DC Association of Chartered Public Schools

At the Arlington Career Center in Arlington, Va., engineering instructor James “J.C” Parry leads half a dozen youths in a discussion on whether to design an amusement park, a lunar base, or a prison.

At a muddy, stone-laden construction site at Woodrow Wilson High School in the District of Columbia, students in white hardhats tour the gutted insides of the building and get an up-close look at the structure of their soon-to-be renovated high school.

A few miles south, in a cramped third-floor classroom at Booker T. Washington Public Charter School, students hear from Brian Petruzzi, a newly minted “blast engineer”—someone, in other words, who works to ensure that buildings can withstand the force of a terrorist attack. He reveals to them how he didn’t even know what a blast engineer was until just before he graduated from college this past spring.

Those scenes represent snapshots of the ACE Mentor Program of Greater Washington Inc.

Just one of dozens of local chapters affiliated with the national ACE Mentor Program, headquartered in Stamford, Conn., the program provides early career exposure, mentoring, and scholarships to high school students in an attempt to encourage them to enter one of the three fields that make up the ACE acronym: architecture, construction, and engineering.

Founded in 1993 by longtime engineering consultant Charles Thornton, the program is increasingly being seen as one potentially effective model for reaching the Obama administration’s goal of getting more youths into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM-related careers. Nationally, the ACE Mentor Program serves 5,200 youths, down from 9,400 last year, a dip that program officials attribute to the poor state of the economy. But the organization has started hiring regional staff to help reach its goal to enroll 100,000 students annually by 2018.

“I think ACE does a really powerful job,” Kumar Garg, a policy analyst in the White House Office of Science and Technology, said in an interview.

Mr. Garg said the program’s philosophy and approach dovetail with a number of themes that President Barack Obama has been touting about the importance of putting science and technology among America’s educational priorities.

And much as the hit TV series “CSI” has whetted more students’ interest in exploring careers in crime-scene investigation, Mr. Garg said, ACE is influencing more young people to explore careers in architecture, construction, and engineering.

“Exposing students to different types of careers and how to get there has a powerful impact on their motivation in school and getting good grades, whether their interest is in science and technology and what they do to get there,” he said.

Influential Factor

The ACE program operates as an after-school activity. Members at each site meet twice a week for classes led by teachers and industry professionals who volunteer their time. Guest speakers and site tours are regular features of the class. Students typically find out about it from teachers or by word of mouth.

The capstone of the experience comes in spring when students from chapters nationwide present proposals to design or redesign various structures at the American Institute of Architects, or AIA, in Washington. Previous design proposals have included everything from energy-efficient houses to underwater casinos. One project, the restoration of a greenhouse and surrounding grounds at Coolidge High School in the District of Columbia, found its way from paper to reality.

Program alumni say its emphasis on practical considerations in related careers has provided invaluable insight for their higher education and career decisions.

“I think it played a big role,” said D.C.-area alumna Carlyn Luu, who recently graduated magna cum laude from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. She is working as a member of the architectural staff at Wiencek & Associates Architects & Planners in Gaithersburg, Md., where she is gaining experience to become a licensed architect.

Unlike most students served by ACE, Ms. Luu actually sought out the program back in 2005 when she was a senior at Chantilly High School in Chantilly, Va., and wanted more architectural and engineering education than the drafting classes her school offered. She started attending ACE sessions in nearby Fairfax, Va. Now, she plans to give back to ACE as a mentor in Chantilly.

A survey of program graduates from 2002 to 2009, conducted and released by ACE in January, indicates that the vast majority of alumni chose a career in the architecture, construction, or engineering fields or began to consider one after participating in the program. The same survey found that ACE students graduated from high school and enrolled in college at substantially higher rates than the national average: 97 percent vs. 73.4 percent and 94 percent vs. 68 percent, respectively. It also found that minority students were majoring in architecture and engineering at several times the rate of their non-ACE counterparts.

Such students include Kristal Robinson, a senior majoring in electrical engineering at Howard University in the District of Columbia. Through the program, she has interned at Arup, a global consulting firm of engineers and designers, where she helped design lighting and power at the Abu Dhabi International Airport in the United Arab Emirates.

“It was really a good learning experience, because I was already interested in architecture and engineering,” Ms. Robinson said, “and it was a plus because I got the chance to see what engineers do in the field instead of just reading about it,” which is one of the primary goals of the program.

“It’s not just the brick and mortar stuff anymore,” said Christine Merdon, the chief operating officer of the Architect of the U.S. Capitol. Ms. Merdon, who serves as board president of the ACE program in Washington, said a key emphasis of the program is “making buildings more efficient and intelligent.”

“We’re trying to get students to think about all the needs,” said Mr. Parry of the Arlington Career Center. He noted construction-project considerations that range from providing access for cargo vehicles dropping off their loads to making sure all facilities are handicapped accessible.

Real-World Perspective

Among the college-going ACE students, a limited number of scholarships are awarded to those who plan to study a related field.

Last academic year, of 79 high school seniors in the D.C. program, 27 applied for scholarships, meaning that roughly a third went on to study ACE-related fields. The program registered 312 youths, 210 of whom completed it at one of 18 schools in the metropolitan area.

“That’s a pretty good number,” said Trisha Grant, who was recently hired as the executive director of the program in Washington, referring to the seniors who applied for ACE scholarships. “It could have easily been zero before the ACE program came around.”

