Today, as part of meeting new Federal requirements the California Department of Education (CDE) published a list of 187 "persistently lowest achieving schools" which will be required to implement one of four school intervention models:

• Turnaround Model: The local educational agency (LEA) undertakes a series of major school improvement actions, including but not limited to, replacing the principal and rehiring no more than 50 percent of the school's staff; adopting a new governance structure; and implementing an instructional program that is research-based and vertically aligned from one grade to the next, as well as aligned with California's adopted content standards.
• Restart Model: The LEA converts a school or closes and reopens a school under a charter school operator, a charter management organization (CMO), or an education management organization (EMO) that has been selected through a locally determined rigorous review process using state educational agency provided guidance. (A CMO is a non-profit organization that operates or manages charter schools by centralizing or sharing certain functions and resources among schools. An EMO is a for-profit or non-profit organization that provides "whole-school operation" services to a LEA.) A restart model school must enroll, within the grades it serves, any former student who wishes to attend the school.
• School Closure Model: The LEA closes a school and enrolls the students who attended that school in other schools in the LEA that are higher achieving. These other schools should be within reasonable proximity to the closed school and may include, but are not limited to, charter schools or new schools for which achievement data are not yet available.
• Transformation Model: The LEA implements a series of required school improvement strategies, including replacing the principal who led the school prior to implementation of the transformation model, and increasing instructional time.

Living here in Mendocino County, I am much more familiar with the marijuana industry than I would care to be. Not only do we live with the consequences of our state's effort to allow the medicinal use of pot, but our own county government has long taken a "don't ask, don't tell" approach since it represents a significant portion of our rural county's economy.

Many in my town favor legalization and argue that recreational use of marijuana is safer than alcohol.

It was nice to see this Pajama's Media column providing another view on the impact of marijuana use.

There’s no question that making drugs illegal creates serious problems for our criminal justice system. It clogs the courts, it corrupts police officers and government officials, and it funds some really sleazy people. All of this is true — but it turns out that there are some substantial social costs on the other side that simply don’t get any attention. While it may sound like I have been watching Reefer Madness (1936) – a tragically overwrought portrayal of the dangers of marijuana — it turns out that mental illness is one of those social costs.

A surprising number of scholarly studies in the last 25 years have demonstrated that marijuana use seems to cause an increase in psychoses such as schizophrenia, and somewhat less dramatic mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder.

Let me emphasize: This isn’t just correlation analysis — finding that people with a current mental illness are disproportionately potheads. I am well aware that people with significant mental illness problems tend to “self-medicate” using various psychoactive drugs (including alcohol). No, these are longitudinal studies that show the marijuana use comes first, with the mental illness later in life.

The first of these, involving Swedish conscripts, was published in the Lancet in 1987. Those who had used marijuana heavily by age 18 were six times more likely to develop schizophrenia. A British medical journal paper published in 2002 performed a longitudinal study in New Zealand and found that:

Firstly, cannabis use is associated with an increased risk of experiencing schizophrenia symptoms, even after psychotic symptoms preceding the onset of cannabis use are controlled for. … Secondly, early cannabis use (by age 15) confers greater risk for schizophrenia outcomes than later cannabis use (by age 18). The youngest cannabis users may be most at risk because their cannabis use becomes longstanding.

This paper, from the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2004, should also make you a bit concerned. From the abstract:

On an individual level, cannabis use confers an overall twofold increase in the relative risk for later schizophrenia. At the population level, elimination of cannabis use would reduce the incidence of schizophrenia by approximately 8%, assuming a causal relationship. Cannabis use appears to be neither a sufficient nor a necessary cause for psychosis. It is a component cause, part of a complex constellation of factors leading to psychosis.

One of my favorite web sites is the Mendocino County Sheriff's booking page. Being from a small town, this is attractive because sometimes I recognize people I went to school with or who served me at the local burger joint. Some of the pictures of the alleged criminals are quite amusing. Today, the name of one of the alleged criminals caught my attention. The gentleman's name is:

Larry Pee Wee Commander II

What makes it even more unfortunate is that apparently his Dad had this same name and he decided to give it to his son as well. With a name like that, this poor guy was born to a life of crime. He didn't have a chance. Read the rest of this post!

One of the big news stories this week is Central Falls High School in Rhode Island. The school district is under pressure from their state department of education to make some changes at the low performing school. This Providence Journal story describes the details.

The state’s tiniest, poorest city has become the center of a national battle over dramatic school reform. On the one side, federal and state education officials say they must take painful and dramatic steps to transform the nation’s lowest-performing schools. On the other side, teachers unions say such efforts undermine hard-won protections in their contracts.

