Its summertime, and for many high school coaches and debaters, that means its already time to plan for the season ahead. At which tournaments will you and your team compete this coming season?
Winterhaven School is one of many that parents can explore at www.scooponschools.com. Portland moms Jacqueline Rothenberg and Katy Mayo-Hudson started the website to help parents navigate the many Portland-area school choices for their kids.Parents used to sidle up to Northeast Portland mom Jacqueline Rothenberg on the playground, wanting to know if the rumors were true: Was she the one with THE spreadsheet?
The one that laid out in clear, concise terms all the ins and outs of picking a school for kids, be it public or private, neighborhood, magnet, charter or online, from application deadlines to decision day?
And most important of all: Would she share it?
Rothenberg was happy to oblige, and these days, parents don’t need to stalk her on the playground to get her inside scoop, painstakingly compiled during a year of trying to find the school that would be the right fit for her older daughter, now 8.
With another mom, Northeast Portlander Katy Mayo-Hudson, Rothenberg started , which walks parents through the potentially bewildering process of finding the right school for their kids and includes a growing list of insider portraits of different Portland-area schools.
Before this, “there was no clear path to get the information that we wanted,” Rothenberg says. “You have to weave together these choices as a parent, and nowhere is that done.”
Anyone who has ever tried to figure out the right school for their kids knows it can be tricky. Everyone is guaranteed a spot at their neighborhood public school, of course, and most families wind up there in the end. But many parents want to see what else is out there, from magnet schools such as Buckman Arts Elementary to public charter schools such as Emerson School.
And then there are venerable private schools such as the Oregon Episcopal School, as well as fast-growing virtual schools.
They all have different deadlines, different application requirements and different tour dates. If you want to do a comprehensive survey of your choices, it can be overwhelming, Rothenberg and Hudson say.
“I think Portland Public Schools is somewhat conflicted that they have options that compete with the neighborhood schools, and it comes out in their website guide to choosing a school,” Hudson says.
Judy Brennan, the district’s director of family support and school choice, acknowledges the school choice process “probably is not as easy as it could be.” Portland Public Schools gives parents many more options than most comparably sized school districts.
“There are very few systems that both give you a guaranteed neighborhood school and the option to apply to almost any other schools,” Brennan says. “We have set ourselves up to make it complicated, and it can be confusing for parents who are looking at the full range of choices.”
The district’s budget for website upgrades is limited, she says, so the district welcomes efforts like this one to help bring more clarity to the picking and choosing.
The numbers of students seeking transfers out of their neighborhood schools has declined, according to the district, from 3,318 elementary and middle school students in the 2006-07 school year to 2,707 for the upcoming school year.
But that doesn’t mean it’s easier to transfer: In fact, the percentage of applicants who successfully transferred out of their neighborhood school in 2006 was 65.5 percent, while for next school year it was 60 percent.
The lower numbers are because of the district’s focus on “making sure that our neighborhood schools are our strongest schools and a greater understanding of what it takes to have a balance of healthy schools across the system,” Brennan said.
Thousands of families each year consider the breadth of options before making a school choice. Rothenberg and Hudson say they see themselves as strong public school advocates and true believers in the neighborhood school system.
“But in the past few decades, there has been a lot more out there about how different children learn differently, and based on what we know today, maybe there are good reasons to have choices,” Rothenberg says.
Their website is organized chronologically, with features such as a calendar, ideas for questions to ask during school tours, and tips about the lottery. Those interested in a particular school, as opposed to general tips, can check to see if their school has been profiled in the site’s blog.
The blog features assessments of each school’s strengths and weaknesses. For example, Winterhaven, a K-8 school in Southeast Portland, is singled out for its “rigor, strong curriculum, high expectations and focused community,” but the profile also notes the school, a math and science magnet, can have a “pressure cooker atmosphere.”
But Mayo-Hudson stresses there’s no substitute for going on a tour and talking to as many enrolled families as you can. Kristin Teigan, who has a first-grader and a fourth-grader at the school, disputes the pressure-cooker claim. She says the school has met the needs of her two very different sons.
“There are kids of a wide variety of abilities, and the school accommodates them,” Teigan says.
Food for thought
There are other popular online forums in Portland for discussing individual schools, including the long-running website .
Olivia Rebanal, one of the site’s founders, says the Scoop on Schools website is a helpful addition, because the school choice process can be so overwhelming.
