The results from the survey sent to voters shortly after the failed millage election were released over the weekend. The Fayetteville Flyer has a great graphic summarizing the results. As expected, the cost of the plan was named as the biggest reason for voting against the millage. However, viewing this as simply a cost issue would be mistake. The final price tag of the plan was the direct result of many smaller design decisions made along the way.

Superintendent Vicky Thomas has shown good leadership moving forward from the failed millage vote. I am encouraged to see the district  working on what seems to be both an ambitious and prudent “Plan B.” From what I’ve heard renovation may start as soon as the doors close for summer break.

Yesterday, the Arkansas Times blog reported on the latest installment of LRSD attorney Chris Heller’s attempt to claim that public charter schools are harming the district’s efforts at integration. We have previously pointed out the errors in Heller’s arguments here and here.

While it is annoying to continue correcting Heller’s false claims, it is nevertheless important to point out the truth when these claims are made. And, while some time could be spent trying to figure out why Heller’s arguments increasingly seem to focus on integration in terms of achievement levels and poverty status, I am going to simply focus on the real issue at hand. That is, racial integration.

The Arkansas Times blog links to this table supplied by Heller, which purportedly shows that some of the district’s charter schools are less integrated than traditional public schools in Pulaski County because some of them have lower percentages of minorities than the traditional public schools in LRSD, NLRSD, and PCSSD.

The problem with Heller’s use of the data, however, is that in his analysis the percentage of minorities in those districts are aggregated at the district level. The percentages he shows for the charter schools are given at the school level. What this means is that the amount of segregation within the schools in LRSD, NLRSD, and PCSSD is ignored by Heller. It is impossible to know the level of segregation within the traditional public schools simply by looking at district averages.

As we have mentioned previously, a study by the U of A’s Office for Education Policy used a more rigorous approach–an approach commonly used by academics who study school integration. The OEP study looks at the average levels of minority students in Pulaski County as a whole, and then looks at individual schools to see how close they are to the county-wide average. Here is a table from the OEP report, which shows the 20 schools which are furthest from the county average.

Pulaski County’s Twenty Most Segregated Schools

As can be seen, when the traditional public schools in Pulaski County are disaggregated, they make up the bulk of the list. And what about the district’s most integrated schools? Again, the OEP report provides a list of the top-twenty.

Pulaski County’s Twenty Most Integrated Schools

Here we see that two of the schools singled out by Heller, E-Stem and Lisa Academy, are actually among the most integrated schools of the county.

Still, these rankings only supply part of the picture. Another important question is whether or not students who attend charter schools are worsening the integration levels of the schools they are leaving and the schools they are moving to. In other words, if white students are leaving traditional public schools where the percentage of white students is below-average and going to a public charter school where the percentage of white students is above-average, or if minority students are leaving traditional public schools where the percentage of minority students is below-average and going to public charter schools where the percentage of minority students is above-average.  As it turns out, this is not the case. The OEP report found that:

…the majority of student transfers from LRSD traditional public schools to charter schools are actually resulting in students entering into more racially integrated learning environments. Over half of the white students that left above-average white schools enrolled in a charter school that was more integrated (with almost all white students that left integrated schools enrolling in similarly integrated schools). Further, minority students that leave above-average minority schools or well-integrated schools are enrolling in charter schools that are equally or more integrated than their previous school.

In other words, transfers to public charter schools have the net effect of both leaving traditional public schools more integrated as a result of the transfer, as well as increasing the level of integration at the schools they transfer to.

For the record, I don’t really believe Heller and his team are this bad at math. Rather, it is becoming increasingly apparent that they are purposefully manipulating the data to reach a conclusion that supports their agenda. Additionally, his attempts to shift the debate into terms of economic and academic integration seem to signal that he knows his position against public charter schools can’t be won on racial terms alone.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a good piece about a new study of charter schools by our friend Marcus Winters. Marcus’s study looks at charter schools in New York City and finds that in addition to the achievement gains observed for students who attend charter schools (participant effects), the public schools that lose students to charters actually do better (systemic effects). Most important, Marcus finds that disadvantaged students are benefiting the most.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan is making a push to revamp teacher training, or at least that’s what his recent speech at Columbia University implies. He used some fairly strong language in the speech, saying that our nations ed schools are doing “a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st-century classroom.”

It is about time the department of ed publicly acknowledge the problems with our current teacher training system. The way we train teachers has remained largely the same for the last half century while  labor market conditions have shifted dramatically. For more reading check out these op-ed articles discussing Secretary Duncan’s speech:

Jay Mathews Class Struggle

New York Times Op-Ed

Bloomberg

Also, I dug up an old article by Malcolm Gladwell that appeared in The New Yorker last December.  Malcolm, in his unique style, details the difficulty in predicting who will be a good teacher, the Payton Manning of teaching, and who will perform more like Ryan Leaf. He makes a pretty convincing argument for retooling both teacher training and tenure.

