STP! Stop, think, and praise.

As I look back on my decision to run for another four-year term as your school board member I remember how difficult that decision was. Serving as a school board member, many will say, is a thankless job. I don't find that to be true however, and I freely admit that I enjoy the stops in the grocery store, or in other venues, when folks thank me for my service, and talk about how pleased they are with one aspect or another of the changes we have made! I smile as they say to me that they are sure it is "a thankless job" even as they thank me.

The truth is that working together, we have achieved so much in this community. As the only candidate still running who was endorsed by Community Action for Public Education (CAPE), I remember all too well the conditions we found in a school system that had been neglected by far too many in this community. Schools were crumbling all around us, and there had been no new schools built for thirty years or so. Buildings at Lee High and Woodlawn and other sites had been condemned, but not removed. All roofs leaked every time it rained. Working together with the community we identified well over a billion dollars worth of immediate needs in the physical condition of the schools. The job is not done…. But so much HAS been done!

More importantly, the community had, in fact, nearly given up on their schools. No new taxes had been passed in many, many years, and teachers were being paid significantly less than those in many other districts, and in fact they had been furloughed for three days when a previous board ran out of money! Today, our teachers are paid competitive salaries, and we don't worry about covering up equipment in all the schools when it rains. The citizens in our community have passed tax renewals and new taxes with large margins, and new schools and buildings are going up around the district, on time and under budget. The long running desegregation lawsuit, which began before I was born, is over, and there is no forced bussing at all in Baton Rouge. None. Although I am still amazed to see uninformed people saying that we should end bussing in Baton Rouge! Should all students be forced to walk to school?

During my 16 years on the school board time I have remained true to the principles that CAPE espoused. In spite of the constant bashing of our schools, we have come so very far in the last 16 years. As a community, we sometimes have short memories, especially in the midst of an election when it seems every new candidate wants to show just how bad things are. Some of the things you will never hear from challengers include those items just mentioned, such as new schools, an end to forced bussing, and other things I have referred to in some of my other posts on here. Things such as the cooperation of the School System with the EBR Fire Department, the EBR Library, BREC (all of whom share facilities and land with us all over the parish, something that did not happen before) are forgotten in the unceasing desire, it seems to heap more abuse on our schools.

In spite of pullouts, including two areas that included some of our highest performing schools before they left the system, we have continuously improved on the scores for every subgroup in the parish. By subgroup, I mean different groups of students whether by race or ethnicity, or by other characteristics such as whether or not the student qualifies (based on family income) for free of reduced meal prices. For example, our EBR school system was just recognized as having the ninth highest on-time graduation rates for Black males large districts across the country. I am still amazed that some will take that fact, and turn it on its head and complain that the rate is far too low! (By the way, I agree that the rate is too low… but with an important caveat! Can't we at least take a moment to recognize that every district in the country is having problems increasing the graduation rate for this group of students, and your neighbors and friends, the teachers in our schools, are doing better than almost every other district in the country!) For students who are white, EBR ranks 5th out of all the districts in the state for their achievement, and for students who do not qualify for free or reduced price meals, our students rank 6th out of all districts in the state.

In another study, the researchers at Education Week, the premier weekly that focuses on pre-K through high school issues, calculated the "predicted" graduation rates for districts across the country, based in part on risk factors outside of school control, so called "out of school factors," and then compared the predictions with the actual graduation rates. Again, East Baton Rouge Parish Public Schools were ranked 31st in the entire country out of all the large school systems! No one that I know of us is saying that we have reached the mountaintop…that we can now rest, for the job is done! However, can we not take a moment to thank teachers for the progress they have made? Against incredible odds, and in spite of all the bashing they take?

Intellectual honesty is something I often talk and write about. I ask each of us to set aside our prejudices, our preconceived notions about ideology and what "we believe," and actually look at some of the data and research out there. It might just cause us to pause the next time we have a knee-jerk reaction about "our failing school system." I admitted that I enjoy receiving a "thank you" every now and then… but I would be happier still if this community thanked our teachers for their efforts, each and every day, to educate ALL students who walk (or roll) through the doors of OUR schools. To the teachers and staff of OUR schools, THANK YOU!

The Elusive Graduation Rates….

When I was in school "back in the day" as my son would say, a dropout was someone who "dropped out" of school and went to work or joined the military. For us, a "dropout" was someone who never finished high school.

Alas, today's use of the words "dropout" has an entirely different meaning. When you hear the startling statistics about the number of "dropouts" you might be hearing incredibly high numbers, and wondering just how horrible our schools have gotten! Before you lose all hope, you might want to explore a little about what, exactly, all these numbers mean! When you hear the term "dropout" it might be used in quite a number of different ways. For example, it could be that I was a dropout in high school. I "dropped out" of high school, since I did not graduate with my class. In fact, I remember going by Lee High School and saying "hi" to everyone as they were preparing to go to Panama City during their break to celebrate their upcoming graduation. I was heading to Panama City as well, only in my case the Panama City was in the Republic of Panama. I graduated at the end of the Fall Semester of my Senior Year, and enlisted in the army. It is very likely that a "cohort graduation rate" would have missed the distinction that I graduated early. The easiest (but not particularly accurate) way of determining a "cohort graduation rate" for a school district is to take the number of graduating seniors at the end of a given year, and divide by the number of ninth graders four years earlier. Sounds pretty simple, doesn't it.

A "cohort dropout rate" on the other hand, would be the "cohort graduation rate" subtracted from 100%. OK, that sounds fairly straightforward. A district with a cohort graduation rate of 58% would be one where 42% of the students do not graduate. For the record, I just intentionally made the same mistake made in article in The Advocate this morning; and by so many politicians who are trying to show us just how bad our education is! What was the mistake? To put it simply, whenever talking about the "cohort" rates, we need to distinguish that we are talking about students graduating on time! It seems simple to include those two important words, but the number of Presidents, Governors, and so called "education reformers" who forget to mention the two words is phenomenal. In today's parlance, a dropout is anyone who does not graduate on time, that is to say with her or his classmates who started together.

