We had two presentations on school reforms:
The first presentation is about the closing school models: close/ turnaround/ restart/ transformation. The models are highlighted in a YouTube video:
“It Can Be Done: Turning Around America’s Lowest Achieving Schools (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTiAPwpmLl0) In this presentation, we learned about the Title I School Improvement Grant Program and how the communities of Mobile, Alabama; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Chattanooga, Tennessee were successful in implementing turnaround, restart and transformation models to revitalize and transform their lowest performing schools.
The second presentation is about Race To The Top, abbreviated R2T, RTTT or RTT, is a $4.35 billion United States Department of Education contest created to spur innovation and reforms in state and local district K-12 education. The contest challenges state to create strategies in addressing 4 categories of reform: 1) Adopting Internationally benchmarked standards and assessments (to prepare for success in college and future workplaces); 2) Recruiting, developing, and rewarding effective educators; 3) Building data systems that measure student success and inform educators to improve instruction; and 4) Turn around lowest-achieving schools. A few states had won good funding while most others failed.
These presentations led to a good discussion about teachers’ concerns of jobs, quality of education, quality, and opportunity in general practice. Certainly, when schools are short of funding and resources, they will not be able to provide decent education for students. When the schools go under the evaluation pressure, the focus of education will be shifted to do more test preparation, rather than serious teaching and learning. When students fail to perform well on the assessment testing, the school may get closed and teachers will lose their jobs.
Can we distribute money equally among all the schools in the states? Actually, that funding will be insufficient to make a significant impact on all the schools in America if we choose to do so. The contest is based on the capitalism idea that schools may regard this as a good incentive to do better. This is the harsh reality. In American education, school funding was directly from the property tax. In a good school district, the housing prices are high, and the quality of education are equally high. The poorer school districts will never get enough funding. However, the school districts or states may stand a good chance by aiming high and taking good strategies and initiatives to change the school dynamics and win the grant to make a big difference.
