Secretary White Bends the AP Facts: Published in Thursday Eunice News on Auguest 16, 2014

   Did you watch John White’s interpretation of Louisiana’s “Advanced Placement” scores on TV last week? Secretary of Education White is claiming a success because Louisiana moved from near bottom to about 38th in the number of high school juniors and seniors taking AP placement courses last year (2013-14).

Sounds like an amazing improvement, except for one thing: The vast majority of Louisiana’s AP test takers fail the test.

Our high schools are forced to enroll students in this commercial, for-profit program on the theory that “rigorous” AP classes will prepare our students for college success. Our school performance score depends on the number of students who take and pass AP classes.

White thinks we should celebrate that our state ranks 38th for participation rate. (The accolade comes from the company that designs and sells the classes to our state.) But, the percentage of students who actually passed the tests declined from 34.1% in 2013 to to 30.3% in 2014.

I solidly believe that human beings learn from failure. But I don’t understand how White is serving our students by forcing them to take classes they are not prepared to pass. Professional educators (White is a Teach for America survivor and a political appointee) would never claim they were successful as teachers if only 30% of their students passed their classes.

Can you imagine being forced to put a certain kind of roofing on your house, and then, after the first rain, you discover only 30.3% of your roof works to prevent water damage? Secretary White forced you to put that roof on your house, and he claims success, because at least, your shed is still dry.

Can you imagine being forced to buy a certain brand of Thailand crawfish, only to find that 69% of the product is not consumable? Metaphorically speaking, Secretary White is forcing you to buy that product, and he claims he did a good thing because his corporate backers told him Thailand crawfish is a better crawfish than our own home-grown products.

Why did news outlets participate in White’s deception about our rankings? Why did the media fail to check the facts before giving this con man free press? We may rank 38th in the number of students taxpayers subsidized for AP classes, but we are 49th in passing rate.

White is hiding data and facts from the public. Data that should be on the state website is missing.

Every week, I check the Louisiana Department of Education website to see if White has the courage to post real information about our school and district performance on state LEAP, End of Course tests, and college preparatory ACT and Advanced Placement (AP) tests.

Alas, when you go the state website, you can only find clear, honest data for the school years prior to White’s takeover of the Louisiana Department of Education.

Google helped me track down the real facts from the College Board, facts printed as a table by The Times Picayune. The passing rate for all those taking the AP test in Louisiana was down four percent; women passing declined by 3 percent, African Americans by almost 1 percent.

If White would give us the true data, parents and teachers could work together to fix the problems that contribute to our declining scores.

If AP courses are necessary for the neighborhood schools to survive, for example, they need to be run properly. All AP instructors would need to be exempt from White’s mandatory “COMPASS” teacher evaluation system.   I was trained by the lead AP Music Theory test designer. He insisted that students could only pass the music test if they engaged in rigorous drill and kill. When I explained his teaching methods would get us fired as Louisiana public school teachers, he had a few choice words to describe the foolish COMPASS rubric that is dragging down our achievement scores.

AP classes need to be run as full-year classes. Louisiana high schools embraced the one-semester block program, making it impossible for teachers to do adequate instruction and review before the tests are administered in the spring.

Our Secretary of Education may have forced all these conflicting changes on our public schools with good intentions, but, in every instance, the outcome has been disastrous.

Our children’s future is at stake. We cannot afford to put them in situations where 70% fail because of bad policies and bad financial investments.

It’s time for the media to stop re-telling John’s Big White Lie.

For more information you can google these sites:

http://www.nola.com/education/index.ssf/2014/10/louisiana_sees_some_improvemen.html

http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/ap/rtn/10th-annual/10th-annual-ap-report-state-supplement-louisiana.pdf

The Four B's of School Leadership: My Sunday Eunice News Column for September 7, 2014

Most school improvement programs today require school principals to become “instructional leaders.” This is quite a shift from traditional expectations for rural superintendents and building principals.

