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Fix, Don’t Discard MCAS/PARCC

This fall I had one on one conversations with many of our state's leaders and experts on the misplaced opposition to testing in gen...

Sunday, September 29, 2013

How should schools address the parenting gap?

The UCLA Center for Mental Health in Schools publishes a low budget, awkwardly formatted monthly newsletter that frequently contains strong content with good citations. When I see good content, I will re-format and post here.

According to Richard V. Reeves and Kimberly Howard in a recent report for the Center on Children and Families at Brooking entitled The Parenting Gap, "public policy to address the parenting gap falls into one of two broad camps: building the skills of parents, or providing services to supplement their efforts. The first set seeks to make parents better; the latter to make them less relevant."

The Center suggests that the focus on parents and families needs to be broader, more multifaceted, and embedded into a unified and comprehensive system of learning supports designed to address barriers to learning and teaching.   In this context, interventions to enhance home involvement and engagement must
1.      focus on all who play significant care taking roles with a school's students (including parent surrogates and older siblings; the foster care system)
2.      address factors interfering with school learning and performance directly outreach to those who are reluctant to engage with the school, especially if they have a child who is not doing well make a continuous effort to re-engage those who have become disconnected.

Moreover, our experience is that for this to play out well at a school requires ensuring that a learning supports component is fully integrated into school improvement policy and practice.

For resources related to this broader perspective on home involvement, see
· Enhancing Home Involvement to Address Barriers to Learning: A Collaborative Process
· Engaging the strengths of Families, Youth, and Communities in Rebuilding Learning Supports
· Engaging and Re-engaging Families When a Student is Not Doing Well
· Home Involvement in Schooling: A Self-Study Survey (Tools for Practice)

Saturday, September 28, 2013

TEDx Talk

I will be presenting my ideas about Blogs and Badges at TEDx Beacon Street.
Registration is now officially open for TEDxBeaconStreet
Our second annual conference will again be held at the Graham Gund-designed, award-winning Lincoln School in Brookline MA on November 16 and 17th.  
 
TEDxBeaconStreet 2013 is actually 3 conferences...sign up for the sessions that you plan to attend.

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Saturday morning, November 16.  Designed to be multi-generational and interesting for children 4th grade and up. We are proud to be an anchor site for TEDxYouth Day. Our program will be simulcast worldwide by TED.
 
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Saturday afternoon, November 16 and all day Sunday, November 17 - our main event.
 
 
 
 
 
 Late Sunday afternoon, November 17. We're proud to host a Google Solve for <x> session to hear about and discuss radical technology ideas for solving global problems. In this session, speakers will present "moonshot ideas", followed by a facilitated discussion of the ideas.  Learn more about Solve for <x> here. 
 
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Simulcasts will be held at Google on November 16 and at the MIT Media Lab on November 17, if you prefer Cambridge locations.   
 
Grow our Community
We honor our audience as much as our speakers. Please spread the word and invite friends and colleagues. Our mission is to create an inclusive, interesting community made up of people from all walks of life.
 
Get Involved
We have already started working with our amazing speakers (check them out here) and are looking for volunteers to help coach them as they prepare for the "talk of their life". We are hosting practice sessions every Tuesday in September and October, and on Wednesdays starting in October.  If you are interested in speaker coaching, please sign up on our volunteer page .
 
Finally, we need a lot of help to get ready for this conference - if you would like to be in the inner circle, actively designing and producing this amazing conference, please sign up here.  We will get in touch with you to figure out the best way for you to get involved!
 
Looking forward to seeing you all in November!

 

 

 

Thursday, September 26, 2013

Somerville's Growth Growth

These two graphs, show the improvement in Somerville's instructional impact from 2011 to 2013 among districts with 1000 or more students.
 


2011 Student Growth Percentile (SGP) for MA School Districts with 1,000 or More Students
2011
2013 Student Growth Percentile (SGP)  for MA School Districts with 1,000 or More Students
2013
 
As you can plainly see, Somerville has leaped ahead of our neighboring communities in impact on learning in English and math, as measured by MCAS.
 
 According to the City's press release, the district made this progress due to the following five actions:

1.   Somerville Schools have improved general instruction in every classroom by setting high, formal standards

2.   Targeted instructional support that predicts student performance and intervenes early supports Somerville’s richly diverse student population and a wide range of educational backgrounds and learning abilities

3.   Remediation initiatives quickly adapt to students targeted for instructional support—providing intervention to students at risk of a decline in proficiency before they begin to decline

4.   Technology brings leading edge techniques to the classroom and provides the data points that return information fast and quickly to teachers, constantly measuring student progress throughout the year, improving communication between teachers, students and parents or guardians, and empowering teachers and the district to stay nimble and proactive in adapting to the individual needs of each student

5.    Somerville has expanded academic opportunities both before and after school, while addressing the education and needs of the whole child.
While these measures are not everything, they are a very, very good sign that things are working better for the school district's core responsibility to educate every child in English and math.  Much more work needs to be done by the schools, parents, and community groups to ensure that all parts of our kids progress equally, including engineering and arts.

