2008-09 ADEQUATE YEARLY PROGRESS (AYP) RESULTS:
MANY MORE SCHOOLS FAIL IN MOST STATES
October 24, 2008
In virtually every state that has released AYP results this SCHOOL YEAR (these are results based on 2007-08 tests that determine status for schools for the 2008-09 school year) the number of schools failing to make AYP has increased, dramatically so in many cases. In several states the rate at which schools are failing AYP doubled, tripled, and even quadrupled. These results are not unexpected.
AYP forces all states, school districts, and schools on a march to 100% proficiency by 2013-14. Each state had to establish a trajectory setting out for each year the percentage of students who must score proficient or higher on the state's reading and math test. Those proficiency percentages, or AYP thresholds, must increase over time to reach the 100% mandate. States do not have to raise the bar every year, but must do so at least once every three years. This is one of the years in which every state raised the bar to make AYP.
In addition, several states set their AYP trajectory so that much larger yearly rates of increases in the percentage of students who must be proficient occur in the last half of the 12-year path toward the required 100 percent proficient level. These “balloon payments” are likely to result in even larger rates of schools failing AYP in the next several years.
Indeed, several states that have conducted projections of AYP results in the year 2013-13 predict that between 75 and 99 percent of all school will fail AYP. A just-published analysis in the scholarly journal Science of AYP in California showed that almost all California elementary schools would fail to meet AYP by 2014.
Examples of state AYP results:
• Alabama: the percentage of schools failing AYP declined slightly from 17.8 percent last year to 16.6 percent this year.
• Alaska: the percentage of schools failing AYP increased from 34.1 percent to 41.3 percent.
• Arizona: the percentage of schools failing AYP held steady at 28 percent.
• California: the percentage of schools failing AYP increased from 33 percent to 48 percent, with only 34 percent of middle schools making AYP.
• Colorado: The percentage of schools failing AYP rose to 40 percent this year, up from 25 percent last year.
• Connecticut: the number of schools failing AYP rose to 40 percent, with 408 schools failing – 100 more than last year.
• Delaware: the percentage of schools not making AYP stayed the same as last year, with 33.8 percent failing to make AYP.
• Florida: the percentage of schools failing AYP increased
All states are in the release.
For more information contact:
National Education Association
Beth Foley (BFoley@nea,.org) or Joel Packer (JPacker@nea.org)
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
A Teacher's Anger: Schools, markets and moral failure
A Teacher’s Anger: Markets, Moral Hazards And Schools
http://edwize.org/a-teachers-anger-markets-moral-hazards-and-schools
Over the last year, as the growing economic crisis took a grim toll among working Americans unable to make mortgage payments on their homes, we witnessed the introduction of a term of art from laissez-faire market economics into our national political conversation. It would be wrong for government to provide assistance to those facing foreclosure and the loss of their homes, we were told again and again, because such aid would create a moral hazard. The dream of working Americans to own their own home has led to financially risky behavior, the logic went, as too many bought homes beyond their means. When an economic downturn makes it impossible for these working homeowners to make ends meet, they have to face the hard consequences of their risky behavior: the loss of their home. Rescue them and others will be encouraged to engage in economically risky behavior. Market discipline must rule, unchallenged, whatever carnage it leaves in its wake.
Yet in recent weeks, as Wall Street’s leading financial institutions came crashing down, one after the other like falling dominoes, one heard no talk of moral hazards. When it comes to finance banks, insurance companies and mortgage providers, a different logic had to apply. If these corporate leviathans are subjected to harsh market discipline, if they are not rescued, we are now told, the American and global economies will collapse, resulting in a massive economic privation. It matters not that in this instance the risky economic behavior was in the service of sheer greed, as those with millions and billions of dollars sought more and more, rather than a modest dream to own your own home. All that is important is that the insolvency of Wall Street’s leading financial institutions would bring economic disaster far beyond their particular bottom lines.