A challenge has been finding scholarship money. Of those students who applied for the $4,000 scholarships, only 14 got them. It wasn’t because the other 13 weren’t qualified, but rather, $56,000 is all the program had to award, Ms. Grant said.

The D.C.-area program relies almost entirely on volunteers and operated on a budget of roughly $64,000 in fiscal 2008, tax returns show, but program officials say the organization has stepped up its fundraising efforts, holding, for instance, an annual fundraising breakfast with ACE partners in the private and government sectors. Local affiliates across the country are similarly responsible for holding fundraisers to cover their costs and scholarships, although each affiliate also gets support from the national office.

Though historically the program has operated on a shoestring, school administrators involved in ACE say the program is playing a pivotal role.

Alexander Wilson, the director of academic development for Woodrow Wilson High School at the University of the District of Columbia, where the Wilson students meet until their school is renovated, said ACE serves as a “wonderful bridge between academics and kids’ curiosity and passion about construction, design, building, and engineering and puts it in a real-world perspective.” Woodrow Wilson has had the program for three years.

“This walk-through is one of the best experiences that we’ve ever done,” Mr. Wilson said shortly after the ACE-sponsored tour at the construction site at Woodrow Wilson High. Students—walking among spools of cable and uninstalled ductwork—got to meet the construction manager, ask questions, and learn architectural descriptions for various physical aspects of their school.

But the strongest component, Mr. Wilson said, is ACE’s mentoring.

“I strongly believe that every kid’s success requires a caring, consistent relationship with an adult,” he said. “The ACE program provides really solid mentoring.”

Those mentors, who often meet with students in groups instead of one-on-one, come in the form of professionals such as Mr. Petruzzi, the blast engineer.

On a recent day, students at Booker T. Washington took advantage of Mr. Petruzzi’s presence by chatting with him when the after-school session ended.

“He told me you have to be creative and, at the same time, you have to look at [engineering] from a realistic standpoint,” sophomore Sean Holston said of his conversation with Mr. Petruzzi. “The architect tells you how he wants a building to look, but the engineer tells you how it has to be built so it can stand.”

Mr. Holston said he is leaning toward becoming an electrical engineer and feels the ACE program has given him a competitive edge for college.

“Some people go to college and they want to study architecture and don’t know nothing about it,” he said. “But through this program, you’ll go with a little extra than the rest.”

Study: States Must Move Faster to Close Achievement Gaps

By Mary Ann Zehr

Education Week

December 14, 2010

If states continue their current pace of progress in narrowing achievement gaps between students of different races, ethnic groups, and income levels, it could take decades for lagging student groups in some states to catch up to their better-performing peers, a study of more than 40 states has found.

The report, released Tuesday by the Center on Education Policy, a Washington-based research and policy group, breaks new ground by estimating the length of time it will likely take to close gaps in a sample of states, said Jack Jennings, the organization’s president and chief executive officer.

It shows that, overall, achievement gaps remain large and persistent across the nation, but the gaps between whites and Hispanics and whites and African-Americans are narrowing at a faster pace than those between whites and Native Americans.

“There’s some progress made in narrowing the gaps, but we have to do much more and kick it up much faster,” Mr. Jennings said.

Such gaps are closing—and, in some cases, widening—at an uneven pace among states, according to the report. In Washington State, for example, the Center on Education Policy predicts it will take 105 years to close the gap between white and African-American students in 4th grade reading at the rate it’s going. By contrast, if Louisiana continues at the same pace in narrowing the gap between those same two groups of students in 4th grade reading, the gap will be closed in 12.5 years. At the same time, the gap between whites and Native Americans in 4th grade reading in Colorado is growing rather than narrowing.

The study looked at the state testing data for all grades used for accountability purposes under the No Child Left Behind Act as well as data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the congressionally mandated testing program.

Looking Over Time

For the estimates of how long it would take to close gaps in a sample of states, the authors of the report selected states that had average-size gaps and data for all the years covered in the study, from 2002 through 2009. Overall, though, the study looked at testing data for all 50 states, basing its analysis primarily on the 41 states that had comparable test data for at least three years in a row.

It found that in 2009, test scores for Latinos in states were often 15 to 20 percentage points lower than for whites. For African-Americans, the gap in test scores was typically 20 to 30 points lower than for whites. The size of the test-score gap between Native Americans and whites was similar to that between African-Americans and whites. But states are generally narrowing the gaps between Latinos and whites at a faster rate than they are for African-Americans and Native Americans, the report found.

In high school math across the United States, for example, the gap between Latinos and whites in the percentage of students testing at proficient levels narrowed at an average rate of 1.2 percentage points per year for all states with adequate data. At the same time, achievement gaps between Native Americans and whites are commonly narrowing by an average of less than 1 percentage point per year in states, which translates to less gap-closing progress over time, according to the study.

John W. Tippeconnic, the director of the American Indian Studies Program at Arizona State University, Tempe, said in an e-mail that the findings about achievement differences between Native Americans and whites show “the complexity of Native American education today.” Questions that the study raises for him, he said, include: whether the absence or presence of teaching about Native American languages and culture had an impact on student performance, what the level of quality was of teachers and leaders in schools, how much the poverty status of students might have influenced their test scores, and whether students who attended schools on American Indian reservations performed any differently than those who attended schools off the reservations.

Mr. Jennings said that he hopes researchers will explore those and other issues about why achievement gaps continue to persist. “We don’t have enough money to go behind the data and look at the reasons behind the trends,” he said.

