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Post by Chris_Wendt on Sept 17, 2013 5:50:46 GMT -5
...the easy way: inflate, falsify, CHEAT! Read about it in Newsday. What Newsday left out of the story is the salient fact that NY State was running the Roosevelt School District during the years this high-level administrative cheating occurred. Now, read about that GIGANTIC FAILURE!Regent Tilles summed this up succinctly: "I can tell you right off the bat that the state Education Department has no capabilities to run a school district...." Raise that bar!
Raise that bar!
Raise that bar!
Hearty...har...har!I don't know whether to laugh or to cry. Chris Wendt |
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Post by rr on Sept 17, 2013 9:20:06 GMT -5
I'm curious Chris...do you think if you replaced the staff of say Jericho and placed them into the Roosevelt SD do you think the testing results would translate? In general, do you think the kids in Roosevelt cannot handle the same standards as the kids in Jericho? It would take years, maybe an entire generation, to turn that district around...and it's got to start at home, literally.
Personally I think it's a ridiculous idea to expect the state to take over a failing district and turn it around in such a short time.
Similar to the Math and ELA testing - it's going to take time and hard work from the administration, the teachers, the parents and the kids. If you don't have those factors working together it will take longer to make the changes work. We can't expect that the school administration alone will solve the problems of Roosevelt schools...and therein lies the rub.
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Post by Chris_Wendt on Sept 17, 2013 14:25:21 GMT -5
rr asked... "... if you replaced the staff of say Jericho and placed them into the Roosevelt SD do you think the testing results would translate?" My response: - Who knows? I guess the Jericho faculty, being used to coming to work each day to teach upper-middle class children from families with wealth three times the NYS average, kids who are 95% white or Asian, 97% being well nourished and ready-to-learn, 98% of whom graduate on-time, with 100% of those going on to college...those teachers might find it difficult to adjust to a student body of whom 77% are eligible for free or reduced price lunch or are of Limited English Proficiency, only 7% being white or Asian, with 4% suspended from school at any given time, and only 60% graduating on-time.
- Would your example compensate for the funding differential between the $33,713 spending per student in Jericho and the $25,642 spending per student in Roosevelt? That would amount to an extra $22 Million per year for Roosevelt. I could see that having a positive impact, there.
- How would you deal with the adjusted gross income disparity between the $83,323 per student in Roosevelt and the $425,471 per student in Jericho?
Instead, what if all teachers teaching in Nassau County School Districts were employees of BOCES, and were assigned to teach on 2-year rotating cycles, in schools across the County based on the needs of each school and the abilities of each teacher, with pay based upon both the degree of difficulty of each assignment, and, the results obtained at the end of each cycle or rotation? When Roosevelt was taken over by the State, the then current status of Education Law would have required Roosevelt Middle School and High School to have been closed, with the students then being sent to neighboring districts. That was politically untenable, although it was the law. So, instead of busing students from Roosevelt to Calhoun, Mepham, Bellmore-JFK, Freeport and Uniondale, it was decided to have the State actually step-in and RUN the Roosevelt School District. That arrangement lasted 11 years, through this past June. With the exception of having kept Roosevelt kids out of Bellmore-Merrick, Freeport and Uniondale high schools and middle schools, it was a total and unabashed ACADEMIC FAILURE. It did create a lot of construction jobs, as ALL of Roosevelt's failing school BUILDING were re-built from the ground, up, for about $300 Million. Your State Education Dollars at work! Your State Education Department at work! Shaking my head.... Chris Wendt |
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greda
Junior Member
Posts: 44
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Post by greda on Sept 17, 2013 16:10:17 GMT -5
A state takeover should only be a last resort as it was in this case. The failure of that school district is more than just about teachers and administrators and a poor plant. It goes back to parental involvement or lack thereof. However if the state takeover was a complete failure, I wouldn't know but I would defer to the parents who live and send their kids there.
