a right-wing conspiracy is poised to take over local schools.

Basically, the Obama Administration’s NCLB waivers were designed to relieve pressure to teach to the test for 90 percent of the nation’s schools, while doubling down on ‘bubble-in accountability’ for the most challenging 10 percent, and imposing new standards for evaluating teachers. It may or may not be possible, however, for a poor state like Oklahoma to successfully comply with the federal mandates. Read the rest of this entry »

John Thompson is an Oklahoma City teacher with 18 years of urban high school experience and an education blogger at thisweekineducation.com. He contributes regularly to our blog on education issues.

The Oklahoma City Public Schools faced breathtaking educational changes in 2010.  The OKCPS adopted a year-round calender, as it lengthened the school day for several middle schools.  It was required by federal regulations to restructure three schools, while state law forced it to revamp teacher and administrator evaluations.  The district experimented with performance pay, peer review and mentoring of new teachers, incentives for middle school students, and contracting with Teach for America.  It finally committed to the expansion of all-day prekindergarten.

Implementing this slew of policy initiatives would be more than enough of a challenge for 2011.  The previous year’s best ideas - especially peer review, expanding the school day, and implementing early education - have been shown to be effective in increasing student performance, but only with high-quality implementation.  The district’s turnaround efforts, and incorporating test score growth into teacher and principal evaluations, could be beneficial or they could be disastrous.  The prudent policy would be to place a moratorium on new reforms, and concentrate on making these experiments work. Read the rest of this entry »

John Thompson is an Oklahoma City teacher with 18 years of urban high school experience and an education blogger at thisweekineducation.com. He contributes regularly to our blog on education issues.

The Oklahoma City Public Schools has launched a campaign to close the “achievement gap.” To their credit, the school system acknowledges that our gap between Black and White student performance has grown since the federal No Child Left Behind law increased investments for schools serving poor children of color. The problem is that the OKCPS, like most school systems, has focused on instructional reforms, despite the social science and cognitive science explaining why those efforts are doomed without first addressing deeper issues. As was recently explained by Jonathan Zimmerman in the New York Review of Books, if we believe in the social science that was a foundation of the Brown v. Topeka desegregation case, we must admit that NCLB-driven policies are “doomed.” Read the rest of this entry »

John Thompson is an Oklahoma City teacher with 18 years of urban high school experience and an education blogger at thisweekineducation.com. He is a regular contributor to our blog on education issues.

All of the neighborhood high schools in the Oklahoma City Public School System and four other metro schools are categorized as “dropout factories” because they graduate less than 60 percent of their freshmen. And this is a huge improvement from the early 1990s when the OKCPS had a graduate rate of 39 percent. The Alliance For Excellent Education’s new report, “The Economic Benefits from Halving Oklahoma City’ Dropout Rate,” calculated the effects of reducing the city’s 4,800 dropouts by 50 percent. They estimate that reducing dropouts would generate $24 million in increased earnings, $17 million in additional spending, and $5 million in new investments. Reducing dropouts would increase home sales by $32 million and car sales by $2 million. The new graduates would produce 200 new jobs and generate $29 million in economic growth, as well as $3 million in new tax revenue.

New research by Columbia University’s Hechinger Institute, combined with previous studies, indicates that a key component of reducing dropouts is the expansion of high quality alternative schools. In New York City (where 80 percent of students are low-income) providing alternative slots to 5 percent of the student population has helped increase the city’s graduation rate by 36 percent.  New York discovered that:

…alternative schools for at-risk students worked wonders with struggling students. Regular high schools graduated 19 percent of overage, undercredited students. At alternative schools, the graduation rates were 56 percent – right at the city average.  Once students switched to an alternative school, they came to school more often and began earning credits more quickly. The solution was obvious: open more alternative schools. Read the rest of this entry »