Secretary of Treasury Henry Paulson, who was the CEO of the finance bank Goldman Sachs before he took his current position in the Bush administration, proposed that the rescue of Wall Street involve the unconditional handover of $700 billion. The legislation he brought to Congress gave him the sole authority over the use of this unprecedented amount of money. He and his one-time colleagues on Wall Street fought against provisions which would place limits on the pay of the executives of the rescued corporations, restricting the obscene bonuses and golden parachutes that were symptomatic of the current crisis, on the grounds that this would undermine the incentive of corporate brass to work hard. Incredibly, opposition was also mounted to providing financial aid to homeowners facing foreclosure. It was only Congressional resistance that forced Paulson and the Bush administration even partially off these positions.
Let’s be clear: massive government intervention is clearly necessary if we are to avert a total economic meltdown and the immense harm it would inflict on working people around the globe. But it must not be done on the terms of Wall Street and the Bush administration. Their economic vision treats private profits as sacred, but quickly loses market religion when it comes to socializing corporate losses and having working Americans pick up their bill with our taxes and cuts in our essential public services. Instead, America needs a new New Deal. An effective rescue package will have to address the structural causes of this crisis, restoring the public interest by re-regulating and redirecting an economy where corporate greed has been given free rein. It will need to stimulate economic growth and create new jobs through government spending, provide needed aid to working homeowners, and protect essential public services and the social service safety net. If government is going to save Wall Street from its own folly and avarice with our tax money, the public must have an ownership share in those institutions, and the public must recoup its investment when these corporations turn a profit once again. The government intervention that seems to have had the most positive effect in the current crisis – the purchase of equity shares in the troubled financial institutions – was fashioned by the British Labour government, and the power to implement it in the U.S. was written into law by Congressional Democrats, with the Bush administration unhappily bringing up the rear.
Working Americans have much good reason to be very angry about these developments, and none more so than teachers. For the last decade, Wall Street financiers, hedge fund operators and corporate moguls, together with the market fundamentalists who provide them their ideological support, have been mounting a steady drumbeat of attacks on public schools and on the educators who have dedicated their professional lives to teaching and caring for our children. Our schools are failing and our teachers are incompetent, they repeated again and again in a systematic effort to delegitimize public education, and market based reforms and privatization will make everything right. They know as much about education as Sarah Palin knows about foreign policy: they could see a school from their house. But for them ignorance was bliss: it meant that the laissez-faire market could be the answer to every educational question, without any danger of troubling information on what that actually meant in practice. One might think that the catastrophic failure of the financial markets of Wall Street they had fought to deregulate and remove from public oversight and checks and balances would have led to a little pause and a second thought or two on the wisdom of unfettered, unregulated markets in education. But let’s face it: there is not much capacity for self-reflection in these circles. The work of defending and improving the public schools that are vital to American democracy will rest with those of us who actually work in their classrooms.
Now more than ever, America needs a vibrant and flourishing public square, with public education at its center. The pursuit of greed and excess, the idolatry of unregulated and uncontrolled markets, are no substitute for the pursuit of our common good and the support of our public purpose. We will now pay a heavy price for having forgotten and abandoned this truth of our republic, so as educators, we need to ensure that it is a lesson fully learned.
Leo Casey. NYC. from Edwize
http://edwize.org/a-teachers-anger-markets-moral-hazards-and-schools
Over the last year, as the growing economic crisis took a grim toll among working Americans unable to make mortgage payments on their homes, we witnessed the introduction of a term of art from laissez-faire market economics into our national political conversation. It would be wrong for government to provide assistance to those facing foreclosure and the loss of their homes, we were told again and again, because such aid would create a moral hazard. The dream of working Americans to own their own home has led to financially risky behavior, the logic went, as too many bought homes beyond their means. When an economic downturn makes it impossible for these working homeowners to make ends meet, they have to face the hard consequences of their risky behavior: the loss of their home. Rescue them and others will be encouraged to engage in economically risky behavior. Market discipline must rule, unchallenged, whatever carnage it leaves in its wake.