“This is hard work and these are tough decisions, but students only have one chance for an education,” Education Secretary Duncan said, “and when schools continue to struggle we have a collective obligation to take action.”

Duncan is requiring states, for the first time, to identify their lowest 5 percent of schools — those that have chronically poor performance and low graduation rates — and fix them using one of four methods: school closure; takeover by a charter or school-management organization; transformation which requires a longer school day, among other changes; and “turnaround” which requires the entire teaching staff be fired and no more than 50 percent rehired in the fall.

State Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist moved swiftly on this new requirement, identifying on Jan. 11 six of the “persistently lowest-performing” schools: Central Falls High School, which has very low test scores and a graduation rate of 48 percent, and five schools in Providence. Gist also started the clock on the changes, telling the districts they had until March 17 to decide which of the models they wanted to use. Her actions make Rhode Island one of the first states to publicly release a list of affected schools and put into motion the new federal mandate.

Gallo and the teachers initially agreed they wanted the transformation model, which would protect the teachers’ jobs.

But talks broke down when the two sides could not agree on what transformation entailed.

Gallo wanted teachers to agree to a set of six conditions she said were crucial to improving the school. Teachers would have to spend more time with students in and out of the classroom and commit to training sessions after school with other teachers.

But Gallo said she could pay teachers for only some of the extra duties. Union leaders said they wanted teachers to be paid for more of the additional work and at a higher pay rate — $90 per hour rather than the $30 per hour offered by Gallo.

After negotiations broke down, Gallo said she no longer had confidence the high school could be transformed and instead recommended the turnaround model. Gist approved Gallo’s proposal Tuesday morning and gave the district 120 days to develop a detailed plan.

While I have another story about teacher quality, I'm not trying to pick on teachers today. Good education is about more than just teacher quality, but both of the stories I'm including today make the point that research shows that teacher quality is a major factor that shouldn't be ignored. In this Washington Post op ed, Melinda Gates writes about the importance of teacher quality and her foundation's efforts to improve it.

One reason I am so optimistic about these developments is because, after decades of diffuse reform efforts, they all zero in on the most important ingredient of a great education: effective teachers. The key to helping students learn is making sure that every child has an effective teacher every single year.

Teachers are at the center of our strategy at the Gates Foundation. Since my husband and I started investing in education 10 years ago, our foundation has partnered with more than 1,000 high schools. Our grantmaking wasn't always oriented around effective teaching, but gradually we noticed that the schools with the biggest gains were those doing revolutionary work inside the classroom.

Bill and I see evidence of this every time we visit a school. The 82 schools across the country that have implemented the Knowledge Is Power Program invariably get excellent results from the very same low-income students who tend to struggle at traditional high schools. Last year, we traveled to KIPP Houston High, where 90 percent of the students graduate, compared with 65 percent for the city as a whole, even though KIPP's students are poorer than their peers in Houston's public school system.

The key to this school's success is its principal, Ken Estrella, and the 44 dedicated and talented teachers on his staff. In one class, we observed three teachers leading small groups of students in integrated bio-engineering and world health exercises. By urging students to ask penetrating questions about the diseases of the developing world, the teachers were simultaneously helping them master the basics of biology. The lesson plan bore no relation to the passive lecture format that prevails in many schools.

Empirical research confirms what Bill and I have seen in classrooms nationwide. Data show that an effective teacher has more impact on student performance than any other school-based factor. If African American students could be guaranteed teachers in the top 25 percent of their profession throughout high school, the gap between their test scores and those of white students would disappear.

So why hasn't education policy focused more on raising teacher effectiveness? The country has tried a lot of (outrageously expensive) reforms that don't improve student outcomes -- such as reducing class size by one or two students and paying teachers to get master's degrees. Part of the problem is that it's so hard to measure teaching. Anyone who has ever been inspired by a teacher knows that pedagogy is both a science and an art. Finding a sensitive instrument to evaluate it has been a huge obstacle. Tests yield clear numerical grades, but they can't measure all the intangibles that make a teacher effective.

To help surmount this logjam, a team of researchers (with support from the Gates Foundation) is working with more than 3,000 teachers in seven school districts to develop measures of teacher effectiveness. The project uses seven methods, including videotaping classes, analyzing test scores, and surveying teachers, students and parents.

The Measures of Effective Teaching project will yield a wealth of information that educators desperately need. It will help school districts nationwide make informed decisions about rewarding effective teachers. And it will help all teachers get better at their craft. If we can understand what makes a great teacher great -- precisely what they do that helps their students learn -- then we can encourage average teachers to adopt those proven methods.