The Essential Blog

July 01, 2008

Ed Week Performance Assessment Chat TODAY!

Get ready for an intense hour of online discussion focused on performance assessment, thanks to Ed Week’s performance assessment chat that’s happening today, Tuesday, July first, at 3:00 eastern time/ noon Pacific.

The chat focuses on Rhode Island’s use of performance assessment as a requirement for high school graduation and features CES’s executive director Lewis Cohen, Stanford School Design Network’s Ray Pecheone, and Portsmouth (RI) High School principal Robert Littlefield. Earlier Essential Blog post on the chat is here.

Questions are pouring in, demonstrating that there’s a huge amount of interest in what Rhode Island is doing, really smart questions that will elicits responses on the practical considerations of implementing various forms of performance based assessment at the state, district, and school levels. We’ll post a link for the archive when it’s posted.

Posted by Jill Davidson at 10:15 am | Comments Off|Trackback (0)

June 29, 2008

Performance Assessment Chat on Edweek, 7/1

On July 1, from 3:00-4:00pm Eastern time, CES Executive Director Lewis Cohen will join Raymond Pecheone and Robert Littlefield for an Ed Week hosted online chat about performance assessment. We’re really excited about this–the chat follows up on the New England Performance Assessement Symposium that CES, the Rhode Island Department of Education, and the Great Schools Partnership hosted in Providence, RI last month. The chat will focus on Rhode Island’s performance-based graduation requirements; Rhode Island’s class of 2008 is, by all accounts, the first class anywhere in the U.S. of which performance-based assessments are required statewide as a condition for graduation. Cohen, Pecheone, and Littlefield will respond to questions on the viability of Rhode Island’s performance-based assessment system as a model for other states, and what it’s like to implement such a system on the front lines of education.

Before our excitement takes over completely, we want to mention that the chat is now accepting questions, so jump in and ask your! Click here for that, and for the chat itself on Tuesday.

More about the chat: Ray Pecheone is the co-executive director of the Stanford School Redesign Network and director of the Performance Assessment for California Teachers program. Formerly, Pecheone was the Connecticut bureau chief for curriculum and teacher assessment. Robert Littlefield has been principal of Portsmouth High School for almost ten years, and was recently named the Rhode Island High School Principal of the Year. During his tenure, Mr. Littlefield has worked to transform the culture, mission and focus of PHS into a high-performing, personalized, and supportive learning environment.

Why do you need to participate? A shout out to Jim Horn, in his take on what comes after the testocracy:

When the current testing hysteria subsides, the work of CES will be critical in establishing or re-establishing meaningful learning environments that include multiple assessment methods for multiple learning tasks.

Thanks, Jim. And the same goes the work happening now in the state of Rhode Island.

Posted by Jill Davidson at 12:56 pm | No Comments »|Trackback (0)

June 26, 2008

HBO Documentary: Hard Times at Douglas High: A No Child Left Behind Report Card

Last night I stumbled onto this HBO Docmentary which chronicles a year in the life of Frederick Douglas High School in Baltimore, Maryland. The filmmakers spent an all-access year in the school capturing in vivid detail all aspects of this historically black high school as it attempts to educate students in the dark shadow of No Chil Left Behind. Frederick Douglas High School – which once was a school of choice for Baltimore’s black middle-class and has produced famous alumnae such as Thurgood Marshall – serves an inner-city community living in poverty and suffers from low-test scores, under-funding, over-crowding, and over-stretched and under-qualified teachers. The producers of this documentary state that this film, ” captures the complex realities of life at Douglass, and provides a context for the national debate over the controversial No Child Left Behind Act, focusing on the brutal inequalities of American minority education, considered an American tragedy by many.”

