How do we prepare kids for jobs, future?
More than 80% of students aren’t ready for college
By LORI HIGGINS
FREE PRESS EDUCATION WRITER
Renee Boogren of Troy has two compelling rea sons for wanting Michigan to make its schools more challenging.
She’s a mother. She’s also a biology teacher at Wayne State University who sees the results of kids who come to college unprepared.
It’s most notable in their writing skills.
“One student wrote a lab report that was supposed to be an analysis of the effect of things on seed germina tion,” Boogren said. Instead, the student “wrote more of an essay that concluded with how much he likes plants.”
The facts are these: More than 80% of Michigan students are graduating from high school without the skills to tackle college-level work. Mil lions of dollars are being spent on remedial education in the state’s higher-education in stitutions. Fewer than half of Michigan kids actually go to college.
Ten years ago, Michigan students scored above the U.S. average on a key national ba rometer of student achieve ment. Today, test scores have slipped below those of stu dents in many other states, fueled in part by the disastrous performance of Detroit Public Schools and other underper forming districts. “We’re an average state in a below-average country,” state schools Superintendent Mike Flanagan said. “That’s not OK in this global economy.”
The reality is that Michigan faces a dismal future unless it can lure more businesses with the promise of a well-educated workforce.
The Legislature must ad dress funding issues. Experts say educators and others must reexamine the way we teach our kids and the expectations we have of them.
Michiganders like Renee Boogren agree. The state must do that, she said, or “you’re doing kids a disservice.”
CONCERNS OVER ACHIEVEMENT GROW
TEST SCORES SPUR STATE TO CONSIDER NEW STANDARDS
By LORI HIGGINS
FREE PRESS EDUCATION WRITER
Education expert Sharif Shak rani says he’d give Michigan a C+ for its education system.
Many others would agree.
The state has been lauded for its strong standards and the tough grad uation requirements it enacted in 2006. But there is growing concern about student achievement.
Experts say wide differences in test scores across the state are the re sult of a shocking disparity in how the state’s standards are taught from district to district and classroom to classroom — even in the same build ing. Some say grade inflation — giv ing students a higher grade than their work merits — is rampant, meaning many graduate high school without being prepared for the rigors of college. School funding cuts have led to larger class sizes, school clo sures and layoffs, all affecting stu dent achievement, particularly in ur ban districts such as Detroit.
And many parents, educators and politicians have been slow to adapt to a changing economy in which plenti ful high-paying automotive jobs for people with little education have all but evaporated.
“Those days are gone, and they’re never coming back,” said Tom Wat kins, a former state schools superin tendent who is now an education con sultant.
Students today, he said, “truly have to be prepared to compete against the children of the world.”
Renee Boogren, the mother of three children in Birmingham Public Schools, said she is encouraged that the state is working with 47 other states to develop common education al standards. The new standards would mean that the MEAP — the state’s standardized elementary and middle school exam — will become tougher to pass, with students need ing to prove they have mastered col lege- and career-readiness skills.
“Hopefully, my kids will benefit from that,” she said.
The state expects to adopt the new standards this year, with a new test in place by 2013.
But Bennie Buckley of Oak Park, whose son is a ninth-grader at Oak Park Preparatory Academy, said that if officials overhaul the MEAP, “they need to overhaul the entire edu cation system right with it. You can’t do one without the other.”
Buckley has moved her son from one school to the next over the last five years, searching for the best edu cation for him. She says she is trou bled by many things, particularly the practice of passing on failing kids from one grade to the next. She also says she believes teachers need more resources and parents need to be more involved.
Buckley is hard on her son because she expects him to graduate and go on to college.
“Society is not going to pamper you,” she often tells him.
A problem for everybody
The move to raise standards comes as test scores show only 18% of Michigan students graduate from high school ready for college-level classes in English composition, alge bra, social sciences and biology. The results nationwide — 23% — aren’t much better, as measured by the ACT, the college entrance exam used in many states.
“The state of education in Michi gan is very unequal,” said Shakrani, co-director of the Education Policy Center at Michigan State University. “We have some of the best schools in the nation and some of the worst.” Nowhere is the problem clearer than in Detroit Public Schools, where scores released last fall on the Na tional Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) exam put students dead last in the country. In Detroit, the state’s largest school district, on ly 3% of fourth-graders and 4% of eighth-graders were considered pro ficient in math.