Not ‘New Story’

Another expert on achievement gaps, Edmund Gordon, a professor emeritus of psychology for Yale University and a professor emeritus of psychology and education for Teachers College, Columbia University, said the analysis published in the CEP report doesn’t tell “a substantially new story.” He wrote in an e-mail that “with a few modest exceptions, the gaps in academic achievement have remained a problem in education for my 60 years of studying the problem.”

Mr. Gordon argues that, to help close achievement gaps, “we certainly need good schools, but good schools may not be enough.” His research findings stress that supports for academic learning outside of school, such as those provided by families and communities, may be the “hidden curriculum of high academic achievement,” he said.

The report released Tuesday is meant to be a companion to a report on state test scores and NAEP scores released by the CEP in September. That earlier report, “State Test Score Trends Through 2008-09, Part 1: Rising Scores on State Tests and NAEP,” found that 67 percent of the 23 states studied showed progress on both state tests and the national assessment in 4th grade reading between 2005 and 2009.

Schools Try to Establish a College-Going Culture

By Caralee J. Adams

Education Week

December 8, 2010

To get children thinking about college early, Los Penasquitos Elementary School in San Diego changed its name to No Excuses University at Los Pen. Instead of numbers, classrooms are identified by college names with flags from Ohio State or the University of Michigan hanging on the door. Students learn all about their assigned school, make up a cheer for it, and sometimes even have alumni visit.

“From the minute students walk in the door, we want them to feel like they are on a college campus. It’s all about the spirit,” Damen Lopez, a former principal at the school and the founder of the No Excuses University Network of Schools. “We want to expose them to the possibility of a four-year university. That it’s not something far, far away.”

By creating a college-going culture in elementary school, the hope is that students will aspire to a lifelong path toward higher education and deeper learning that ends with a degree. To reach that goal, the school plays up the concept that there are no excuses for poor effort and staff members have a belief that all students can excel.

International Study Examines Parent Actions, Attitudes on Math Learning

By Erik Robelen

Education Week

December 7, 2010

Just as the latest international testing data once again highlight the relatively poor performance of U.S. students in math, a new report has come out to further explore why the United States may be struggling, with a focus on the math attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of parents, and their children’s out-of-school activities. The survey involved more than 1,000 parents in the United States, Singapore—a top international performer—and England.

Among the key findings: Parents in Singapore are far more likely than those in the United States and England to engage a math tutor to help their child, they’re more likely to get assistance from teachers and others in how to help their child, and their children more often take part in math competitions and math/science camps.

“We come back to this phrase of active learning: More parents in Singapore and students in Singapore are participating in things that are very active,” Lia Schultz, a researcher at Eduventures who co-authored the study, said in an interview.

Consistent with these results were some responses related to parental attitudes reported in the study, which was commissioned by Raytheon Company. For example, 75 percent of Singapore parents said it’s important to provide math learning opportunities outside the school curriculum, compared with 53 percent in the U.S. and 49 percent in England.

Interestingly, U.S. parents expressed much higher confidence in their ability to help their children in math than did parents in Singapore. Whether this U.S. confidence is well-placed is hard to say, but the report suggests that one explanation may be that the middle school math curriculum is more advanced in Singapore than in the United States.

“This is really the first study that I know of that is an international comparison of parental attitudes and their active engagement,” said Brian Fitzgerald, the executive director of the Business-Higher Education Forum. “It’s very very clear that we need to equip our parents to do a better job of helping their sons and daughters become truly math proficient.”

The CEO of Raytheon, the report’s sponsor, is currently the chairman of the Business Higher-Education Forum.

The survey was conducted online, and the majority of parents had some postsecondary educational experience. Of U.S. respondents, for instance, 59 percent had a bachelor’s degree or higher.

I did wonder whether the higher rates of tutoring in Singapore might be explained in part by the economic circumstances of the families surveyed. But Schultz said she didn’t see evidence for this, noting that, in fact, the income levels of the families surveyed in Singapore were lower. (Indeed, further data supplied show that about 80 percent of the U.S. parents surveyed had a household income of $60,000 or more, compared with 48 percent of those in Singapore).

In essence, the sample of parents is representative of parents with children who are college-bound for a four-year degree.

Here are some more detailed highlights from the study:

• 39 percent of parents in Singapore report using a math tutor to help their children, compared with 16 percent in the United States and England.

• 33 percent of Singapore students (ages 10-14) participated in a math competition over the past year, compared with 20 percent in England and 9 percent in the U.S.

• 14 percent of Singapore students participated in a robotics competition, compared with 2 percent in the United States and 1 percent in England.

• At the same time, participation in science fairs by students in the United States and Singapore was about the same, and more U.S. students (17 percent) participated in spelling bees than those in either Singapore (10 percent) or England (13 percent).

• 26 percent of Singapore students participated in a camp or extracurricular activity focused on math or science in the past year, compared with 11 percent in the U.S. and 7 percent in England.

• 52 percent of parents in Singapore report the use of math worksheets or work books by their children outside school, compared with 19 percent in England and 18 percent in the United States.

• 51 percent of Singapore parents report getting help from their child’s school or another organization to help prepare for math exams, compared with 25 percent in both England and the U.S.

• The difference in outside support was smaller, however, when it comes to getting help in completing specific math assignments, with 46 percent in Singapore, 36 percent in England, and 34 percent in the United States.