In essence, this documentary was more of a portrait of a school as it struggles to deal with the institutionalized racism that pagues many of their students, as well as trying to ward off the punitive measures of NCLB impositions. The effect is not pretty. A ninth grade class starts off with 500 plus enrolled students only to end up with 185 in the Senior class. When asked where the students go, a the Senior class advisor stares directly into the camera, eyes welling with tears, and blankly states, ” I have no idea.” “The students at Douglass who make it to the twelth grade,” she says, “they are a truly special bunch. They have gone through a viscious weeding out process.”

The filmmamkers manage to get all access into the school. They follow the 9th Grade English Teacher who gets so burned out on classroom management that he ends up leaving by the end of the first semester. They follow a ninth grade student on his fast-track pass into truancy. They document the principal has she doles out “Non-Proficient” teacher assesments to teachers who only have three students in their entire class passing. “How can we pass a student who is never here?” argues a teacher who feels he is being unfairly judged.

This documentary does highlight some positive aspects of the school. Douglas has an all-state winning basketball team, as well as award-winning music and band programs. The school does have students who perservere against all odds and make it to graduation with the help of certain Douglas staff and faculty. These moments in the film do provide the viewers with a more well-rounded picture of the school and shows us of the extreme strenght that these young people who make it to graduation possses.

Yet the one thing that is glaringly missing from the documentary is any true debate on teaching and learnig practices. The film hints at the dreadful affects of over-crowding and non-personalized instruction, but it gives no treatment to alternative pedagogies out there that, if in place, could serve to transform the educational practices at Douglas. There is no mention of how culturally relevant pedagogy needs to be developed so that students can see themselves in the learning. It gives no treatment as to how school culture practices could be improved so that the school is not run like a prison.

As a portrait of a school, this film is highly effective. Yet if this film is to be used to set the context for the debate on NCLB it is important for there to be some treatment of alternative educational practices that are out there and prove that the the educational practices implemented by NCLB have only served to deepen inequality and the achievement gap.

Hard Times at Douglas High: A No Child Left Behind Report Card can be found at http://www.hbo.com/docs/docuseries/hardtimes/index.html

or

http://www.videoverite.tv/pages/filmdouglasabout.html

Posted by David Siegfried at 10:44 am | No Comments »|Trackback (0)

June 24, 2008

Traces of the Trade tonight on PBS!

CES’s very own Juanita Brown has been involved as a co-producer of the documentary film Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North which priemiers tonight on PBS. CLICK HERE to watch the trailer. Last week the Bill Moyers Journal offered this special preview of the documentary as well.

In this bicentennial year of the U.S. abolition of the slave trade, one might think the tragedy of African slavery in the Americas has been exhaustively told. First-time film-maker Katrina Browne thought the same, until she discovered that her slave-trading ancestors from Rhode Island were not an aberration. Rather, the De Wolf family were the most prominent actors in the North’s vast complicity in slavery, buried in myths of Northern innocence.

Most of the relatives Browne invited to join her never responded. Some were against the effort, including one who felt he had never done anything to anyone and saw no reason why he should be implicated in the DeWolf history. But when the 10 DeWolf descendants, ranging from siblings to seventh cousins, came together to retrace the Triangle Trade from their old hometown in Rhode Island to slave forts in Ghana to sugar plantation ruins in Cuba, they found they formed an answer to their relative’s objection.

Several in the group — and everyone’s father — with one exception, are Ivy League graduates. The family’s preponderance of elite alma maters showed that its privilege endures. The DeWolf slave fortunes were plowed into other, legitimate businesses, a pattern matched in the larger U.S. economy, and secured privilege for the family for generations. Step by step, they uncover the vast extent of Northern complicity in slavery while also stumbling through the minefield of contemporary race relations. Read also, excerpts from Tom DeWolf’s Inheriting the Trade, a powerful and disarmingly honest memoir of the journey.

Filmaker Katrina Browne on her goals for the film:

“In Traces of the Trade, we wanted to ask this question: What is our responsibility? I’m less concerned with understanding the extreme inhumanity of my ancestors than with understanding the mundane, ordinary complicity of the majority of New Englanders who participated in a slave-based economy. That has more parallels to me and my family today: well-intentioned white folks who are still part of systems that do harm. It’s important to roll up our sleeves to deal with what we all inherited from our country’s history.”