Shakrani says the scores in DPS, with 84,600 students, can’t be ig nored. Nor can the dismal scores in other urban districts.
“If part of the state is hurting, I think we cannot assume we don’t feel it,” he said. “If we dismiss that and say overall we are OK, then we are hiding our head in the sand.”
The problem isn’t just in Detroit schools, though.
Ten years ago, Michigan students scored above the national average on the more rigorous NAEP. Today, oth er states have caught up to, and sur passed, Michigan. In Michigan, for in stance, the average score in 2000 was 231 — out of a possible 500 — in fourth-grade math, five points above the national average of 226. In 2009, the average score in Michigan was 236, below the national average of 239.
Meanwhile, the bar for passing the state’s elementary and middle school MEAP exam has been set so low that students with only a basic under standing of the material are passing. Graduates will need more in-depth technical skills in the years ahead, Shakrani said. “Those are the jobs that will pay well.”
There are concerns that grade in flation is a growing problem, partic ularly because students who got strong grades in high school end up taking remedial courses in college.
Jim Ballard, executive director of the Michigan Association of Second ary School Principals, said students aren’t entering ninth-grade “high school ready.” He said students are now receiving Cs for work that, in previous generations, would’ve re sulted in failing grades. Yesterday’s C is today’s B, Ballard said.
“We are reluctant to fail stu dents,” he said. “There’s so much pressure on parents to have super stars. And teachers and principals have been pressured by those outside of the building … to give the appear ance that students are at that higher standard.”
Parents play a role, too
For too many children, what is supposed to happen inside the class room is sidetracked even before the school bell rings.
“We have many fine upstanding families. I’m not saying parents aren’t trying. But many of our kids come with a chaotic start,” said Mike Barlow, Hazel Park’s curriculum di rector.
A former teacher and a high school principal, Barlow says a num ber of children regularly wander into school late. They haven’t eaten. They haven’t slept well. There are children whose homework is consistently missing or half-done.
Even more frustrating, he said, is the response from some parents when school staff try to reach out to them. “You get a shrug. It’s ‘I work late. It was bowling night last night.’ ” Lisa Nahas, a parent of two chil dren in the district and a member of the district’s PTA Council, said it’s tough to get parents involved: “Peo ple say they’re too busy, that they’re working too much to come into the schools and volunteer.”
But this she believes whole-heart edly: “So much is about communica tion. … I shoot e-mails back and forth to our teachers all the time. They wel come the ideas, and they’re quick to respond.”
Proficiency vs. a basic understanding
Among many educators and state officials, there is a growing consen sus that proficiency must be rede fined.
On the surface, it looks like Michi gan students are doing well on the MEAP exam. In 2008, for instance, 76% to 87% passed the elementary and middle school reading test, while 64% to 88% passed the math exam.
But those numbers are mislead ing.
“What we call proficient is really basic,” state schools Superintendent Mike Flanagan said.
The state has been using a defini tion that says a proficient student is one who masters “the basic skills we expect for every single student,” said Joseph Martineau, director of the of fice of educational assessment and accountability at the state education department.
Now the state wants proficiency to mean students exhibit a grasp of skills they’ll need to be ready for col lege and careers. In fifth-grade math, that could mean the difference be tween a basic question that asks stu dents to multiply two numbers and a more complex question asking them to multiply two numbers, then do two more sets of calculations.
The relatively low bar on the MEAP means there’s a huge dispar ity between what it takes to be profi cient on the MEAP and on the NAEP. In 2007, for instance, 86% of Michi gan fourth-graders who took the MEAP math exam were considered proficient or advanced, while only 40% met that distinction on the NAEP exam.
Some say the reason the bar has been set so low in Michigan is be-
KATHLEEN GALLIGAN/Detroit Free Press
cause teachers are an influential part of committees that help determine what should be considered proficient. “It’s human nature,” Shakrani said. “You don’t want kids to fail, and you don’t want to look bad yourself, so you don’t set the bar too high, whereby not too many students will be able to get over it.”
Shakrani suggests it’s happening across the country.
Susan Neuman, professor of edu cational studies at the University of Michigan, blames No Child Left Be hind, the federal law that she helped develop when she served as U.S. as sistant secretary of elementary and secondary education under Presi dent George W. Bush.