“Everyone has been through it, and many families don’t have the time or resources to get out there and explore the system,” Rebanal said.
As Rothenberg and Hudson’s own kids get older, the two mothers say they hope to expand the site to include more coverage of middle and high schools within Portland. They also have plans to continue spotlighting less traditional educational models, from home-schooling to unschooling.
“The only cause that we are pushing is being informed,” Rothenberg says. “If people are more informed, they will be more involved in their kid’s education, and all schools will benefit from parents who are engaged.”
The pairings for the third practice round are available online. The divisions are named for three of our past camp leaders: Oscar Shine, Tommy Clancy, and Neil Conrad. (The Conrad Division will begin its practice rounds later.)
All pairings can be found on the Victory Briefs Wiki.
Over the last few days, academics have begun to weigh in on the APS cheating scandal. In this essay, a UGA education professor says high-stakes testing accountability measures will not improve education, and, in fact, will actually undermine education.
(I havent received any pieces yet in defense of the testing focus in our schools, but will share any that I might receive.)
The essay is from William Wraga, a professor in the program in educational administration and policy at the College of Education, University of Georgia.
The actions of administrators and teachers in the Atlanta Public Schools who altered student test answer sheets are indefensible. The reported “culture of fear, intimidation, and retaliation” that gripped the APS is appalling and counterproductive.
Both were responses to the accountability regime mandated in the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which imposes on schools statistically unreasonable, if not unfeasible, test score targets and escalating sanctions for failure to meet them. The state of Georgia has implemented the NCLB accountability program with fidelity.
These unfortunate events offer an opportunity to reexamine the accountability provisions of NCLB against principles and research in the field of educational testing. Such an exercise reveals that it is high time to adopt a more constructive approach to school improvement.
The field of educational testing, or psychometrics, has existed since standardized tests were first developed in the United States to process and place recruits during World War I. Here are three of the most basic principles of educational testing:
Principle: Standardized test scores do not represent absolute quantities, but merely estimates of what students have learned. (This is because tests only assess a small sample of what students have learned, not all of it; a score is a generalization from the small sample to the entire subject.)
Principle: As mere estimates, standardized test scores by themselves provide insufficient information to make important decisions about what students have and have not learned. (This is because until we test students on everything they should know in a particular subject, rather than just a small sample of it, we will never truly know how much of it they know.)
Principle: Because standardized test scores by themselves provide insufficient information to make important decisions about what students have and have not learned, no single test score should be used by itself to make important decisions about what students have learned.
Anyone can see that the accountability provisions of NCLB and their implementation in Georgia violate each of these basic principles of educational testing: test scores have been treated as absolute quantities, have been assumed to provide by themselves sufficient information to make important decisions, and actually have been used by themselves to make important decisions about students, such as whether students should graduate from high school.
Research has found that when high-stakes tests are used:
1. Educators will teach to the tests.
2. Curriculum narrows to that which is on the test.
3. Instruction narrows to skill-drill test prep.
4. Academically disaffected students are more likely to drop out of school.
5. The pressure to raise scores in the face of severe sanctions increases the incidence of unethical behavior.
Research has not found sufficient evidence to support the notion that implementing high-stakes tests will improve student learning.
In short, research suggests that high-stakes testing accountability measures not only will not improve education, but also may actually undermine education. Why would we enact a policy that would do that to educators and students?
So the problems in the APS must be fixed. To do so, however, must include fixing the dysfunctional education policy that created the conditions for those problems to occur. The accountability provisions in NCLB violate basic principles of educational testing and mandate practices that negatively impact curriculum, instruction, and learning. They must be discarded and replaced by practices that have been proven to improve teaching and learning.
Such practices would include, for example, engaging teachers in developing curriculum for the students they teach, setting realistic and challenging goals for learning, employing effective classroom assessments that draw from a wide range of information about student learning, and establishing an organizational culture animated by incentives and provisions for accomplishments. In order to improve schools, we should abandon the debilitating culture of accountability and foster a constructive culture of attainability.
Finally, as the problems in the APS are redressed, the politicians, policy makers, and others who irresponsibly advocated and mandated high-stakes testing accountability measures must be considered culpable as well — and should be held accountable for the problems their miseducative policies created.
Federal officials track all kinds of statistics about schools to check whether students have different access or opportunities based on race, gender or other factors. Like public schools everywhere, Portland schools are monitored by federal civil rights officials to see whether students are being treated equitably despite differences in race, gender, disability status and native language.