Before the No Child Left Behind Act was passed and signed into law by President George Bush, K-12 school leaders across the nation spent most of their time satisfying parents' concerns about school logistics and school discipline.

Over the years, I've seen principals and small town superintendents work ungodly hours just dealing with beans, balls, buses and behavior issues.

These leaders were successful most of the time because they treated their teachers as professionals, and they saw themselves as agents who gathered resources and ran school logistics in such a manner that teachers could easily and independently plan and deliver instruction consistent with state academic standards.

When NCLB became law, there was a lot of resistance to the idea that school administrators had to become instructional leaders. I've heard many a superintendent and principal insist that they had no time to be Chief Educator. To keep their jobs, they had to spend most of their time satisfying parental concerns about beans, balls, buses, and behavior. Their tenure depended on the satisfaction of parents and school board members, based on their overall management of cafeteria, sports, transportation, and school discipline issues.

But, the paradigm shift is not at all a bad idea. It's just badly implemented most of the time, because public schools rarely have the financial resources to expand their administrations to invest in instructional leadership at the building or school district level.

The State of Louisiana Board of Education, for example, implemented rigid policies about how teachers should teach, with the expectation that classroom instruction would flow the same way in every classroom regardless of subject, student ability, or access to textbooks and computers. Every classroom, every student should look, act, and perform the same way, as if teachers were packaging McDonald's Hamburgers rather than developing the minds and hearts of children.

And, now, using the “Compass” evaluation system, Louisiana has completely undermined the value of instructional leadership, as it was intended to push our schools to higher levels of achievement.

Under “Compass,” principals are supposed to walk around with their clipboards, and downgrade teacher effectiveness if they notice any deviation from the teaching formula that our State Superintendent of Education now requires of all teachers – whether or not the deviation produced better learning in the classroom.

The Compass system encourages principals to downgrade teachers if they engage in direct instruction – even when research shows that at-risk students make greater achievement gains when teachers use direct instruction methods.

Under “Compass,” principals are supposed to walk around with their clipboards, and downgrade teacher effectiveness if they notice that a teacher is not using technology – whether or not the school provides the teacher with technology.

Even when teachers produce high levels of achievement in their students, our state education superintendent has instructed principals to still downgrade teacher evaluations, on the bizarre theory that teachers will work harder if you devalue their accomplishments.

Sadly, there are a few school administrators in Louisiana who have embraced this negative instruction leader model, because their own evaluations now depend on compliance with the Compass System. Is it any wonder that school teachers are leaving the profession they love in droves?

At the outset of NCLB, there was much discussion about whether or not schools needed to have larger administrative staffs in order to accomplish this major shift of responsibilities for top administrators.  Other industries have much smaller supervisor to staff ratios, the reasoning went. So, if we really wanted to improve classroom instruction, we needed to reduce the number of teachers each principal supervises, to make it possible for principals to more closely monitor their teachers.

My own dissertation results showed an inverse correlation between the amount of money spent on administration – the more more money spent on administration, the lower the math and reading scores. Conversely, the more money that was spent inside the classroom, the higher the achievement.

Of course, money spent in the classroom needs to be spent wisely on instruction materials, smaller class sizes, highly-trained, certified teachers and student support systems.

Since the Compass evaluation system was implemented under Superintendent John White, Louisiana's teaching profession is being reduced to a cookie cutter recipe of behaviors that are not based in research, history, psychology, or best practices. Rather than providing instructional leadership, White expects principals to monitor superficial behaviors of teachers and students, with the expectation that both will move and act with robotic precision.

Our children and our schools performed much better when our teachers were permitted to act as professionals. Until Louisiana's administrators are allowed to be positive instructional leaders to their team of professional, certified teachers, it may be best for administrators to focus on what they do best: keep everybody happy with a steady flow of beans, balls,buses, and behavioral interventions.

