| Public Education Network Weekly NewsBlast
"Public Involvement. Public Education. Public Benefit."
February 26, 2010
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Administration offers carrot, lets recession be stick
About a month from now, according to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, "good superintendents" will send out pink slips in response to steep declines in state revenues and their corresponding effect on education budgets, The Washington Post reports. In a speech to the National Governors' Association, the secretary said he was "very, very concerned" about the prospect, when $48 billion in stimulus funds to states run out by the end of the year. Duncan reminded his audience, however, that $1.5 billion in Race to the Top (RttT) grants are on track for distribution, with finalists being announced next week. The administration will also send out school improvement grants to states next month totaling $3.5 billion. On the same day as Duncan's speech, the White House announced $350 million in new competitive grants that states can use to develop educational standards to prepare students for college. The president has also proposed extending the RttT initiative and expanding it by $3 billion to fund new education innovations, especially at charter schools. In January, there were 8.03 million workers in local education, down from 8.09 million a year before and 8.05 million in January 2008, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/21/AR2010022102828.html
Small city, large ramifications
The entire staff of a low-performing high school in Central Falls, R.I. has been fired, prompting the state's labor unions to come out in force against the decision and the education officials who made it, reports The Providence Journal. As a sign of the decision's national significance, the American Federation of Teachers sent a representative to a rally for the fired teachers with a message of support from its 1.4 million membership. On the other side of the debate, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said he "applauded" the Rhode Island officials for their "courage." "This is hard work and these are tough decisions, but students only have one chance for an education." Duncan is requiring states to identify their lowest-performing five percent of schools 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; or "turnaround," which requires the entire teaching staff be fired and no more than 50 percent rehired in the fall. When talks broke down between Central Falls Supt. Frances Gallo and the Central Falls teacher union over what "transformation" would entail, the city's school board voted 5-2 to fire every teacher at the school.
Read more: http://www.projo.com/education/content/central_falls_trustees_vote_02-24-10_EOHI83C_v56.3b42117.html
Pinning down the intangibles of effective teaching
In an op-ed in The Washington Post, Melinda French Gates writes she is "optimistic" about reform developments stemming from the Race to the Top initiative (RttT): "After decades of diffuse reform efforts, [these developments] 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." The achievement gap between white and African American students would all but disappear, says Gates, if African American students were guaranteed teachers in the top 25 percent of their profession through high school. Why, then, hasn't education policy focused on teacher effectiveness? In part because effective pedagogy has so many intangibles, difficult to measure empirically. "To help surmount this logjam," the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is underwriting a project at seven sites that will move toward distilling the bases for teacher effectiveness, using methods that include videotaping classes, analyzing test scores, and surveying teachers, students, and parents. "If all the stakeholders -- the federal government, state governments, school districts and teachers -- continue to coalesce around the goal of having an effective teacher in every classroom, then public schools will start to deliver on their core promise," writes Gates. "They will prepare every single American to succeed in college, their careers and their lives."
Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/18/AR2010021802919.html
Fixing NCLB's flaws in the new ESEA
A new plan from the administration requiring states to adopt "college- and career-readiness" standards to qualify for $14.5 billion in Title 1 funding "seems to remedy many of the problems with the counterproductive incentive system of NCLB," writes Gabriel Arana on the TAPPED blog of The American Prospect. Though the plan's details have yet to be "ironed out" by Congress, its basic gist is that states would be required to adopt common standards (such as those under development by the National Governor's Association) but would not be penalized if certain schools failed to meet these standards. Instead, failing schools would get additional assistance. While the standards would originate with the states working in tandem, the plan as a whole is a "smart move" toward nationalization, in Arana's view. And though a typical objection to national standards is that they don't take into account the differing needs of students in disparate communities, "national standards aren't the ceiling -- they're the floor School districts across the country are free to tailor curricula to their needs, but national standards establish a bare minimum for what taxpayers can get out of the school system."
Read more http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=02&year=2010&base_name=moving_toward_national_educati
Related: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/education/23educ.html
The issue is not encouraging, but keeping, students in STEM
A new study from the University of California at Los Angeles' Higher Education Research Institute finds that while more and more students are starting college with the intention of majoring in science, technology, engineering, or math, actual completion rates are lagging, especially with underrepresented minorities, according to Inside Higher Ed. Because some of the largest-ever proportions of students are entering college with an interest in STEM professions, "all the blame here can't be placed on K-12 education" for not preparing enough American scientists and engineers, as some workforce experts and politicians argue, says co-author Mitchell Chang. Fault also lies with the nation's colleges and universities for deterring students somewhere between freshman year and the completion of a bachelor's degree in four or five years. "Something that happens in college -- and it goes beyond just preparation -- is losing students," Chang says. Thirty percent of Latino students who started in STEM fields earned degrees in four years, while 41.6 percent completed them within five years. For black students, rates were even lower, with 23 percent of freshman STEM majors earning degrees in four years and 32.2 percent in five years, while the numbers for non-STEM majors were 49 percent and 58 percent, respectively.
Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/02/17/stem
See the report: http://www.heri.ucla.edu/publications-brp.php
Related: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100220204814.htm
'Intertwined' policies cause widespread alienation, and worse
A new report from the Advancement Project examines the joint effects of zero-tolerance discipline and high-stakes testing, which in it its view derive from the same ideological roots that have "turned schools into hostile and alienating environments for many of our youth, effectively treating them as drop-outs-in-waiting." It finds that the end result of "these intertwined punitive policies" is a "school-to-prison pipeline," in which students throughout the country are "treated as if they are disposable routinely pushed out of school and toward the juvenile and criminal justice systems." The report finds that the dramatic rise in school-based arrests coincides with the passage of NCLB: "For example, at the national level, there were almost 250,000 more students suspended out-of-school in 2006-07 than there were just four years earlier, when NCLB was signed into law. During the same timeframe, the number of students expelled across the country increased 15 percent." While the increased securitization of schools is disaffecting for many at-risk students, "the emphasis placed on test results above all other priorities has an alienating and dehumanizing effect on young people, who resent being viewed and treated as little more than test scores." These policies have become mutually reinforcing, the report argues, changing the incentive structure for educators, "putting many teachers and administrators in the unenviable position of having to choose between their students' interests and their own self-interest."
See the report: http://www.advancementproject.org/digital-library/publications/test-punish-and-push-out-how-zero-tolerance-and-high-stakes-testing-fu
Sharing expertise, and recognition for it, are key
The Center for Teaching Quality has released a report on the results of a Teacher Network survey aiming to better understand the role of collaboration in supporting and retaining effective teachers in high-needs urban schools. Drawing on the survey of 1,210 teachers and other research, the report finds that teachers whose students make the greatest achievement gains have extensive preparation and experience relevant to their current assignment (subject, grade level, and student population taught). Opportunities to work with like-minded, similarly accomplished colleagues -- and to build and share collective expertise -- are also strongly associated with effective teaching. Accomplished teachers who have opportunities to share their expertise -- and serve as leaders (as coaches, mentors, teacher educators, etc.) -- are more likely to remain in the profession. To teach effectively, teachers need access to principals who cultivate and embrace teacher leadership; time and tools to learn from each other; opportunities to connect and work with community organizations and agencies that support students and their families outside school walls; evaluation systems that comprehensively measure the impact of teachers on student learning; and performance pay systems that primarily reward the spread of teaching expertise and spur collaboration among teachers.
See the report: http://www.teachersnetwork.org/effectiveteachers/
Charters and magnets: why the difference?
With all the hoopla and controversy surrounding charter schools, some experts find that magnet schools are getting "short shrift," by the Obama administration, according to Education Week. This is despite the fact that on the local level, magnet schools continue to be popular with parents. District-run magnet schools, which typically have a particular academic focus aimed at attracting a diverse student population, saw significant growth in the mid-1980s. The Obama administration's fiscal 2011 budget proposes to increase funding for magnet schools to $110 million from $100 million this fiscal year, but in comparison calls for spending $400 million for "promoting effective charter schools," an increase of $81 million, or more than 20 percent, over charters' current funding. This imbalance is increasingly relevant as charters come under scrutiny for lack of racial diversity in the wake of a report from the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles of the University of California, Los Angeles. Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project, said he'd like to see the federal government provide an "open field" for grant competitions for all kinds of public schools, rather than allocating separate amounts of money for charter schools and magnet schools. The federal government should build on the political support among both conservatives and progressives for magnet schools, in Orfield's view.
Read more: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/02/24/22magnets_ep.h29.html?tkn=VSBF1yUKUd%2FAC3zB0d8H5E%2B6xv1KLcpK40%2Bd&cmp=clp-ecseclips
What a superlative student assessment system should look like
A white paper from the Council of Chief State School Officers considers what a student assessment system would entail if built from the best practices in current educational research and educational systems in the U.S. and high-achieving nations around the world. The paper suggests that any assessment process should support a range of purposes -- informing learning and instruction, determining progress, measuring achievement, and providing partial accountability information. It must address the depth and breadth of standards as well as all areas of the curriculum, not just those easily measured. The needs of all students must be integral to its design process, and it should honor research indicating that students learn best when given challenging content and provided with assistance, guidance, and feedback on a regular basis. The assessment should use a variety of measures, instruments, and processes at the classroom, school, district, and state levels, and measures should be formative as well as summative. Teachers should score student work based on shared targets. In sum, the assessment should support students in acquiring higher-order thinking and performance skills, and support learning for students, educators, schools, and states.