Yet in recent weeks, as Wall Street’s leading financial institutions came crashing down, one after the other like falling dominoes, one heard no talk of moral hazards. When it comes to finance banks, insurance companies and mortgage providers, a different logic had to apply. If these corporate leviathans are subjected to harsh market discipline, if they are not rescued, we are now told, the American and global economies will collapse, resulting in a massive economic privation. It matters not that in this instance the risky economic behavior was in the service of sheer greed, as those with millions and billions of dollars sought more and more, rather than a modest dream to own your own home. All that is important is that the insolvency of Wall Street’s leading financial institutions would bring economic disaster far beyond their particular bottom lines.
Secretary of Treasury Henry Paulson, who was the CEO of the finance bank Goldman Sachs before he took his current position in the Bush administration, proposed that the rescue of Wall Street involve the unconditional handover of $700 billion. The legislation he brought to Congress gave him the sole authority over the use of this unprecedented amount of money. He and his one-time colleagues on Wall Street fought against provisions which would place limits on the pay of the executives of the rescued corporations, restricting the obscene bonuses and golden parachutes that were symptomatic of the current crisis, on the grounds that this would undermine the incentive of corporate brass to work hard. Incredibly, opposition was also mounted to providing financial aid to homeowners facing foreclosure. It was only Congressional resistance that forced Paulson and the Bush administration even partially off these positions.
Let’s be clear: massive government intervention is clearly necessary if we are to avert a total economic meltdown and the immense harm it would inflict on working people around the globe. But it must not be done on the terms of Wall Street and the Bush administration. Their economic vision treats private profits as sacred, but quickly loses market religion when it comes to socializing corporate losses and having working Americans pick up their bill with our taxes and cuts in our essential public services. Instead, America needs a new New Deal. An effective rescue package will have to address the structural causes of this crisis, restoring the public interest by re-regulating and redirecting an economy where corporate greed has been given free rein. It will need to stimulate economic growth and create new jobs through government spending, provide needed aid to working homeowners, and protect essential public services and the social service safety net. If government is going to save Wall Street from its own folly and avarice with our tax money, the public must have an ownership share in those institutions, and the public must recoup its investment when these corporations turn a profit once again. The government intervention that seems to have had the most positive effect in the current crisis – the purchase of equity shares in the troubled financial institutions – was fashioned by the British Labour government, and the power to implement it in the U.S. was written into law by Congressional Democrats, with the Bush administration unhappily bringing up the rear.
Working Americans have much good reason to be very angry about these developments, and none more so than teachers. For the last decade, Wall Street financiers, hedge fund operators and corporate moguls, together with the market fundamentalists who provide them their ideological support, have been mounting a steady drumbeat of attacks on public schools and on the educators who have dedicated their professional lives to teaching and caring for our children. Our schools are failing and our teachers are incompetent, they repeated again and again in a systematic effort to delegitimize public education, and market based reforms and privatization will make everything right. They know as much about education as Sarah Palin knows about foreign policy: they could see a school from their house. But for them ignorance was bliss: it meant that the laissez-faire market could be the answer to every educational question, without any danger of troubling information on what that actually meant in practice. One might think that the catastrophic failure of the financial markets of Wall Street they had fought to deregulate and remove from public oversight and checks and balances would have led to a little pause and a second thought or two on the wisdom of unfettered, unregulated markets in education. But let’s face it: there is not much capacity for self-reflection in these circles. The work of defending and improving the public schools that are vital to American democracy will rest with those of us who actually work in their classrooms.
Now more than ever, America needs a vibrant and flourishing public square, with public education at its center. The pursuit of greed and excess, the idolatry of unregulated and uncontrolled markets, are no substitute for the pursuit of our common good and the support of our public purpose. We will now pay a heavy price for having forgotten and abandoned this truth of our republic, so as educators, we need to ensure that it is a lesson fully learned.
Leo Casey. NYC. from Edwize
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