PISA: How Top-Scoring Nations Get There

By Catherine Gewertz

Education Week

December 7, 2010

You have likely heard by now about the United States’ less-than-inspiring results on the latest PISA. (If not, see my colleague Erik Robelen’s story.) Those much-talked-about scores tell us which countries are producing the highest achievement among their 15-year-olds, but nothing about how they produced those results.

That’s discussed in another report issued today by the OECD, the same organization that oversees PISA. The study, “Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education: Lessons From PISA for the United States,” examines various aspects of education in high-performing or fast-improving countries, including distribution of resources, classroom environment, and assessment and accountability practices. It ends with lessons the United States can learn from these countries.

One of the things that might strike you as you look at these lessons is their reasonableness (outweighed, apparently, only by their seeming impossibility in most of this country). Here’s one: ensuring coherence of policies and practices across all aspects of the system and over sustained periods of time, with consistency of implementation. Wow. Really? Can you imagine?

This one got my attention, having heard endlessly this year about the fear of federal intrusion into local education decisionmaking: “balancing local responsibility with a capable center of authority and legitimacy to act.” Hmmm. It’s that capable center of authority that tends to make folks real nervous in our homeland.

The study was undertaken with researchers from the National Center on Education and the Economy, who have spent a lot of time on international education studies. You might recall, also, that the NCEE is working on a pilot program to create a board-exam system for high schools, modeled on systems used in other countries.

Program Builds School Supports for Foster Pupils

By Sarah D. Sparks

Education Week

December 8, 2010

Five districts in the Los Angeles area are weaving a web of interagency supports to catch a group of high school students who face an especially great risk for slipping through the cracks in school: youths in foster care.

The Education Pilot Program, a collaboration of school administrators and social workers, academic tutors, and student advocates, supports high school foster students by developing holistic learning plans, much like those created for special education students, and coordinating interagency supports.Modeled on a framework developed by the Baltimore-based Annie E. Casey Foundation, the program has shown the potential to become a national model for keeping foster students on track to graduate and go on to college.

Its research track record earned it the highest available rating in the federal Investing in Innovation, or i3, competition earlier this year, enabling the program to secure more than $3.6 million in grant money over the next four years to conduct a larger pilot and prepare to expand statewide.

“The [foster] kids who are not in our program tend to be the invisible kids,” said Angel Rodriguez, the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services’ project coordinator for the pilot. “They just won’t ask for help, and they’ll allow themselves to fall behind; … and because of the overburdened child-welfare system, their social worker may not be able to keep up with their academic needs when they are worried about safety and placement needs.”

Gates Study Offers Teacher-Effectiveness Clues

By Stephen Sawchuk

Education Week

December 20, 2010

“Value added” gauges based on growth in student test scores and students’ perceptions of their teachers both hold promise as components of a system for identifying and promoting teacher effectiveness, according to preliminary findings from the first year of a major study.

The analysis , released today by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, shows that teachers’ value-added histories strongly predicted how they would perform in other classrooms or school years—as did students’ perceptions of their teachers’ ability to maintain order in the classroom and provide challenging lessons.

The findings are part of the Seattle-based foundation’s $45 million Measure of Effective Teaching study . The project seeks to identify the most accurate measures of superior teaching. ( “Multi-City Study Eyes Best Gauges of Good Teaching,” …

Mayor-Elect Aims at Eliminating Achievement Gap among D.C. Kids

By Donald L. Hense

The Washington Times

December 10, 2010

Many greeted Mayor-elect Vincent Gray‘s election as a defeat for education reform. I disagree. I’ve known Mr. Gray for many years. I believe he cares deeply about our children. I also believe he understands the need to reform all of our city’s educational institutions and practices.

Mr. Gray understands that education reform in Washington is not only about addressing issues in the traditional public school system. Nearly 40 percent of the District’s students are educated in publicly funded charter schools independently of the traditional system.

I welcome the fact that the city’s traditional public schools are now accountable to our mayor, but charter schools like mine are no less significant in our city’s effort to deliver a quality public education to all students.

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty‘s defiance of D.C. law – which requires that students attending public charter schools receive public funds equal to those for students attending city-run schools – was hardly mentioned by many self-styled education reformers during the election. Mr. Gray‘s strong support for equitable funding for charters and the city’s pro-education reform law received scarcely more coverage.

My own charter school educates about one in 15 children enrolled in Washington’s public schools – about one in seven in the District’s charters. All six of our charter campuses are located in underserved Northeast and Southeast communities. We also partner with D.C. Public Schools and Baltimore City Public Schools to turn around failed regular public schools. We serve more than 6,500 students, most of whose families have low incomes.

To best serve our children, we constantly monitor and analyze data to evaluate teachers and principals. As a charter, we can hire and reward outstanding educators.

We pioneered Early College in D.C., enabling our high school students to take college courses for college credit. We also encourage them to take Advanced Placement courses, favored by selective and private schools as college preparation.

Friendship also helps students earn Gates and Posse scholarships, providing financial and emotional support through college, and offers pre-kindergarten, preschool and after-school programs. We think we make a significant difference for our students and our city, entitling us to equal funding and attention with the traditional school system.

I headed Friendship House, which served low-income families. Mr. Gray ran Covenant House. We struggled with the same issues in different quadrants of the city. We know that good public schools are necessary if we will ever turn the corner to providing equal opportunities to all D.C. residents.