The film’s accompanying discussion guides include some historical background, resources for further learning, tips for facilitators, and, of course, a collection of questions and observations. These materials are free to download and designed to provoke conversation about the film and issues of race, equality, and repair in the U.S.

”Traces of the Trade“ (an official selection of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival) offers powerful new perspectives on race relations, white privelege, and racial inequity as we continue to work to achieve the Unrealized American Dream.

Premieres June 24, 2008 at 10PM. Check local listings.

We’re grateful to Juanita for her work on the film. Post here after watching and tell us what you think, how you may use this in your teaching, and how it informs your view of this previously obscure facet of our histories.

Posted by Kyle Meador at 11:21 am | 1 Comment »|Trackback (0)

June 23, 2008

“Democracy at Risk” revisited

George Wood recently posted a useful blog entry at the Forum for Education and Democracy on how proposals in the Forum’s recently released “Democracy at Risk” report would affect the high school at which he’s the principal, Federal Hocking High School in Stewart, Ohio. Federal Hocking High School, a public school serving around 400 students in rural southern Ohio, is a CES Mentor School and part of the CES Small Schools Project. The benefits that would result if the federal government changed its role in education from what the currently NCLB status quo would be significant to individual kids and teachers in powerful ways at Federal Hocking High School, as Wood describes: To begin with the equity issues—if America was serious about paying off the educational debt it owes children who have not been the winners in the uneven competition for educational resources much would change here. Moving my school to just the average per pupil expenditures in Ohio would mean that, as a district, we would not have had to cut nearly $1.2 million from an $11.5 million dollar budget. It would mean we could have more than one counselor for our more than 1100 students in the district. We would not have to rely on drink machine sales to support field trips and student events, we could stop charging kids to be in the band or sports, and we could add teachers to reduce math and Spanish classes that squeeze over 35 students into a room. Then there is the support of our teachers. Let’s begin with pay, and how we would still count among our number a young science teacher, one of the best I have ever seen, if his salary had been at least equal to the college loan debt he carried. Paying off loans like this and support for graduate degrees as a pay back for committing to teach in a low-income community is something we call for in “Democracy at Risk.”

Enacting the federal policies we call for would also provide a stronger framework for on-the-job training and advancement for my staff. We do a good job in providing staff development, but most of it comes from money we have to raise on our own and is carried on outside the work day. No other profession requires so much of its members in terms of unpaid staff development time—often at programs that teachers have to pay for themselves. My teachers deserve recognition as the professionals they are, and that starts with supporting them in the field with high quality staff development as opposed to the hit-or-miss strategies currently in place. Finally, if the recommendations The Forum has made were put into action, my community would be involved in seriously thinking about, debating, and assessing how students are achieving the goals we all have and share for them. Currently, a battery of state tests, over which communities have no input and little understanding, stand in for measuring school success. To date, after over sixteen years of using such measures, the State of Ohio has no information as to how these test results correlate with success in work or college. And yet the reputation of the school district and community rest on the scores that will be reported this summer. Wood’s focus on just one school that serves 400 students is powerful, demonstrating that the devil of sweeping policies such as NCLB–and the lack of policies such as equitable education funding–really is in the details. Read “Democracy at Risk” for a vision of they ways that federal education policy can improve the lives and futures of young people and their communities.

Posted by Jill Davidson at 11:33 am | 1 Comment »|Trackback (0)

Ed Week Performance Assessment Chat TODAY!

Performance Assessment Chat on Edweek, 7/1

HBO Documentary: Hard Times at Douglas High: A No Child Left Behind Report Card

Traces of the Trade tonight on PBS!

“Democracy at Risk” revisited

“Showing What They Know” in Rhode Island and beyond

Call for Essays: “Assualt on Working Class Kids”

Blackstone Academy Charter School

Exhibitions Webcast TODAY!