I raised that question in an earlier post, based on the fact that the raw scores needed to be advanced or proficient have dropped substantially over the past few years.

Now there is a new study from the National Center for Education Statistics — a government agency — comparing how students did on their own state tests to how they did on National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests.

Lo and behold, out of the 24 states nationwide whose tests were comparable to NAEP, Arkansas was one of the few states wherein children performed higher on state tests in 2007 than in 2005, but their performance was not higher by the NAEP standard.  Indeed, if you look at Table 24, Arkansas is the only state in the entire study that saw all four categories (4th and 8th grade reading and math) make suspiciously large improvements on state tests between 2005 and 2007.

For specifics, see pages 41-46. Arkansas 4th grade reading scores had a 4.6 percentage point discrepancy in 2007 compared to 2005 (that is, 4.6% more students scored “proficient” in 2007 than they would have if the state tests remained more consistent with NAEP). Arkansas 4th grade math scores had a 9.5 percentage point discrepancy. Arkansas 8th grade reading scores had a 5.8 percentage point discrepancy. And Arkansas 8th grade math scores had a startling 12.1 percentage point discrepancy — more than any other state in the study.

The logical possibilities are these:

1) NAEP got harder between 2005 and 2007. This is not the case.

2) Students in Arkansas spend an inordinate amount of time practicing for Benchmark tests, but whatever skills and concepts they learn don’t carry over to a slightly different math and reading test. Possible, but not likely either. 8th grade math should be similar no matter who is testing it, and the U.S. Department of Education thought Arkansas’ tests were indeed comparable to NAEP. And in any event, there’s no evidence that Arkansas students are spending more time in state-specific test prep than anyone in any other state.

3) Arkansas students are more motivated to do well on high-stakes Benchmark exams, but brush off the low-stakes NAEP test. The problem is that there is no evidence for this theory. From the student’s perspective, neither of these tests are high-stakes in any way whatsoever. Moreover, the “motivation” theory doesn’t explain why Arkansas tests would see an increasing discrepancy with NAEP as time passes (rather than having the same discrepancy all along), nor does it explain why Arkansas would have more discrepancies than any other state (whose students are presumably subject to the same differential motivations).

4) State tests were dumbed down.

Unfortunately, the last possibility is looking the most likely at this point. Recall that the number of raw points Arkansas required to be “proficient” in 8th grade math was 39 points in 2006, but this has now dropped to a mere 28 points out of 80, which seems awfully low to be called “proficient.” And then recall that of all the states in the study, Arkansas 8th graders in Arkansas had the greatest discrepancy between state tests and NAEP — 12 percentage points. This is a coincidence?

So far, the Arkansas Department of Education has had no explanation for these results. A recent Democrat-Gazette story said:

Julie Johnson Thompson, a spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Education, attributed that to the fact that Arkansas results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress have been flat in recent years while the results improved on the state exams.

But Thompson here is just restating the problem in circular fashion, not providing an explanation of anything.

The Arkansas Department of Education should explain these discrepancies in a clear and straightforward manner that the public can understand. Otherwise, it looks like Arkansas’ academic “progress” in recent years was questionable.

I’ve been a huge fan of Russellville band Deas Vail since discovering them nearly 2 years ago. The best way to describe them would be this: indie pop-infused rock with soaring and haunting melodies sung by one of the best vocalists in rock. Having seen them three times in concert, I can say that they’re far better live than most bands are in the studio with the benefit of editing, autotune, etc.

As of August 27, their new album “Birds and Cages” is available on Amazon, or Itunes, or through their new record label Mono vs. Stereo (for only $7.00!).

I have to admit, even as much as I loved their first album “All The Houses Look the Same,” I was a little bit nervous last year when they announced that they were recording both a 5-song EP (“White Lights“) and a full-length album, all at the same time. I wondered if maybe they would be stretched too thin.

Boy was I ever wrong. To my ears, it’s one of the best albums I’ve ever bought, let alone in 2009. If anything, they’ve taken their music to a new level. Wes Blaylock (the lead singer) is just as jaw-dropping with his soaring vocal pyrotechnics, and his wife Laura (keyboardist) is featured more often in some quite lovely vocal duos. Andy Moore (guitar) is constantly pushing the envelope with different sounds and effects.

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The tunes are just as full of earworms (i.e., melodic hooks that you can’t get out of your head) as ever, but the music is often adventurous and arresting. “Sunlight” has a progressive rock sound that is hard to place in a single key. The intro to “The Great Physician” has a really nice chord progression that is far different from your traditional I-IV-V. The verses in “Atlantis” are in 5/4 time. “Puzzles and Pieces” is just beautiful — I could easily hear this song featured in one of the many television shows that run out the clock by playing a poignant song while the various characters look pensive.

As another reviewer put it, “Deas Vail is one of the few bands who can take pop/rock music and force the listener to apply ‘beautiful’ to it as an adjective.” If that sounds appealing to you, “Birds and Cages” should be on your purchase list.