Findings are in the news this month, including:
Some detail is missing from those articles, particularly the item I wrote about calculus. What factors are behind the dearth of African American students taking calculus? No one asked the students, and my article doesn’t try to answer that question (except to note that in cases like Jefferson’s, the school didn’t offer the course).
Portland school board members agree that improving equity, particular for students of color, needs to be a high priority for all district employees. They haven’t been briefed on the specific findings about sports or calculus, but unanimously passed a policy this summer calling for urgent actions to improve racial equity.
In other news, a former mentor to many African American students at Grant High, former Self Enhancement coordinator Sam Thompson, says racial bias explains why he is having to shut down his new bar that he had hoped to make into a gathering spot for African Americans in Portland. The Skanner newspaper offers a long and detailed look, entitled “The Rise and Fall of a Young Black Man’s Dream,” at the experience of Thompson and his club, named Seeznin’s for his habit of highly seasoning food he prepares.
Self Enhancement has an excellent track record of helping African American students at Grant, Jefferson and Benson to stay in school and earn diplomas. And many students who were advised and mentored by Thompson while at Grant say he went to extraordinary lengths to help keep them on track in school and get them through crises such as the unsolved September 2010 shooting death of their friend and fellow Self Enhancement participant Andre Payton.
Those efforts and others to help young people even after he left Self Enhancement to run Seeznin’s are discussed in the article by The Skanner’s Helen Silvis.
As I type this I am staring at my newly earned Associate in Arts degree and certificate in creative writing from the Community College of Philadelphia. I am realizing that no matter how tedious, all of the work was worth it. All of the nights staying up to write papers, reading handout after handout, and studying for countless hours prepared me for where I am now.
I must admit, however, that during my first semester at CCP my mind was filled with doubt. Would I be able to actually finish college? Was I truly prepared?
I suppose this is the feeling of all incoming freshman: whether they will be able to stick with college. Succeed in it. Over the next several weeks, I plan to share personal stories of my time at CCP and current transition to Temple University.
During my first semester at CCP, I was already wary from my then short-lived Temple experience and I was constantly going over in my mind what I didn’t know and what I should have known. During my first year at CCP I found myself surrounded by people who seemed to be pondering the same questions. Some appeared to be just out of high school, like myself, while others had been out of school for years and had decided that they wanted to better themselves.
In that first year I shared a math class with a grandmother of two. She had been out of school for many years and was trying to stay committed to being enrolled at CCP. She was very friendly and very enthusiastic about class. And I just thought of her as a shining example of what could be accomplished no matter how old you are. It would be worth it in the end, and her grandchildren would be proud.
I wish I had the chance to know this grandmother a little more during our time together in class. Perhaps her enthusiasm would have rubbed off on me. What became apparent to me was that most students at CCP stayed to themselves. Even me. I think that if I had socialized more with my peers, that things would have gone easier and that I would have enjoyed my first semester a little more. My peers were smart and it was refreshing to be around them and hear their different perspectives.
My professors, at that time, were perfect images of what I had pictured them to be, very knowledgeable. Not all were old and wrinkly like the stories go. Out of all my professors during my first semester, my favorite was my English professor, Paul Oliver Wright. He realized the areas that his students were lacking in, such as grammar, and was not afraid to point it out to us. Sometimes he’d make comments in front of the entire class, which could be slightly embarrassing.
In addition to that, he talked to us and made conversation. You would think that is what professors are supposed to do, but further along in my time at CCP I learned that not all professors were as open as Professor Wright. Some were distant from their students, while others left students wondering how could this person actually be considered a professor?
One fond memory I have of Professor Wright is of one day when I was on my way to his class. He stopped me and asked what my opinion was about the reading he had handed out the previous day. I can’t recall what I had said in response, but I was taken by surprise nonetheless–he wanted to know my opinion. Professors were interesting and could be friendly once you got to know them.
Despite having two jobs at the time, the workload was not that bad until later semesters. It was hard deciding at times whether I needed an extra hour at work or an extra hour of studying. I worked through it though, and even when there were times when I wanted to be at work, I knew in the end that what I was doing would be worth it.
I often would overhear my friends discussing CCP, saying how it was nothing but the “13th grade.” Some simply not wanting to attend because they couldn’t consider it a real college. Not true. I believed it to be a stepping stone to something greater, and it was. During my time at CCP I became independent and prepared for what comes next. I look forward to sharing more about my college experience in future posts.