There is no provision in the law saying that the kids had to be transfered to neighboring school districts. The NCLB lays out a couple of provisions:
A fifth year of failure results in planning to restructure the entire school; the plan is implemented if the school fails to hit its AYP targets for the sixth year in a row. Common options include closing the school, turning the school into a charter school, hiring a private company to run the school, or asking the state office of education to run the school directly.
And rotating teachers between schools is a ridiculous answer. Stability is what is needed to ensure a good teaching environment.
Maybe the answer would be a charter school that would allow for a better learning environment for those students and families who are trying to get a better education. Ends up being cheaper but with everyone beholden to the teachers unions we know that would never happen. Which is a shame because it is more about protecting jobs than teaching kids, which as a union I guess is what they should be doing.
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Post by Chris_Wendt on Sept 18, 2013 6:23:10 GMT -5
A state takeover should only be a last resort as it was in this case. Based on the results (Graduation Rate, Performance Indices, etc.) and considering Regent Tilles' remarks, a state takeover of a public school district should NEVER occur, should not have occurred then, there (Roosevelt). I volunteered as a mentor to the Roosevelt Board of Education after the takeover, and can personally attest to the ill-will that was generated in Roosevelt against NYSED as a result of their having been "TAKEN OVER". The failure of that school district is more than just about teachers and administrators and a poor plant. It goes back to parental involvement or lack thereof. I do not believe that you have any personal knowledge of the factors, and attempting to blame "the parents" is specious, and not at all helpful by way of fashioning a remedy. There is no provision in the law saying that the kids had to be transferred to neighboring school districts. The NCLB lays out a couple of provisions.... The failures of the Roosevelt secondary schools were cumulative over a number of years predating NCLB. The state of the NY ED Law at that time was exactly as I reported it, above. While this plan is more current as written, in NY it is honored more in the breach than in actual practice. If you peruse State Accountability Reports especially for the worst performing districts, you will note the more common practice after five years of failing is to simply continue the affected schools in "Year Five" failure status for several more years. NYSED has also added new, creative status classifications for failing schools and districts, probably (my opinion) to postpone the inevitability of having to deal with those intractable failures in any meaningful corrective way. The strikeout in the above quote reflects that fact that these options have not typically been applied in NY, or, as in the case of the State takeover of Roosevelt, have been tried and proven contrary to the best intentions. The Governor's most recently proposed "death penalty" for failing schools relies heavily on the charter school option, and possibly may include third party operators, although that would be a stretch, legally, especially with the school unions. (We will be no more likely to rotate teachers through schools than the prior 'what if' scenario posed by 'rr' of replacing all the teachers in Jericho and sending all the Jericho teachers to Roosevelt. Context is crucial to understanding or deriding the comments of others). The stability of faculty is an interesting topic. Tenure engenders faculty stability. In Wantagh, teacher/faculty stability has generally been a very good attribute of our district. However, in the worst failing districts, an argument could be made that faculty stability is actually faculty inertia, and may be a large part of some district's real problems, e.g. Chicago with its first-time-ever graduation rate of 60% in June 2012, and most of that improvement over past performance was attributed to the large number of students (50,000) enrolled in charter schools, there. The other thing about faculty stability is that, by and large it does not exist in the way we used to think of it. You would have to pour over NY School Report Cards to see this. For the 2010-11 school year, turnover of teachers with less than 5 years experience was reported as: - Seaford...........................47%
- Plainedge........................46%
- Roosevelt.........................41%
- Wantagh..........................35%
- Levittown.........................35%
- Bellmore-Merrick CHSD......34%
- Island Trees.......................0%
Tenure is being over-ridden by the aging-out of the Baby Boom teachers, and the economy and declining enrollment are churning up the ranks of younger, newer teachers. Add to this the need for different qualifications and performance expectations for new teachers, and you see the patchwork results, above. As I said, faculty stability is an interesting topic, and in some sense also appropriate to the broader subject of "Failure Analysis". Food for thought for today. Regards Chris Wendt Edited for a typo, added Roosevelt teacher turnover stats and an additional reason for high turnover among junior teachers, 9/18/13 |
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