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Got Hip?



Got Hip?

Somerville finds itself (by definition a suburb, yet still a city) in an interesting position as the effects of hipness and gentrification point to seemingly distinct paths.

·         One is like other hipster havens in Brooklyn or Wicker Park – places that have retained a shade of the counterculture tendencies that define hipster identity.

·         Two is like mature urban inner ring suburbs, Brookline and Cambridge being two local examples.

The latter can claim to be cool but lack the authenticity of Somerville’s creative culture. The former over deliver on cool and trendiness and priceyness but because they are neighborhoods within New York and Chicago (or any large city) respectively, under deliver on the city services that suburbs provide.
 
Whatever happens, the hipsters likely won’t be a permanent part of Somerville history as it’s usually the politicians or the wealthy elite of any given place that decide its fate. For now the trendy capital of Metro Boston can pat itself on its plaid-clad back, and keep its beanie cap-covered-head high.

Whither Somerville?

 by Andrew Zimmermann
 
<http://www.urbanophile.com/2013/09/17/boston-whither-somerville-by-andrew-zimmermann/>

Urbanophile reader Andrew Zimmermann sends us this tale of change in Somerville, a suburban town near Boston

Urban planners have long cast the artist and gay/lesbian communities as urban pioneers and harbingers of gentrification. We’ve heard the stories of North Halsted in Chicago, the Pearl District in Portland, the South End in Boston and Soho/Chelsea in Manhattan. But, ever since hipsters became part of the sub-culture lexicon, urban experts have blamed gentrification on them. From Williamsburg, Brooklyn to the Mission in San Francisco hipster havens have continued to demonstrate that gentrification isn’t limited to the artists or gays (although I’m not sure there is much of difference). The latest installment, not to anyone’s surprise in the Boston area, is Somerville<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerville,_Massachusetts>, which was the subject of a recent piece<http://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/style/2013/08/22/some-somerville-worry-become-too-hip-for-its-own-good/Ibas2h5Q5p9MTl82qQ2OwK/story.html> by Beth Teitell in the Boston Globe.

Somerville’s back story is what you would expect of a turn-around tale in urban terms. Inner Ring suburb – check. Architecturally rich yet deteriorated housing stock – check. Mass transit connectivity – check. Cheap rents – check (well not anymore). Walkable, dense urban neighborhoods – check. Enter artists, gays but more overwhelmingly, hipsters, or so portends the title of the Globe article “Somerville worries it’s growing too hip”. Somerville is noteworthy however in a couple ways. First, it is the densest city in all of New England, almost exclusively achieved through low-rise residential housing types – think triple deckers, condos and townhomes. Second, local government has proved not to be a hindrance, instead turning it from a crime ridden place known as “Slummerville” to among the state’s best run municipalities<http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2006/05/14/the_model_city/>. The schools however have a long way to go (we’ll discuss later).

As the story points out if gays, artists and hipsters are the first adopters, it won’t take long for the effects of gentrification to show themselves through drastic changes to the retail sector and the good ol’ barometer of choice, housing prices. Let’s take a look at both, since the retail and real estate sectors approach gentrifying neighborhoods much more systematically than do our hipster friends.

Retail
If you’ve visited Davis Square recently, you know that the retail landscape has changed drastically in the last decade. Walgreens and Starbucks are among your anchor tenants. The food and beverage offerings have gone from cheap working-class linoleum floor eateries to upscale bistros and kitchens and cantinas. Alfresco’s, a modest Italian restaurant got rebranded as M3<http://imwithmeat.com/home.html>, a “concept in southern dining” replete with catfish, chalkboard paint tables straight from a Pinterest board and plenty of canned beer you’ve never heard of. Likewise, the Painted Burro<http://thepaintedburro.com/>, which calls itself a “Mexican Kitchen and Tequila Bar”, expanded in less than a year into the space occupied by Spike’s Junkyard Dogs – a blue collar, fluorescent lit hole in the wall. It won’t be missed – and no you still can’t get a table midweek at the “burro” without a reservation. That doesn’t even begin to describe the explosion of fro-yo shops<http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2013/05/25/pinkberry-orange-leaf-and-more-charting-frozen-yogurt-gold-rush/vZZ5RMe2MVUV6u7g9Eo8tM/story.html> in Davis which saw its count jump from zero to three in the last year. Even if the new smell wears off, as Teitell’s article depicts, top local chefs are elbowing their way into Somerville to be part of the action.