So, does the cohort graduation rate above mean that 42% of seniors did not graduate? No. Does it mean that 42% of students in the school did not ever graduate? Again, the answer is no. It indicates that 42% of those in the freshman class did not graduate exactly four years later. Some of them might have taken an extra semester to graduate based on illness, or failing a particular course. Some of them might have moved, and lost credit for a course they didn't finish at one school that was not offered at the new school. Some might simply have left the school system, and so they did not graduate with their peers. The most important point to make, I believe, is that many, if not most of these students, actually do graduate or pass their GED tests, signifying that they have in fact mastered high school level material.

For perspective, and something that is almost never mentioned by the politicians and "reformers" doing everything they can to tell the public how important it is that we all sup at the table of their particular educational changes currently being promoted, remember that when many of us were young, life was simpler. We didn't need to do that much math. If you dropped out of school, and did not graduate, at all, then you were considered a "dropout." Today, it is necessary to do a chronological study and determine when you should have graduated! For another perspective, colleges evaluate their progress by determining their graduation rates in a different way. They use a standard "six-year graduation rate" for their undergraduates, even though most, if not all of their undergraduates are in four-year degree programs. Their numbers, in most cases, are "worse" than the average high school "four-year graduation rate."

Now… let's look at some other complications when calculating our "graduation rates" for school districts. As The Advocate newspaper reported today, East Baton Rouge Parish public schools were highlighted in the national Schott Report as having the ninth highest "cohort graduation rate" for African-American males among all large school systems in the country with at least 10,000 African American males. This report, as do others from the Louisiana State Department of Education, likely contains some common errors. For example, how do the rates calculated account for the fact that EBR schools four years ago included Central High School, one of our larger high schools. For the last few years, those students continued to graduate, but they were no longer in the EBR system, since the citizens of Central formed their own school system. So dividing the EBR graduating class by the number of EBR students four years earlier gives you an error! Do the math! It is interesting to note that the effect of the error is much greater for white students than for African-American students, since the vast majority of African-American students in Central High School returned to EBR schools, since they were in a variety of choice programs, whereas most other students did not. So the Schott report likely underestimates the graduation rates for all EBR students.

What other ways can you imagine that graduation rates can be misleading? Or asking the question in another way, why should we always ask how such rates are being determined? Take a look at www.noelhammatt.org to see some of the things EBR has been doing to increase the real graduation rates

An important note: I cannot criticize the author of the article in our newspaper this morning, for he is relying, in a quotation in the story, on one of the following two statements from the same Schott Report! See if you can spot the subtle, but important, differences in meaning!

Yes We Can, The Schott 50 State Report on Public Education and Black Males, starkly illustrates that only 47% of Black males graduate from high school—far short of the trajectory and post-secondary credentials needed for our nation to be globally competitive by 2020. (Page 1)

Yet, unfortunately, the graduation rate for Black male students for the nation as a whole in 2007/8 was only 47%, that is, most Black male students did not graduate with their cohort." (Page 6)

Breaking Out of the "Reformers" Box!

Over the last few years I have pointed out to state education officials that there is a clear pattern that should be obvious to anyone looking at so-called "failing" schools in Louisiana. I shared with leaders the average demographics of the schools threatened with takeover by the state: approximately 95%+ of the students qualify for free or reduced price meals, and approximately 95%+ of the students are African-American. For the record, I am neither making any kind of "predictions" as to the academic achievement of the students in these schools based on "low expectations" nor am I saying that African-American students from low income families cannot learn or achieve high academic standards. On the other hand, I am stating that we should be carefully examining why it is that these are the shared demographics of these schools.

Researchers have found, by and large, that neither race/ethnicity nor the income of families has much to do, directly, with student achievement. What researchers have found, however, is that many of the underlying conditions that are found to impact student achievement are disproportionately distributed by race and income. These underlying conditions, which include such things as number of parents in the home, the number of books in the home, the number of hours of televisions watched, and the number of times a week children are read to, are all powerful predictors of student achievement, and are not under the control of our schools. I asked Paul Pastorek, the State Superintendent, to join with a number of groups looking at developing initiatives to impact some of these out-of-school factors. Instead, he started highlighting what he calls high poverty/high performing schools. None of these schools come close to overcoming the kinds of challenges faced by those schools taken over by the state.

I decided to look for "75/75/75 schools" in Louisiana. These would be schools where 75% or more of the student body was African-American, and at least 75% of the students came from families qualifying for free-or reduced meal prices, and 75% or more of the students in the school met state proficiency standards in both reading and math. I did a search using data from a nationally recognized school data engine, School Data Direct, and discovered the following. In the latest data set, Louisiana had 359 public schools in the state where over 75% of the students were African American, and over 75% of the students were receiving free or reduced meal prices. Out of these 359 schools only one school met the 75/75/75 criteria. I won’t even mention the school’s name, because it is not likely that the school actually created the success, since it is elementary, in New Orleans, and is a school of choice. Due to these factors it would require a bit more analysis to determine if it is the school that is achieving these results, or whether the results are the product of some selective admissions practices, and score-scrubbing which appears to currently be a problem in New Orleans. At any rate, ignoring the patterns of the 358 out of 359 schools does a disservice to the students in those schools, and a policy based on the one school that appears to be an outlier would likely not be fruitful. A policy based on exceptions is not likely to be an exceptionally good policy! Instead, let's work together to develop interventions that impact the underlying conditions!

We must break out of the box that limits education reforms to the limited time that students spend at school!