Category: DMN | Education

Dallas Catholic school students will get a day off Feb. 7 – and not for an early Ash Wednesday.

Schools will shut down so students and teachers can go to Austin for a rally in favor of school vouchers, which use public dollars to send students to private and religious schools. Other Catholic schools around the state are joining the effort.

The move is a sign that new leaders in the Catholic Church – which would probably be the biggest beneficiary of any voucher program – plan to be much more active in lobbying the Legislature than in previous years.

“There are a couple new archbishops,” said Charles LeBlanc, the Dallas Diocese’s director of schools. “We have a new director of the Texas Catholic Conference. And I’m impressed with the energy.”

Vouchers have been a controversial topic for the last several legislative sessions.

Supporters say they allow children to escape failing public schools and give parents choices. Opponents say they take money away from public schools that need it and threaten the separation of church and state.

“The vast majority of Texas parents, Catholic or otherwise, send their children to public schools and want those public schools to be supported by the Legislature, not robbed by a voucher scheme,” said Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network, a group that opposes vouchers. […]

Read More… from Catholic schools to close for rally; Dallas Diocese giving students, teachers a day to lobby for vouchers

Nearly 600 Texas public schools have been cleared of suspicions of cheating, state officials said Thursday, leaving 105 other schools still under investigation.

Texas Education Agency officials cited the clearing of 592 schools as evidence of the integrity of the state’s influential testing system.

“It is imperative that Texans trust our test results and have confidence that they are valid and reliable,” Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley said in a prepared statement.

But some question the thoroughness of the agency’s investigation, which relied heavily on self-reported questionnaires filled out by school officials a year and a half after the 2005 tests in question.

“I don’t know how accurate a set of responses you’re going to get from sending people a questionnaire,” said Jason Stephens, an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut who studies cheating. “That might be expedient, but if there is something going on, nobody’s going to go out and admit that.”

The investigation stems from a report produced in May by Caveon, a test-security firm. It analyzed schools’ scores on the 2005 Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills and tried to determine which schools had unusual patterns that could suggest cheating.

The report flagged 700 schools for a variety of reasons, including scores that jumped too quickly, answer sheets with too many erasures and students whose answer patterns suggested they might have copied off a classmate. […]

Read More… from Cheating inquiry clears 592 schools; State’s use of campus self-reporting in TAKS investigation questioned

Barely a year after receiving a clean bill of health, the North Texas charter schools run by the Belknap family are in trouble again.

State education officials are investigating allegations of financial impropriety, employees are being laid off to cut costs, and the schools are at risk of state intervention. Officials say the schools should be able to finish out the school year; beyond that is less clear.

“We don’t know how bad things are because they don’t have a good set of books,” said Karen Case, a former Texas Education Agency official who was hired by the schools Tuesday as the new part-time superintendent. “But they are in serious financial trouble.”

The Belknap family operates A+ Academy and Inspired Vision Academy, both in southeastern Dallas. Together they enroll more than 1,500 students, some of whom attended the recently shuttered Wilmer-Hutchins school district.

The family previously ran Rylie Faith Family Academy, but state officials closed that school in 2003 after years of low test scores.

Don and Karen Lewis Belknap, the schools’ co-founders, did not return phone calls seeking comment.

Charter schools are public schools funded with state taxpayer dollars but without the traditional governance structure of an elected school board. They have proved controversial because many are run by people with little experience in education or management. Academic performance in many charter schools is poor, and state oversight is limited. Laws can make it hard for the state to close even schools with serious financial and academic problems.

Since opening in 1999, the Belknap schools have received well over $38 million in state funds. […]

Read More… from Family’s schools failing again; 2 SE Dallas charters in financial trouble, at risk of state intervention

For fifth-graders having trouble with the TAKS test, everything comes down to a familiar factor: Location, location, location.

Texas’ law against social promotion is supposed to set uniform standards, requiring students to pass both the math and reading TAKS to be promoted to the sixth grade. But districts are given wide leeway in deciding who actually gets held back, and – according to newly released data from 2005, the most recent available – they use it in vastly different ways.