Elsewhere in town, the loveable loser Johnny Foodmaster grocery chain has been supplanted by Stop & Shop and Whole Foods. You don’t need to be from Boston to know that when Whole Foods takes over for any grocer, things they are a changing. The fact that national behemoths like Starbucks, Chipotle, Pinkberry and Whole Foods are betting on Somerville is telling of what stage of gentrification the city is now experiencing. If retail is said to follow rooftops, then clearly retailers are paying attention to who is underneath those rooftops. Somerville’s population has largely remained static while its demographics<http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/25/2562535lk.html> have changed considerably. It’s now home to the second largest concentration of 24-35 year olds in the country – a Neilsen analyst’s version of shooting fish in a barrel.

[http://www.urbanophile.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/somerville1.png]
Population hasn’t changed since 1980 – but WHO composes that population has.

Real Estate
It wasn’t long ago that “Slummerville<http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Slummerville>” was a moniker real estate agents had to overcome when selling homes in Somerville. The days of getting bargains in town have largely disappeared as developers have chopped up large three story homes into condos and townhomes that routinely sell for $500/sf or more. Hipster populations in Somerville’s Davis Square have migrated within city lines to places like Union Square, Magoun Square and East Somerville. Even with a red-hot real estate market in greater Boston, Somerville remains white hot.

Red Fin reports a 103% sale to list ratio with a median home price of $470,000 and an average of 28% down in the second quarter of 2013. Clearly its not 24-35 year old hipsters putting down an average of $131,000 to claim of piece of Somerville as their own. White Collar professionals and families are among the early late majority that are betting on Somerville just as much as Starbucks and Whole Foods are. The loss of affordable housing and diversity would be lamentable if it weren’t so inevitably predictable. It’s not as if riders of fixed gear bikes wearing skinny jeans have disappeared, they just have to dodge baby strollers on the sidewalks and VWs, Mini Coppers and Audis in the streets.

[http://www.urbanophile.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/somerville2.png]
Davis Square and Inman Square are no bargain any more.

Schools
Lastly, all the kids in strollers will need a place to attend school someday. If only Somerville were that place. SchoolDigger.com<http://SchoolDigger.com> recently rated the city 299th out 325 school systems<http://www.schooldigger.com/go/MA/districtrank.aspx> state wide. For all the progress Mayor Joe Curtatone has made, he’s clearly focused on the early adopters and the hipness of the city, with the schools as a longer term project. It might be sensible, but he and the city are running out of time. The Wellesleys, Newtons and Miltons might lack hipsters or artists or gays but they have a leg up on schools, an advantage suburbia has always had over the urban core. Undoubtedly its schools will have to do better and they will as gentrification will lead to higher standards, be they in the retail, real estate or city services sectors.

Somerville finds itself (by definition a suburb, yet still a city) in an interesting position as the effects of hipness and gentrification point to seemingly distinct paths. One is like other hipster havens<http://www.forbes.com/sites/morganbrennan/2012/09/20/americas-hippest-hipster-neighborhoods/> in Brooklyn or Wicker Park – places that have retained a shade of the counterculture tendencies that define hipster identity. Two is like mature urban inner ring suburbs, Brookline and Cambridge being two local examples. The latter can claim to be cool but lack the authenticity of Somerville’s creative culture. The former over deliver on cool and trendiness and priceyness but because they are neighborhoods within New York and Chicago (or any large city) respectively, under deliver on the city services that suburbs provide. Whatever happens, the hipsters likely won’t be a permanent part of Somerville history as it’s usually the politicians or the wealthy elite of any given place that decide its fate. For now the trendy capital of Metro Boston can pat itself on its plaid-clad back, and keep its beanie cap-covered-head high. See you at Chipotle.

Andrew Zimmermann is an architect and urban designer with NBBJ<http://www.nbbj.com/>, a global architecture firm with a presence in Boston. He lives in Somerville’s Davis Square with his wife and occasionally writes about design, real estate or anything that he finds interesting on www.zimmswhim.com<http://www.zimmswhim.com/>.



Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Somerville 2013 Growth Scores

Somerville schools are starting to show strong quality in terms of student growth.  Growth is a measure of the value added by the school, controlling for the student’s prior performance, as compared with each student’s statewide academic peers.  In this way Chelsea and Wellesley can be measured on a common scale for quality, although their students start in dramatically different places.  A 66 SGP means that 2/3rds of the students in that school grow more than other students statewide with the same previous score.  Growth below 40 is low and should be of concern.  Growth over 60 is high and should be celebrated. 

 As you can see from the table below, all but one subject in one school is now above 50, better than average, and several schools show very high growth and major gains in growth.  Of particular note are the Brown in Math and High School in English, although there are several other high growth scores.  I would also point out that the W Somerville, which had low growth for the past five years, is now showing high growth as well.