We both know that the belief that one person can deliver, in no time at all, the reforms needed to bring quality education to every student is a media fantasy. Washington’s Michelle Rhee and New York’s Joel I. Klein have left to much the same fanfare as accompanied their arrival, yet most students in those school systems are not where they need to be.

The District’s recent test scores have gone down as well as up. Worse, citywide test scores conceal alarming disparities. In 2007, just 27 percent of elementary school students in the city’s disadvantaged Ward 8 read at grade level. After three years of school system reform, 29 percent did so. Yet in affluent Ward 3, reforms pushed reading proficiency up eight percentage points, from 78 percent to 86 percent. The achievement gap between Ward 3′s predominantly white students and Ward 8′s overwhelmingly black students has widened.

In a tragically divided city like ours, it may be hard for some to comprehend the challenge involved in bringing students who are several grade levels behind to grade level. We want those students to graduate from high school and complete college. If we fail, Washington’s achievement gap will continue to grow.

The stakes for our children are high. A Ward 3 student leaving education without a high school diploma or a college degree has multiple safety nets: resources to return to education, abundant learning opportunities outside school, and the more generous assumptions society makes about them compared to their Ward 8 peers.

In Ward 8, where unemployment is 30 percent, a similarly under qualified adult might at best hope to work at the cash register of a grocery store or drugstore. Such jobs may soon be automated, and even those are beyond the reach of adults who lack basic literacy and math skills.

The District’s disadvantaged children need both the traditional school system and charters to provide quality education choices like those the District’s privileged residents enjoy. We can achieve the education reform they so desperately need. But to get there, we need help from a mayor who truly understands the problems and will fund all public schools fairly.

The Worst Schools

The Washington Post

December 18, 2010

A LOT IS BEING read into the recent decision by interim D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson to remove the private operator brought in to fix the city’s troubled Dunbar High School. Foes of Mayor-elect Vincent C. Gray (D) have seized on it as a sign that he will be soft on education reform. Critics of school turnarounds point to it as evidence that these drastic means to improve schools don’t work. We think that both are wrong. In fact, it’s hard to transform schools where a culture of poor performance and low expectations has taken root – and it’s critical to keep trying.

More than two years after it was hired based on its success running a highly regarded school in New York, Friends of Bedford was ousted as operator of Dunbar, although it continues to manage Coolidge High School. The decision by Ms. Henderson followed, as The Post’s Bill Turque reported, escalating complaints from parents and teachers about safety, security and academics. “In general, the building seems to be in turmoil at all times,” Ms. Henderson concluded in a letter terminating the contract with Friends of Bedford. The school will be operated by the city.

The meltdown at Dunbar comes amid new attention devoted to turnaround efforts at the nation’s worst-performing schools. A report released this week by theThomas B. Fordham Institute looked at more than 2,000 of the worst-performing district and charter schools in 10 states from 2003 through 2009 and found only about 1 percent making significant improvements. One reason for those disappointing results was the tendency of schools to make timid adjustments rather than take bold steps. That’s why the Obama administration gets credit for sticking its neck out – not to mention opening its wallet – to support places willing to make drastic changessuch as replacing teaching staff and shutting down schools and reopening them as charters.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan is devoting an unprecedented $3.5 billion to a campaign to fix the country’s lowest-performing schools. The department is encouraged by reports showing a willingness to make hard decisions. The Post’s Nick Anderson, for example, recently reported on 150 schools where principals and at least half of the staff were replaced. Equally encouraging is that some of these efforts were undertaken without opposition from the teachers unions.

But as Dunbar demonstrates, there are no quick fixes. Radical change may be needed, but it is just a first step; it has to be nurtured. Ms. Henderson may be right to correct course, but we hope she will now keep a steady focus on the school.

Gray Eyes More

By Deborah Simmons

The Washington Post

December 12, 2010

Mayor-elect Vincent C. Gray wants to push forward with education reforms by having more collaboration between charter schools and traditional schools, an initiative supported by charter co-founder Joshua Kern.

Mr. Kern, founding president of Thurgood Marshall Academy Public Charter High School, also is being considered as the next deputy mayor for education.

“I cant really talk about it,” Mr. Kern said Sunday concerning a possible slot in the Gray administration. “I cant really say anything.”

The development comes as Mr. Grays alma mater, the once-elite Dunbar High School, undergoes its second transformation in as many years after Interim Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson fired the charter organization that was managing the school.

“Obviously I want to see the school turned around,” Mr. Gray told The Washington Times on Saturday. “We have a lot of successful charters in this city. Some are better than others and thats one of the reasons we want closer collaboration.”

The incoming mayor said he holds Mr. Kern, who co-founded TMA nine years ago, his school and other successful charter schools in high regard.

“Oftentimes, charters are viewed as competitive because they take different approaches to governing,” Mr. Gray said. “Thurgood Marshall Academy is a shining example of a successful public school.”

Thurgood Marshall Academy and Mr. Gray’s Dunbar High School are two D.C. schools that have a lot in common, though they are nothing alike. Both are public high schools, both are named for outstanding black Americans and both have majority-black student bodies.

But the commonality begins and ends there. Thurgood Marshall, the citys most successful non-selective public high school, is a school that works.

Students at TMA, as the school is called, rank higher on standardized tests than any other open-enrollment public high school in the city, with 72 percent of its students scoring proficient in reading and 66 percent in math on this years DC-CAS standardized test. Also, 100 percent of its graduating classes has been accepted to college for the past five years.