For instance, the Klein school district in suburban Houston promoted 98.5 percent of its fifth-graders who had failed the TAKS reading test repeatedly. Wichita Falls schools, in contrast, promoted just 4.8 percent.

Austin ISD promoted 90 percent of its fifth-graders who repeatedly failed the TAKS math test. But the Georgetown district – a 20-minute drive away – promoted only 20 percent.

“There seems to be a lot of variation in the way people interpret the law,” said Dawson Orr, Wichita Falls’ superintendent.

Despite their divergent results, officials in several districts said they are working within the law, which leaves the final decision about promotion to the child’s parents and educators.

In all, Texas schools ended up promoting about 70 percent of its worst-performing fifth-graders through a tool known as the grade placement committee.

“Our parents very much want to see their children move on and have those upper-grade experiences,” said Holly Hughes, assistant superintendent for elementary education in Clear Creek ISD near Houston. “We work hard with each family to determine what’s best for each child.” […]

Read More… from Kids fail TAKS, still pass; Districts vary widely on promoting 5th-graders who flunked test

One of the concepts newspaper readers sometimes have trouble with is the divide between the editorial staff and the news staff.

The folks who write our editorials, on the fourth floor here at The Dallas Morning News, are good people. But they don’t have any say in what I write, and I don’t have any say in what they write.

It won’t surprise you that we sometimes disagree. So excuse me while I get out my bone-picking tools.

In an editorial last week, they addressed a big issue: How to keep more of Texas high school students in school and marching toward graduation. Texas has a lot of dropouts every year – depending on how you do the math, more than any other state. Lots of those are Hispanic kids with poor English skills.

The editorial board’s first recommendation: The Legislature should give more money to schools so they can hire more bilingual teachers and cut class sizes.

The logic seems impeccable: A teacher can do a better job with 18 students than she can with 30. So shrink classes and you end up with better results, right?

Unfortunately – no matter how well intentioned the idea – I suspect that going on a hiring spree wouldn’t have the impact some hope for. […]

Read More… from COLUMN: Getting real on dropouts; Mass hirings alone won’t fix problem; invest in a strong staff

You probably didn’t notice, but Texas schools just celebrated a big holiday.

I doubt anyone brought cupcakes to class, but Oct. 27 looms large in principals’ offices and the halls of administration buildings.

That’s because the last Friday in October is New Kids Stop Mattering Day – the day after which any new students enrolling at your school won’t be counted in next spring’s TAKS scores.

It’s a holiday that makes life easier for teachers and principals wishing for higher test scores. But it also hurts thousands of Texas kids.

Jennifer Booher-Jennings is a Columbia graduate student whose research I’ve written about before. She studies how poorly constructed testing systems can leave some kids without the attention they deserve.

Last year I wrote in this space about her study of a Texas elementary school, where teachers gave enormous help to kids at risk of falling just a few points short of passing TAKS. That’s good.

But that extra help came at the expense of weaker kids – kids who might not pass even with more tutoring and teacher time invested. They were being written off as hopeless – at age 8.

That’s bad. It’s bad because it ignores what would be best for kids – helping the weakest at least as much those on the bubble – and instead does what’s best for the adults. Namely, it boosts a school’s passing rate by going after only the low-hanging fruit. […]

Read More… from COLUMN: Is TAKS approach fair? Weakest kids written off while schools focus on state accountability

Sometimes the best service the media can provide is a simple message.

Stay calm. Things aren’t that bad.

Whenever newspapers and the networks report on a school shooting – much less a mini-spree of them – the temptation is to think that the world is spiraling out of control.

The cable news networks start frothing for ratings. Up go the on-screen graphics – open-ended fear-mongering like “Is your child in danger?”

Self-appointed school-security experts – looking to make a buck as consultants – start e-mailing reporters about the urgent threat to America’s children.

And legislators, eager for five minutes with Nancy Grace, start overreacting and throwing around dumb ideas.