The NCLB law requires states to identify schools that don’t meet ade quate yearly progress based on the percentage of students deemed profi cient on state exams, and Neuman said that in many states, the stan dards were lowered so fewer schools would be identified. The law had bi partisan support in Congress, par tially because of such flexibility.
“We didn’t have the political cap ital” to intervene after the law passed, she said.
Flanagan said he doesn’t believe politics have played any part in the stan dards for MEAP being so low. But he ac knowledges the bar has to increase.
He said the time has come for proficien cy on the MEAP to mean more.
Said Martineau: “We are no longer in an economic situation where you can graduate from high school with basic skills and get a good job.”
Flaws in the system
Bill Schmidt, co-director of the Educa tion Policy Center at Michigan State Uni versity, said part of the problem in Michi gan is that there is little consistency in how the state’s standards are taught in the classroom.
A study he’s working on of 30 school districts in Michigan and 30 in Ohio is finding huge disparities in what’s being taught from one district to the next — even from one classroom to the next in the same building. A teacher in one third grade classroom might spend 100 days covering basic arithmetic, while a teacher in another spends 20 days.
“There’s this mythology in the United States that it’s OK for teachers to decide what should be taught in a classroom, that when the door is shut, it’s the teacher’s responsibility to make those types of deci sions,” Schmidt said. “Nowhere else in the rest of the world is that even thought to be the case.”
The disparities illustrate why it’s nec essary for teachers to follow a set curricu lum from school to school, district to dis trict, Schmidt said.
“There will be no improvement in Michigan until we deal with that,” he said. June Teisan, a science teacher at Harp er Woods Secondary School, disagrees. The former Michigan Teacher of the Year said teachers should understand what the state standards are and teach them in the classroom. But she worries that a pre scribed curriculum that tells teachers what to teach and when to teach it “ties the hands of educators.”
Schmidt said he believes Michigan is heading in the right direction by being part of the process of developing common national standards. If more students fail the MEAP as a result, Schmidt said, that will put pressure on teachers to produce better results.
In addition, Flanagan said, recent legis lation that will make student growth a sig nificant part of teacher evaluations also may spur teachers to ensure the stan dards are being taught. If too many kids fail, a teacher is likely to be downgraded in his evaluation. The idea is to remove inef fective teachers.
“It’s going to show up,” Flanagan said.
| CONTACT LORI HIGGINS: 313-222-6651 OR LHIGGINS@FREEPRESS.COM.STAFF WRITER ROBIN ERB CONTRIBUTED TO THIS REPORT.
Students’ attitudes a major obstacle to learning, prof says
High grades and test scores don’t always mean students have the crit ical- thinking skills and tenacity they need for college. “The ill-prepared, we can address,” MSU prof Carl Taylor says. “The attitude is tougher.”
By ROBIN ERB
FREE PRESS EDUCATION WRITER
What gets Carl Taylor is not what his students don’t know; it’s that many don’t care what they don’t know.
The sociology professor at Michigan State University calls it the “normalization of igno rance” — a culture in which the definitions of reading and writ ing are what can be texted or Fa cebooked.
Taylor and others say that for many of today’s youths, a Google search counts as heady re search. And composition is cut and- paste.
“They’re moving so fast, the only thing that matters is the end,” said Taylor, who grew up in Detroit and has spent years researching youth culture.
Too often, these students head to college without the crit ical- thinking skills, patience and tenacity needed for even entry level courses.
Add to the mix a sense of enti tlement — groomed over the years by parents who feed it and teachers who get tired of fight ing it, Taylor said.
“I’ve always had concerned parents, but in this past decade — and it gets worse every year — you get this indignant, pissed off student, who returns with an indignant, pissed-off parent,” he said.
Parents have complained to him about his no-tolerance poli cy for tardy students and his un wavering deadlines on class as signments. They’ve demanded changes for their college-age children’s grades.
For too many teachers in kin dergarten through 12th grades, he said, it’s not worth the con stant fights with parents, stu dents and administrators to keep working with a below-aver age student. Rather, it’s easier to pass along the problem: “In the end, it’s not worth the battle.”
Taylor said a senior recently asked for his help in getting a job. When he criticized her cover let ter, in which she wrote that she looked forward to “hereing” from her potential boss, she was annoyed.
“The ill-prepared, we can ad dress; the attitude is tougher,” he said.
| CONTACT ROBIN ERB: 313-222-2708 OR RERB@FREEPRESS.COM
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