Neither of those accomplishments is a small matter in the nations capital, where public schools consistently rank near the bottom of the nations academic ladder. The situation is especially bad at the high schools in TMA’s neighborhood. Less then 20 percent of students at Anacostia High School scored proficient in both DC-CAS categories, and Ballou didn’t do much better — 30 percent of its students were proficient in reading and 26 percent in math.

Dunbar, whose alumni include D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, former Republican U.S. Sen. Edward Brooke, and blood bank pioneer Dr. Charles R. Drew, is an underperforming traditional school where recent rape accusations and hooliganism forced Ms. Henderson to reverse reform measures made by her predecessor, Michelle Rhee.

During a recent visit to the school, Mr. Kern, a Gray campaign adviser, said three words — “teaching and learning” — sum up what goes on inside the walls of TMA, which relocated in 2005 to the aged red-brick building that had housed Nichols Avenue School on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue Southeast.

The school is neighbor to the Anacostia Metro Station, low-income housing, liquor stores, and mom-and-pop shops — the very environs its students dream of leaving to attend college. About 74 of TMA’s students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch.

Markysha Dickens, a senior, and junior Latrice Clyburn said TMA teachers and counselors are already preparing them for college and professional careers, and both have younger sisters who will be attending next year.

Having met her deadline for essays and college applications, Markysha has her heart set on the University of Vermont to major in psychology.

“I want to open my own office, to help people,” said Markysha, who would have attended Anacostia, Ballou or Dunbar but settled on TMA, because “you have to be on your ps and qs.”

“Ive grown academically and got my head on straight,” she said.

TMA’s no-nonsense approach gives students a syllabus, so they know what is expected from them in each course. It offers rigorous curricula, including moot court in honor of the school’s Supreme Court justice namesake, and Advanced Placement, foreign language and art courses — instruction many D.C. public schools forgo to focus on basics. It also offers students laptop computers, after-school hours in the library and computer lab, as well as discussions with teachers and counselors.

With 96 percent of TMAs students living in Wards 7 or Ward 8, teachers said it is incumbent upon the faculty to first meet students where they are and then guide them to reach goals they never imagined achieving, let alone surpassing.

“Many come in reading below grade level, but we’re pretty open with one another and flesh them out,” English teacher Evan Lloyd said.

“Some have social and emotional needs that we try to meet,” said Michael Hendricks, who teaches Spanish and social studies. “We tell them they can do better than a 2.0 [grade-point average].”

Teachers also said its important to connect with and stay in touch with parents, and encourage teenage charges to let others see what they see and think.

“I start out with a blank canvas,” said art teacher Nafeesah Shabazz, who had taught in Prince Georges County. “I have to make them believe than can do it. I dont care how good or bad they are, I dont criticize them. I critique them.

She said she often will “call and send e-mails to their parents when I have a standout student.”

TMA follows students through college, too, with an alumni association and emergency fund that ensures college freshmen and other underclassmen dont have excuses to drop out. To that end, the fund helps students buy books, pay for emergency travel, toiletries and food.

“We don’t want them to drop out,” said Mr. Kern, a former teacher. “We want them to continue to succeed.”

School Boards Group Questions U.S. Guidance on Bullying

By Mark Walsh

December 15, 2010

Education Week

The general counsel of the National School Boards Association is warning the U.S. Department of Education that recent federal guidance to schools on bullying and harassment expands the standard of liability for school officials and “will invite misguided litigation.”

“The expansive position on what conduct constitutes ‘harassment’ protected by federal civil rights laws and what remedial measures are legally required will unnecessarily complicate investigations and possibly expose school districts to liability beyond that envisioned by the Supreme Court,” says the letterform Francisco M. Negron Jr., NSBA’s top lawyer, to Charles P. Rose, the Education Department’s general counsel.

Negron stresses in the letter that the NSBA shares the Education Department’s interest in reducing bullying and harassment in schools. But he cites several concerns about the Oct. 27 “Dear Colleague” letter that went out from Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali.

Education Department Press Secretary Justin Hamilton said officials have had conversations with NSBA since receiving the letter.

“We believe that the guidance is clear and lays out what all of our collective responsibilities are to protect the interests of students,” Hamilton said in an interview Wednesday.

In the October guidance from the Office for Civil Rights, Ali said certain peer harassment in schools based on sex-role stereotyping or religious differences may amount to violations of existing federal civil rights laws. (Education Week had this.)

Negron said the OCR letter “significantly expands” the standard of liability for schools over peer harassment beyond the standard established by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 1999 case, Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education. In that case, the court said schools could only be held liable for peer sexual harassment when they had “actual knowledge” of the harassment, and the activity was so “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive” that it effectively barred the victim’s access to an educational program or benefit.

By contrast, the OCR letter, Negron asserts, potentially would hold a school district liable for harassment about which “it knows or should have known,” and covers harassment that is “severe, pervasive, or persistent” and that merely “interferes” with or limits participation in an educational program. Each prong of OCR’s guidance softens the Davis standard, Negron said.

Negron raises several other concerns about the OCR letter. The letter states that school districts are required to eliminate harassment and the hostile environment it creates, and to prevent it from recurring. But the Supreme Court’s Davis decision explicitly rejected the idea that schools must “remedy” peer harassment, Negron said.

