Fall Semester Reflection #5: Kindle Project

Posted on by Mark Isero

favicon I love reading and I love technology. That’s why I love having Kindles in my classroom.

This semester, I used my five classroom Kindles (now six — thanks, Wil!) in two ways: (1) to promote independent reading in my Advisory, (2) to promote close reading in AP English.

Here’s what I’ve found:

1. Some students love reading on the Kindle.  One of my advisees reported that she read much more this semester than ever before. Usually, I let my advisees borrow a Kindle for a month. She wouldn’t give hers back!

2. The Kindle is not as good for close academic reading as it is for immersive independent reading. One of my students in AP English said she liked annotating books on the Kindle, but most said the device was difficult to navigate. Specifically, the lack of page numbers on many titles led to student confusion and difficulty in following along in discussion with the rest of the class.

3. The Kindle is great for students who struggle with reading. One of my students used the Kindle’s text-to-speech to help her through a challenging book. The ability to change the font size on the Kindle also helps readers persist through frustration.

4. The Kindle is not great at helping students find books to read. Although my classroom Kindles hold many high-interest books, my students have trouble selecting new ones to read. That’s partly because the Kindle interface does little to connect readers to new books. Yes, you can view the book’s title, but it’s not in color. Yes, you can search the Amazon store, but that’s not ideal. After all, there’s nothing on the Kindle that’s equivalent to having a large classroom library with physical books with colorful covers.

5. The Kindle’s tech novelty wears off quickly for students — but that’s a good thing. Some students’ excitement for the E-Ink Kindle may drop over time. But what I love about the Kindle is that there are no distractions. It’s a reading device, and that’s what it’s for.

For next semester, I plan on focusing my Kindle project solely on independent reading in my Advisory. Instead of distributing my six Kindles to two different projects, I’m going to put more resources into what the Kindle is good at: immersive reading.

Because my students are seniors and ready to graduate, I have just a few months to ensure that they become lifelong readers. I look forward to the task of connecting my students to high-quality books that speak to them and challenge their perspective of the world.

One more thing: I have exciting news! This Friday, my student Antonio and I will be on The Kindle Chronicles, Len Edgerly’s podcast “all about your Kindle.” It’s an honor to be on the show, which I’ve listened to for more than a year. I hope you’ll check out the podcast this Friday! favicon

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CCSA’s public call for charter school closures is wrong

Posted on by Mark Isero

favicon The California Charter Schools Association last Thursday called for the closure of Leadership High School and nine other charter schools in the state, citing academic underperformance.

CCSA President Jed Wallace said that the organization is “taking a lead role in ensuring appropriate academic accountability” by “establishing clear and transparent academic performance expectations for charter schools.”

I don’t have a problem with the organization weighing in on the charter school conversation. After all, the CCSA is the state’s leading advocacy group for charter schools, and accountability is important.

Nevertheless, the CCSA’s unprecedented public call for the immediate closure of 10 schools is an aggressive move geared to garner political support, rather than to advocate for quality education. Here’s why the CCSA is wrong:

1. The CCSA recommends school closures on criteria not based on law. In setting up its “Minimum Criteria for Renewal,” the CCSA has created performance metrics that do not follow current California law (Education Code Section 47607). To justify its extralegal criteria, the organization cites Ed Code Section 47605(b), a more general provision, which stipulates that the district may issue requirements to ensure the school does not have an “unsound educational program.” Instead of relying on districts to interpret current law, the CCSA wishes to inject its own, new criteria without legislative consideration.

2. The CCSA does not trust local districts to evaluate their charter schools fairly. In its FAQ about the public call for non-renewal, the CCSA states that districts have applied existing criteria unevenly, which has resulted in “the re-authorization of charters that depart significantly from the statewide distribution of academic performance that would be considered acceptable.” In other words, local districts have made mistakes in renewing charter schools and should not be counted on to make the right decision. Even though the CCSA claims it does not want to become a regulatory agency with the authority to close schools, that’s exactly what’s happening here.

3. The CCSA wants to close schools because of test scores but questions their validity. When it comes to testing, the CCSA is all over the map. On the one hand, the CCSA argues that test scores are fundamental:

Our framework — measured by testing — is the ‘bones’ of a sound structure. Without the ‘bones,’ there is no foundation, no robustness, and nothing to hang all the other things we know to be important in a child’s education.

In another part of the FAQ, the CCSA states that test scores provide appropriate benchmarks and levels of performance to evaluate schools. That’s why the state’s Academic Performance Index (API) is CCSA’s leading criterion for its recommendation to close the 10 charter schools.

On the other hand, the organization discredits the Academic Performance Index as “not there yet” but hesitates  to call the system “useless.” Most interesting is that the CCSA replaces the state’s Similar Schools Rank with its own “Similar Schools Measure,” claiming that state results “fluctuate significantly from year to year” and “have limited use in assessing the soundness” of charter schools. In short, the CCSA is using part of the state’s assessment system but throwing out the rest, thus devising its own evaluation process.

4. The CCSA modified its initial list of failing schools to single out schools for immediate elimination. In its press release, the CCSA states that 31 schools, or 3.2 percent of the 982 charter schools in California, did not meet minimum criteria. Yet only 10 schools, just 1 percent, made its final list for closure. The reason for the shorter list, according to the CCSA, is that these 10 schools face charter renewal before June 2012. Therefore, instead of naming all failing schools, the CCSA targets a small percentage, based on new criteria, and offers no time to improve. In its quest to appear tough on school accountability, the CCSA orchestrated its final list to make it more palatable.