Everybody wins – except for anyone who wants to point out the truth. Which is that violence in schools has plummeted over the past decade.

It may be hard to think about that when your TV shows a line of Amish buggies rolling in a funeral procession – or when the country has three school shootings in a week’s time. But it’s the truth.

By just about every measure, school violence has been falling steadily since the early 1990s. Federal statistics say incidents of serious school violence were twice as common in 1994 as they were in 2004. […]

Read More… from COLUMN: Don’t believe the hype about violence at schools

State investigators are having some success finding evidence of TAKS cheating in their first wave of on-site investigations. But it may be another two months before those investigations – of less than 1 percent of schools flagged as suspicious – are completed.

The Texas Education Agency is reacting to findings by Caveon, a Utah test-security firm it hired last year to look for signs of cheating on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills.

Caveon flagged 699 Texas schools for a variety of reasons, such as unexplained leaps in scores, high numbers of erased answers, or groups of students with identical or nearly identical answer sheets.

This summer, TEA appointed a task force to examine the findings. Agency staffers began on-site investigations at five schools whose scores seemed particularly suspicious. The names of those schools haven’t been made public.

TEA spokeswoman Debbie Graves Ratcliffe said the investigative interviews were helpful in determining which of Caveon’s methods for detecting cheating can be supported through other evidence.

The task force, meeting Thursday in Austin, recommended a few changes to the methods investigators use. That includes interviewing a wider range of staff members on each campus under scrutiny. […]

Read More… from Progress cited in TAKS cheat probe; But initial investigation of five especially suspect schools far from done

On May 12, 2005, Texas education commissioner Shirley Neeley stood in the Wilmer-Hutchins school board chambers and announced the results of her agency’s investigation into cheating on the TAKS test.

“Twenty-two WHISD teachers were found guilty of cheating,” she said. “The investigation found inexcusable, illegal, unprofessional and unacceptable behavior on the part of these 22 individuals.”

Shortly after, the Wilmer-Hutchins schools were all shut down. But the careers of the teachers lived on.

At least 10 of the 22 Wilmer-Hutchins educators are now working in other North Texas public schools, a Dallas Morning News investigation found. None has faced official sanction, more than 2 1/2 years after the cheating took place.

Most were able to find new jobs weeks after Dr. Neeley’s statements.

They were able to do so in part because the body responsible for disciplinary actions against teachers, the State Board for Educator Certification, has been slow to act on the cases. The agency has a notorious backlog and a reputation for letting cases lie dormant, sometimes for more than two years.

In addition, state officials chose not to use their normal method to inform school districts of the findings of their investigation. Several of the school districts that now employ the teachers said they were unaware of the findings until informed by The News.

“I am absolutely dumbfounded,” said Lou Blanchard, director of the Treetops School International, a charter school in Euless. When her school hired a teacher named Betty Houston, Dr. Blanchard had no idea she was one of the teachers state investigators implicated in Wilmer-Hutchins. […]

Read More… from Cheating hasn’t hurt teachers; Exclusive: Accused WHISD educators hired in other schools

If you or your child is applying to a selective college this year, here’s a reading assignment: Pick up a copy of The Price of Admission, a new book by Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Golden.

It’ll either give you a useful view into how the elite admissions game works or just leave you disgusted about the whole enterprise.

Actually, probably both.

Mr. Golden’s subject is the root unfairness in the way elite colleges choose who wins the coveted spots in their freshman classes.

Some folks complain about admissions policies that favor minority students. But Mr. Golden shows the degree to which the bias actually moves in the opposite direction: toward children of privilege.

We all know wealthy kids have enormous advantages not available to others. Their parents can afford score-boosting SAT prep classes and private school tuition. They can give their children an upbringing that provides endless educational opportunities. Those can all give the rich an edge.

But I’m not talking about those kids – the ones who, even considering their privileges, earn their spots. I’m talking about kids who aren’t remarkably bright but still get into top colleges because of who their daddy is. […]

Read More… from COLUMN: Elite schools make room for mediocre rich kids