See the paper: http://www.ccsso.org/publications/details.cfm?PublicationID=381
Catching all students at a critical time
Middle-grade schools in California that are outperforming their peers are doing so with a "full-court organizational press on improved student outcomes," according to a new report from Ed Source. The report derives from a large-scale study of 303 middle schools, in which researchers surveyed 303 principals, 3,752 English Language Arts (ELA) and math teachers in grades 6-8, and 157 superintendents of the districts and charter management organizations that oversee the schools. Researchers then analyzed the reported district and school practices against scores on California's standards-based tests in ELA and math in grades 6, 7, and 8, taken by the 204,000 students in their sample. What the research found was that higher-performing schools enjoyed a shared district- and school-wide culture that placed its primary focus on improvements in academic outcomes for all students, from the lowest performing to the highest. These schools also designed their instructional program to prepare every student for a rigorous high school education. Researchers did not find a consistent or strong association between student outcomes on standards-based tests and school grade configuration or organizational models of teachers and instruction. In middle school, many students lose ground in key subject areas; success in these subjects is a strong predictor of success in high school and beyond.
See the report: http://www.edsource.org/middle-grades-study.html
BRIEFLY NOTED
More disparagement for teacher prep from Duncan
The Secretary of Education referred to education colleges as the "Rodney Dangerfields" of higher education because many university leaders don't give them the respect afforded other programs.
http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/u-s-ed-chief-314783.html
Tough sanctions for number-fudgers
Gov. Sonny Perdue has introduced bills that would make altering test scores on Georgia's state academic tests a criminal misdemeanor, punishable by up to 30 days in jail, a $1,000 fine, and loss of any pension.
http://www.gpb.org/news/2010/02/19/school-chief-supports-bill-to-criminalize-test-cheating
Kentucky to vote on Bible literacy elective
A bill that would establish guidelines for teaching an elective course on the Bible's literary structure and its influence on "literature, art, music, mores, oratory and public policy" will now go to the full state senate for a vote.
http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20102180336
Slow going in the move to fire poor teachers
In the two years since the NYC Department of Education began an intensive effort to root out bad teachers from the more than 55,000 who have tenure, officials have managed to fire only three for incompetence.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/24/education/24teachers.html?ref=education
Medically correct and age-appropriate sex ed now law in WI
Sex education classes in Wisconsin public schools will have to teach students about birth control and sexually transmitted diseases under a new bill signed by Gov. Jim Doyle.
http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/85213817.html
GRANTS AND FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES
Montgomery County Poet Laureate Program: Sarah Mook Prize
The purpose of the Sarah Mook Memorial Poetry Contest is to acknowledge, encourage, and reward the efforts of student poets. Maximum award: $100. Eligibility: students K-12. Deadline: March 31, 2010.
http://www.a2pwebdesign.com/poetrywits/poetrycontest/sarahmook.htm
Motorola Foundation: Innovation Generation Collaborative Grants
The Motorola Foundation Innovation Generation Collaborative Grants support medium- to large-scale STEM education collaborations between two or more nonprofit organizations, schools, and/or districts. Funding priority will be placed on programs that engage students and teachers in innovative, hands-on activities, teach STEM as well as develop innovative thinking and creative problem-solving skills, focus on girls and minorities that are currently underrepresented in the STEM disciplines, and take place in communities with Motorola employees. All requests must be partnerships between two or more non-profit organizations or schools. Maximum award: $500,000. Eligibility: U.S. non-profit organizations, schools, or school districts that are prior Motorola Foundation Innovation Generation grant recipients. Deadline: April 1, 2010.
http://www.motorola.com/staticfiles/Business/Corporate/US-EN/corporate-responsibility/society/community-investment-education-more-about-innovation-generation-grants.html
Presidential Awards for Excellence in Math and Science Teaching
The Presidential Awards for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching recognize highly qualified teachers for their contributions in the classroom and to their profession. Maximum award: $10,000; a paid trip for two to Washington, D.C. to attend a series of recognition events and professional development opportunities; a citation signed by the President of the United States. Eligibility: teachers grades K-6 in a public or private school with five years' experience teaching math or science. Deadline: April 1, 2010.
http://www.paemst.org/controllers/about.cfc?method=view
Libri Foundation: Books for Children
The Libri Foundation Books for Children Grants donate new, quality, hardcover children's books to small, rural, public libraries across the country. Maximum award: varies. Eligibility: Libraries must be in a rural area, have a limited operating budget, and an active children's department. The average total operating budget of a Books for Children grant recipient must be less than $40,000. Deadline: April 15, 2010.
http://www.librifoundation.org/apps.html
Lemelson-MIT Program: InvenTeams
The Lemelson-MIT Program is dedicated to supporting and encouraging invention, and seeks to inspire students and rising inventors. Maximum award: $10,000. Eligibility: high school science, mathematics, and technology teachers at public, private, and vocational schools, and their students. Deadline: April 23, 2010.
http://web.mit.edu/inventeams/about.html
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
"I love teaching, but I was surprised at the amount of planning it takes to keep lessons fresh. I also didn't realize that you're performing in the classroom, giving 45-minute presentations, almost all day. Then you do it again, day after day."
-- Peter Wilson, on switching careers to teaching.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/jobs/21pre.html?ref=education
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