Underestimating the Impact of Poverty

A coach sent this to me and I thought this was interesting food for thought.

The red is Krashen and Yvonne Siu-Runyan’s response to the article about school reconstitution in Columbine.

I suggest reading the article first and then the response.

Subject: Underestimating the impact of poverty



Sent to the Daily Camera, Dec 16, 2008

Underestimating the Impact of Poverty

The Colorado Department of Education and Boulder Valley School
Officials think that re-organizing Columbine Elementary Schools is going solve the problem
of low test-scores. It won't.

A large proportion of students who attend Columbine Elementary come
from financially needy families-88.1% of the children are on free or
reduced price lunch.

There isn't a single convincing case in educational research of this
kind of reform producing significant effects when poverty is that high. We have
underestimated the impact of poverty: Children of poverty suffer from
malnutrition, stressful home situations, toxic environments, and have
far less access to books at home, in their communities and in school.
They don't need their teachers fired and re-hired. They need more and
better food, cleaner air and water, more encouragement and nurturing,
and more access to books through improved libraries.

Re-organizing the school is like re-organizing the deck chairs on the
Titantic: It neglects the major cause of the low test scores.

Yvonne Siu-Runyan and Stephen Krashen

Yvonne Siu-Runyan is the Vice-President of the National Council of
Teachers of English.



Columbine Elementary School teachers must reapply for jobs

Daily Camera, Boulder, CO
By Laura Snider

The faculty members at Columbine Elementary School in Boulder went to
a staff meeting this week to greet their new principal. They left not
sure if they still had jobs.

The Boulder Valley School District has decided on a virtual do-over
for Columbine — which has been consistently under-performing on
standardized tests — giving the school a new building, a new
curriculum, a new principal and, now, a new staff.

Teachers were told this week that they will have to reapply for their
jobs if they want to continue working at the school in the fall.

“We really are saying that we want Columbine to be a new school,”
said district spokesman Briggs Gamblin. “The challenges to academic
achievement at Columbine are well-known and are of great concern to
the existing faculty as well as everyone else in the district.”

The district was notified by the Colorado Department of Education
this year that it had to take “corrective action” against Columbine because the school
had failed to meet “adequate yearly progress” — a metric based
on the state-mandated standardized tests — for the third year in a row.

Corrective action, which meets requirements set by the federal No
Child Left Behind program, must include one of the following: creating
an entirely new curriculum, decreasing management authority at the
school level, appointing an outside expert to advise the school,
extending the school day, or replacing the staff who are relevant to
the school’s failure.

“We would not have been required to take this far-reaching of an
action, but this was the right action for this school,” Gamblin said. “We know some people
won’t agree with that, but it is not meant to be negative toward the
current staff in terms of their passion for the kids and their passion for the program.”

But it’s hard for some not to see it that way.

“This is a slap in the face to the dedicated, highly trained and
talented teachers who go the extra mile in a difficult environment,”
parent David Heath wrote in a letter to the Camera. “... They deal
day in and day out with immigrant children that can barely speak English.”

More than 50 percent of the students who are assigned Columbine as
their neighborhood school choose to open-enroll at a different school,
leaving a population of students that is not representative of the
neighborhood demographics. More than 80 percent of the students who
attend Columbine qualify for free and reduced-price lunches, and the majority speak Spanish as their
first language.

The teachers are well-trained, with 100 percent meeting the state’s
guidelines for “highly qualified.” Teachers at Columbine have an average of nine years of
teaching experience, and 23 of the 43 full- and part-time teachers at the school have
master’s or doctoral degrees, according to state data.

“Please explain to our son, who has thrived at Columbine in his
first two years there, why his teacher might not be there when he
returns to school in the fall,” Bryan and Kori Jew asked in an open
letter to the superintendent.

The visioning process for Columbine, which had to be restructured
after racially charged comments marred the process earlier this fall, is meant to engage the
entire community, according to district officials, including people who chose not to
put their children at Columbine.

At Boulder Valley schools, teachers who have taught for more than
three years have a sort of tenure, called non-probationary status. If
the 30 teachers who are tenured at Columbine now do not get re-hired,
the school district “owes them a job,” according to Superintendent
Chris King, and officials will find a place for those teachers
elsewhere.

King sees the re-application process as a chance to have teachers
recommit themselves to a new school and a new curriculum.

Lynn Widger, the current principal, announced her retirement last
week, and she is being replaced by Cindy Kaier, now Kohl Elementary
School’s principal in Broomfield.

“I’ve watched the school for a lot of years,” King said. “And
I don’t think the current model is serving kids. Doing nothing is
not an option, so we’re choosing to do the hard thing because we
think it’s right for the kids.”

2008-12-12

http://www.dailycamera.com/news/2008/dec/12/columbine-teachers-must-reapply/