Negron also says the OCR letter only “minimally” recognizes the First Amendment free speech rights of students and fails to recognize the constitutional limitations on school districts’ ability to discipline students for protected speech.

Negron called on the Education Department it issue a document clarifying that schools must operate under multiple local, state, and federal legal requirements on harassment and bullying.

“It is our hope that through this letter, we have addressed what we see as some unintended legal and practical challenges arising from the [Dear Colleague letter],” Negron wrote.

Getting K-12 into the Discussion of College Completion

By Caralee Adams

Education Week

December 16, 2010

The growing national discussion on college completion has focused heavily on the performance of higher education and government, with less attention paid to the role of the K-12 pipeline.
A report released this week by three higher-education organizations, for example, applauds President Obama’s goal to lead the world in college graduates by 2020, and then calls for greater action and commitment from government and institutions to make it happen.

In Strengthening College Opportunity and Performance, the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs Productivity and Accountability, the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, and the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education urge federal and state governments to move beyond the rhetoric and set some specific targets and policies to boost college completion.

They call for better data collection to track higher education performance and the development of systems to reward completion, not just enrollments. They also say colleges need to change their culture to focus on improving instruction and encouraging graduation, as well as channeling financial resources to support those goals to reward innovation and completion.

The Chronicle of Higher Education also delved into the issue with an analysis of college graduation rates at 1,400 public and private colleges over a six-year period from 2003 to 2008. While most schools showed a slight increase in completion rates, about one-third of colleges faced a decline. Despite the talk of raising graduation rates in higher education, the task still seems formidable.

So, what does all this mean for the K-12 system?

Dennis Jones, president of National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, says there needs to be better alignment of high school and college standards, in particular matching high school exit exams with college placement exams.

His advice for K-12: “Insist that higher education come to the table with a definition of what it means to be college-ready.”

K-12 has worked hard at setting standards, Jones says, and he faults higher education for not doing more on this front. “It’s way too easy for higher ed. to point to K-12 and say, ‘If they just sent us good students.’ We don’t want to let higher ed. off the hook,” he says.

The hope is that the recent report will “jump start” some conversation, including talk between education systems about how to improve college completion by working together, he says.

Educational structures were built at a time when the country needed about 30 percent of students to attain college degrees—and now the goal is nearly double that, says Jane Wellman, executive director of the Delta Project.

“We need to shift to a different type of approach that is more user-friendly to help individuals navigate the systems. What we have now is not working well,” she says. “The goal of increasing college attainment is the right one, but we can’t accomplish it if we don’t focus at all levels of government and all institutions. It won’t happen to serve the status quo and not the future.”

Stan Jones, president of Complete College America, says K-12 can improve the college completion rate by maintaining high standards in high school, offering strong college prep classes, and making use of one of the simplest solutions: encouraging students not to skip math their senior year, even if they have fulfilled their requirements. Too often, kids fail their first year in college because they aren’t prepared in math.

When it comes to the discussion between the two sectors, he thinks high schools are actually working harder at this than colleges. He thinks colleges should do more to reach out and have joint faculty discussions with high schools so the expectations in college are met.

Too often, students naively start college with no idea of the increased work load and think it’s just going to be like another year of high school, he says.

“Higher education could do a better job communicating that the expectations are—both to students and teachers,” he says. “I don’t think the agenda needs more money. It needs more focus on completion. … We are winning the battle to get students to go to college, we are losing the battle with completion.”

Before students even enroll in college, high school counselors need to make sure students are ready for the challenge, says Steve Schneider, a school counselor at Sheboygan South High School in Sheboygan, Wis., and secondary level vice president of the American School Counselors Association.

“The bulk of students who start and don’t finish college have chosen the wrong educational pathway,” says Schneider. “We are trying to prevent that from happening in the first place.”

That means encouraging high school juniors to take college math placement tests to see if they need more classes before graduation. Or trying a dual-enrollment class to get a sense of how prepared they are for college, says Schneider.

Also, Schneider says, students need to overcome the “social stigma” attached to technical schools. In Sheboygan, the high school is trying to bring in manufacturing and other businesses in the area to expose students to the demand for skilled workers in the community and boost the value of certificate and associate degrees. “We want them to realize that there is employment at the end” if they choose that alternative route, he says.

Cutbacks Force Some Early Colleges to Close Down

By Mary Ann Zehr

Education Week

December 20, 2010

At a time when two large-scale experimental studies are showing promising outcomes for students who attend early-college high schools, some of those schools are struggling to cover costs or have even had to close for financial reasons.

The 214 early colleges that are part of a national network run by the Boston-based Jobs for the Future are having to be creative about financing since a $107 million investment in them by the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has mostly been spent and subsidies for them in some states have been cut. The school improvement model enables students to take college courses while still in high school, and many of the participants attain associate degrees by high school graduation.

Over the past two-and-a-half years, two such schools have closed in Georgia, and a District of Columbia high school greatly scaled back its school-within-a-school early-college program. In Ohio, Youngstown State University is transferring responsibility for an early-college high school on its campus to the nearby Eastern Gateway Community College because it can no longer afford to sponsor it.

“Some schools are suffering, and some are thriving,” said Andrea R. Berger, the project director for a national evaluation of early colleges commissioned by the Gates Foundation. Financial sustainability “varies dramatically, based on local policies, on how much local funding there is, or how much they’ve been able to supplement it,” she said.