I teach at Leadership High School, so it makes sense that I’m critical of the CCSA’s public call to close my school. Still, it’s apparent that the organization is doing this for political gain and not to improve student achievement.

For the first time ever, the CCSA is going over the heads of its member schools and daring local districts to close them. I am hopeful that the SFUSD Board of Education will see through this political move and consider Leadership High School’s application based on its merits and charter school law, rather than on the CCSA’s misguided criteria.

What do you think? favicon

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Fall Semester Reflection #4: Office Hours

Posted on by Mark Isero

favicon One of the reasons all my students passed last semester is that I intervened early. I identified four struggling students and encouraged them to attend office hours after school every Tuesday.

For the most part, they did — and their effort paid off. In addition to my support, my students each got a personal grammar coach to help them one-on-one with their writing. It was pretty neat.

Now that it’s Winter Break, I’m trying to figure out how I can best use my lunch and after-school time to support my students. After all, besides the students I forced, only a few others attended office hours regularly. That left me underutilized.

If my students really want to pass the AP test, they will need to extend their learning day. And they will need me to push them.

My current idea is to split up my class into five groups and to have them attend office hours as a cohort once per week for 30 minutes. At our weekly meetings, we’d do a variety of activities, depending on what we’re doing in class or based on the group’s needs.

Thirty minutes a week doesn’t sound like much, but I’m hopeful that the time will lead to additional learning opportunities outside office hours. Right now, my students don’t naturally depend on each other for support. By introducing this structure, I am hopeful that we’ll see some momentum, some urgency.

On the negative side, by mandating that my students attend — and by prescribing how we’ll work together — I do run the risk of being less available for students when their curiosity (or anxiety) emerges naturally. It’s possible that their intrinsic motivation will decline.

What do you think? How should I organize office hours next semester? favicon

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Leadership High School: The power of headlines to mislead

Posted on by Mark Isero

favicon A nervous student called me today. “Mr. Isero, our school is going to close,” she said.

“No, it’s not,” I replied.

“But I read it in the newspaper,” she said.

She was right. She had read an article on SF Gate with the headline, “S.F. Leadership High on state’s list of 10 for closure.”

And she had read “Poor test scores may shut Leadership High in San Francisco” in The Examiner.

Unfortunately, because of poorly written headlines, my student — and thousands more — received a misleading representation of the truth.

In fact, the school is not on the state’s list for closure, as the Chronicle suggested. That’s just false. And while it’s true that test scores are influential in our current climate, there’s no evidence to suggest that the school’s charter renewal is in jeopardy.

The truth is: (1) A charter school association recommended our school’s closure because of low test scores, (2) That organization has no authority over the school’s existence, (3) The school applies for charter renewal with the district’s Board of Education this Spring.

If you read the entirety of the articles, both writers — Jill Tucker and Amy Crawford — do an adequate job reporting the story. After all, when you’re pressured with a deadline and limited space, it’s hard to get deep into nuances.

But most people are influenced mainly by an article’s headline. That’s what we read first. That’s what grabs our attention.

Unfortunately, it’s standard practice in journalism that an article’s headline writer is different from an article’s writer.

A headline writer must quickly scan an article for its contents and write a headline that fits the amount of space in the newspaper or on a website.

In both the Chronicle and the Examiner’s stories, the headlines are misleading — and have caused a great deal of anxiety. If I distrusted the news media (which I don’t — I have a deep respect for journalism), I would say the headline writer knew exactly what he or she was doing in order to sell papers and cause controversy.

More likely, this was just an oversight. As our school deals with this media barrage, however, I’m reminded by what I tell my students: Every word matters. favicon

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Leadership High School is not slated to close

Posted on by Mark Isero

favicon Even though my students read seven books, wrote 14 essays, and averaged 10 hours of homework a week this semester (in my class alone), I work at a failing school.

So says the California Charter Schools Association.

On Thursday, the organization — which has no authority over our school — recommended 10 schools for closure because of low test scores. My school, Leadership High School, was on the list. This press release prompted several misleading news reports and tons of anxiety in our school community.

The truth is, the CCSA does not choose whether our school gets its charter renewed. That authority goes to our district’s Board of Education.

The truth also is, our test scores are, indeed, low — if you look just at the overall score. But if you consider our performance with African American and Latino students, who make up 82 percent of our population, our results surpass those of other schools in San Francisco. Please read our school’s response.

In our current political climate, it’s easy to overgeneralize, and it’s easy to point fingers. That’s what’s happening here. With our economy down, money is tight, and that means emotions are strong. Charter schools run the gamut and are not widely understood as public schools. Because everyone pays taxes and has attended school, everyone has an opinion. People’s full selves — positive and negative, compassionate and mean-spirited, magnanimous and racist — come out when talking about public schools.

I’m proud to work at Leadership High School. That’s why I’ve been here 12 years. We do important work. I look forward to our charter renewal process in February with the Board of Education. I am hopeful that its seven members will follow the process and look closely at all the facts, rather than succumb to simplistic rhetoric. favicon