Education Should Do No Harm - My Sunday Eunice News Commentary published July 27, 2014

Should Louisiana taxpayers “keep it simple,” and allow high-priced Common Core education contracts to be funded in violation of our state contracting laws?

That was the suggestion of Stephen Waguespack, LABI President, when he argued last Sunday that it was too late to remedy the badly designed Common Core Program by canceling the sole-source contracts the way our governor, Bobby Jindal, chose to do. 

Mr. Waguespack does not seem to be aware of the public testimony of teachers, parents, and administrators who are clearly making the case that Louisiana's Common Core Program was disastrously adopted, recklessly imposed, without adequate design input from teachers, subject-matter experts, or education testing experts. 

There have been dozens of hearings, media interviews, and expert testimonies in which education leaders argued that the Common Core Program is hurting our state public education system.

The legislature tried to halt the program, but, so many state legislators are financially beholding to education industry lobbyists, they dared not cross their patrons by voting down the Common Core, as their constituents asked them to.

Governor Bobby Jindal chose to halt the Common Core with a legal strategy.  He vowed to restore some modicum of democratic process to the next phase of planning for Louisiana's public schools.

But, now, the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education is trying to force the Common Core through – no matter what the people and the experts say.

Enter Mr. Waguespack, spokesperson for the Louisiana Business Institute: Go through with the Common Core, because we've already invested four years in it.  “It's just that simple.”

Mr. Waguespack did not address any of the critical concerns presented by dozens of nationally recognized educators.  He ignored concerns expressed by thousands of teachers and parents who are worried that the Common Core is not age appropriate for younger school children, but at the same time, not rigorous enough for high school age children.

He minimized our concerns using the label “doubts,” then proceeded to argue we should do the easy thing: spend hundreds of millions of dollars MORE on tests that were never subject to scrutiny by experts in the field of education.

I can think of several disasters that resulted from this kind of thinking, this kind of inattention to fundamental design flaws.

Do you remember the Challenger Shuttle that was torn apart minutes after takeoff, killing six astronauts and the first teacher to travel in space?  Days before takeoff, NASA engineers were still debating design flaws.  NASA management chose to go through with the launch, because it was just that simple:  they were fearful of the embarrassment guaranteed if there was another delayed take-off due to an inexpensive design flaw.

Do you remember our shock and awe as a nation, when the City of New Orleans was submerged under water – because design flaws in the New Orleans Levees resulted in devastating floods after Hurricane Katrina?  Three months BEFORE Katrina, scientists were testifying that MRGO, a dirt moving project that was supposed to make it easier for ships to navigate to the port were rarely used, and they actually created a funnel for storm waters to surge through – guaranteeing major flooding.  MRGO was nicknamed “Trojan Horse.”  Warnings to correct the design flaw were not heeded.  We know the rest of the story.

So many complex engineering plans have design flaws, but, we ignore them because “It's just that simple:”  Disasters rarely happen.

Do you remember our disbelief as a nation when the Deepwater Horizon wells ruptured?  This engineering project was rushed.  Warnings of impending danger by trained staff were ignored. In the interest of getting oil to market quicker, managers took the simple solution.  They rushed a job and ignored reports of design flaws.   Eleven workers were killed. 

The Deepwater Horizon Disaster caused one of the worst environmental crises in American History. 

There's no reason to rush the Common Core Program through, now that design flaws and contracting flaws have been made obvious to our legislators, our Governor, and our parents and community leaders.

Sometimes, it's smart to pull the plug on badly engineered structures.  It's just as smart to pull the plug on badly designed education programs.

In the short run, superintendents and directors and public leaders may be red-cheeked with embarrassment at the sudden change of course.  After all, they've been forced to publicly endorse a very badly designed program that is already doing a lot of harm to our children.

But, in the long run, we can produce lasting positive changes in our schools by adopting research-based curriculum and testing strategies that meet the real needs of our diverse students and our 21st century workforce  --- without doing harm in the process.

Public Education should do no harm.  It's just that simple.

Copyright July 22, 2014