6 Comments:

 kjoe said...

he cannot be that clueless about the tuition law.

He must know the accreditation will be restored---shortly after June 15th.

4/13/2007 1:48 AM

 

 Doug Duckworth said...

He is clueless if he thinks that a suburban sprawl czar has the capacity to make improvements in the SLPS.

4/13/2007 9:22 AM

 

 Ariel said...

Can't get any worse?
Of course it can...

From SLPS October archives:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Tony Sanders
October 13, 2006 Phone: 314-345-5743

SAINT LOUIS PUBLIC SCHOOLS CONTINUE
TO OUTPERFORM CHARTER SCHOOLS

St. Louis – The St. Louis Public School District (SLPS) continues to outperform charter schools in every content area tested according to an analysis of Missouri Assessment Program (MAP) test scores. The review of the 2006 MAP score results reveals:

· Twenty-six percent (26%) of SLPS 3rd graders scored at the proficient or advanced level in Communication Arts compared to 16% of students in charter schools;

· In 7th Grade Communication Arts, 15% of SLPS students scored at the proficient or advanced level versus 14% of charter school students;

· Eighteen percent (18%) of SLPS 11th graders scored at the proficient or advanced level in Communication Arts compared to only 9% of charter school students;

· Twenty percent (20%) of SLPS’ 4th grade students scored either proficient or advanced in Mathematics compared to 18% of students in charter schools;

· In 8th grade Mathematics, 13% of SLPS students scored at the proficient or advanced level compared to 11% of charter school students; and,

· Thirteen percent (13%) of our 10th grade students scored at the proficient or advanced level in Mathematics compared to only 8% of students in charter schools.

“While the Board of Education and I will continue to push for increased academic achievement for all students, the community needs to see that the St. Louis Public Schools remain the best choice for students,” said Dr. Diana Bourisaw, Superintendent of the St. Louis Public Schools.

4/13/2007 4:48 PM

 

 Ariel said...

And this is worse too...

From Dr. Bourisaw's report to the state board of education, SLPS November archives:

(A demographic note: according to the same report, SLPS is comprised of 81.7% African American students.)

"SLPS AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDENTS OUTPERFORM COUNTY COUNTERPARTS

Since 2001, SLPS African American students have consistently outperformed their counterparts in county schools on the MAP.

SLPS African American students had the highest mean MAP index score on 28 of 45 possible comparisons (62%)

SLPS African American magnet school students had 27 of the 28 highest scores (96%) out of these comparisons

SLPS African American students had better scores than their County and charter school counterparts on 28 of 30 possible elementary and middle school comparisons (93%)

Based on the last five years of MAP results, the data demonstrates that no alternative configuration for schooling African American children in St. Louis has been shown superior to the magnet schools operated by SLPS"

4/13/2007 5:04 PM

 

 Helen Louise said...

Ariel, thanks for the "facts" and clarification.

Now this from Dr. Gerald W. Bracey: "Education in public and private schools is not as different as many may think.

Are private schools better than public schools? Given the push for privatization from the federal government and some researchers and ideologues, one might conclude that there is something inherently superior about private schools.

But in some instances, the superior outcomes are questionable both as matters of fact and of interpretation. In Politics, Markets, and America's Schools, for example, John Chubb and Terry Moe (1990), argue that the very fact that public schools were direct democracies made them less efficient than private schools. But many researchers had great difficulty comprehending exactly how Chubb and Moe had statistically handled their data.

From Chubb and Moe's work and that of other free-market theorists, Richard Rothstein, Martin Carnoy, and Luis Benveniste generated six hypotheses about the advantages we should find in private schools:

* Private school personnel are more accountable to parents

* Private schools have more clearly defined expectations and outputs

* Private elementary schools teach good behavior and values better

* Private schools' teacher selection and retention practices are more efficient

* Private schools achieve success with curricular materials that do not differ from curricular materials in public schools

* Private school innovations stimulate improved practices at the public schools with which they compete.

Testing these hypotheses generated the book Can Public Schools Learn from Private Schools? (Rothstein, Carnoy, & Beneviste, 1999). In their research, the authors found that the reality bearing on the six hypotheses was more complex than the hypotheses would lead one to expect, but none of the hypotheses were confirmed. In some instances, they were reversed.

The key factor turned out not to be who runs the schools but the socioeconomic status of the school's clientele. Public and private schools in middle class and affluent areas looked a lot alike. And public and private schools in poor areas also looked alike.

To date, the difficulty in reaching anything like a definitive conclusion about whether public schools or private schools are better has been lack of a sufficiently large national database and a technique that could simultaneously control the many variables on which public and private schools differ. That is, a way to simultaneously adjust for in affluence; parental education level; and the proportions of low-income, minority, special education, and English language learners in the two types of schools.

Recently, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) commissioned the Educational Testing Service (ETS) to conduct such a study using NAEP data and a statistical procedure known as hierarchical linear modeling (HLM), which permits the control of many variables simultaneously. In addition to the variables mentioned above, other factors-such as the number of books in the home, the presence of a computer in the home, and absenteeism and student mobility-were included.

The study analyzed the results of the 2003 NAEP reading and math assessments at grades 4 and 8. An examination using only raw scores found the private schools outscoring public schools in both subjects and both grades.

When the data were adjusted by HLM for differences in all of the variables noted above, the picture that emerged looked quite different. Public schools did as well as private schools in fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math. Public schools outperformed the private schools in fourth-grade math. They remained behind in eighth-grade reading, but the difference declined sharply from about 18 points to about 7.

The reputation of academia is that it plods along indifferent to time lines and deadlines of the sort that people in schools or private employment have to cope with. It is not unusual for a research study to take two years from completion to publication. But in the current politically charged education policy arena, things are different. It took less than three weeks for Paul Peterson and Elena Llaudet of Harvard's Program in Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) to publish a rebuttal (in a publication through PEPG that Peterson heads, not in a bona fide journal) that offered alternative interpretations of the data using different definitions of the variables.

Many greeted the PEPG counterpoint with skepticism. The headline over the coverage at People for the American Way read, "When the Going Gets Tough, Privatization Proponents Get Paul Peterson" (Franck, 2006). The PEPG paper alleges that NCES s variable definitions biased the results toward public schools. In addition, it identifies some of the demographic variables that NCES had defined as outside the control of the school, which Peterson and Llaudet claimed might be a consequence of choosing private schools. Two such variables for the PEPG analysis were the number of books in the home and the availability of a computer at home. Their argument here strikes me as speculative and implausible. They build no case for it, and it is generally held that schools have very little impact on home resources."

4/14/2007 9:12 AM

 

 kjoe said...

Are there places where charter and priveate schools are required to accept special needs students?

I have heard that there are-----and that is where i would like to see these arguments hashed out.

Otherwise, it seems irrelevant.

4/14/2007 12:34 PM

 

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