Early-college high schools have multiplied from a few early adopters when the Gates Foundation started its initiative to support them in 2002 to more than 300 today. Gates money was channeled to the schools through 13 intermediaries that formed a network coordinated by Jobs for the Future, a nonprofit organization focused on workforce development. Those early colleges target groups underrepresented in higher education—such as African-Americans, Latinos, low-income students, and those who are the first in their families to attend college—by offering a shorter, less expensive, and highly supportive route to earning a college degree. In addition, an estimated 100 early colleges operate outside that network, according to Jobs for the Future.

Gates Support

The Gates Foundation stopped most of its funding for such schools in 2009 as its focus shifted to other education-improvement priorities.

“In terms of early-college high schools, we do not plan to put additional funding into the creation of new schools,” said Stephen Barkanic, a senior program officer for the foundation. “But we do want to see what design principles [within those programs] are accelerating students toward college readiness and college success.”

In addition to the $107 million that supported early colleges, the foundation granted $34 million to Jobs for the Future for coordination, and $26 million for research on the effectiveness of the high school model. (The foundation also provides grant support to Editorial Projects in Education, the nonprofit corporation that publishes Education Week.)

The early-college participants in the Jobs for the Future network all get free tuition for the college courses they take, but someone has to pay for it. Because students haven’t yet graduated from high school, federal financial-aid programs, such as Pell Grants, cannot be used to underwrite early-college costs.

In some states, such as North Carolina and Texas, state subsidies to cover tuition and other costs remain strong, but that’s not the case in states such as Georgia and Ohio, or in the District of Columbia.

Meanwhile, in two large-scale randomized, controlled studies of early-college high schools, researchers are finding that such schools have increased access to college for underrepresented students and enabled them to succeed in postsecondary education.

Julie A. Edmunds, the project director for high school reform for the SERVE Center at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, is conducting one of those studies in that state. Begun in 2006, the study is underwritten by a $2.87 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences.

The study, which will ultimately have a sample of 4,000 students in 19 schools, compares students who were accepted in a lottery system of early colleges with those who applied but were not accepted, attending regular public schools instead. The study so far has looked at early-college students’ progress in 9th and 10th grades.

The results show that, compared to the students in the control group, “more kids are taking these [college] courses and succeeding in them,” Ms. Edmunds said. “More kids are staying in school.”

In the other major study, the Gates Foundation has paid for a nationwide experimental evaluation of early-college high schools. The Washington-based American Institutes for Research is carrying out the evaluation, which started this year.

Like the North Carolina study, it compares students who were accepted by lottery into early colleges with students who failed to win a seat in those lotteries, according to Ms. Berger of the American Institutes for Research. It has a sample of about 5,000 students, who started high school in the 2004-05 school year.

Among the findings are that proficiency rates on standardized tests are higher for early-college participants than for the control-group students in the same school districts. Attendance rates and four-year high school graduation rates are also higher for the early-college students, Ms. Berger said. She said the first analysis will likely be released some time next year.

But educators should be wary of thinking that a particular structure of schooling leads to success, said Betsy Brand, the director of the Washington-based American Youth Policy Forum.

“It’s important to dig more deeply, not just into whether the name ‘early-college high school’ means the kids are going to be succeeding, but what are the practices that have succeeded,” she said.

Finance Forecast

Whether early colleges survive depends largely on the availability of state funding to cover college-tuition costs, said Delia Pompa, the senior vice president for programs for the Washington-based National Council of La Raza, one of the intermediaries that received Gates Foundation funding for early colleges.

“If the state provides tuition money for the kids to get [college-credit] hours, they are sustainable,” she said.

One of the early colleges that the Latino-advocacy group previously supported, which operated within Bell Multicultural High School in Washington, scaled back its program in the 2008-09 school year from supporting as many as 100 students to take college courses while in high school to only two or three per year, said Maria Tukeva, the school’s principal, in an e-mail message. She said the same scale of the program couldn’t be sustained after Gates money, which had helped cover tuition for high schoolers to take college courses, ran out and subsequent funding from the District of Columbia government also stopped, though she is seeking funds to build it back up again.

The Regional Early Admission for College Hopefuls Early College, in Carrollton, Ga., closed last school year for financial reasons, and the Macon Bibb Early-College School, in Macon, Ga., closed the previous school year because it wasn’t financially viable, said Dawn B. Cooper, the director of college readiness for the board of regents of the University System of Georgia.

The state university system allocated funding for early colleges for two years, but that aid was halted before last school year, Ms. Cooper said.

In Ohio, at least two early colleges are experiencing financial pressure.

Youngstown State is shifting responsibility for an early-college program to Eastern Gateway Community College because the university can no longer afford it, said Ron Cole, the university’s director of communications. Between fiscal 2009 and fiscal 2010, state funding to the four-year university for its early-college program dropped from $751,000 to $65,000, he said.

Ann Koon, the director of public information for the community college, said it’s more feasible for her institution to run the program, which has 250 students. Ohio’s funding for community colleges differs from that for its four-year institutions, she explained, in that a community college can count early-college participants as if they were regular college students. Also, she said, tuition at the community college is lower than at Youngstown State.

Meanwhile, Dayton Early-College Academy, a charter school in Dayton, Ohio, is seeking ways to stay afloat financially, said Judy A. Hennessey, the school’s superintendent. For four years, she said, Ohio had a line item in its budget for early colleges, which translated to about $700,000 per year for her school, but that line item was cut in the current biennial budget.

“Right now, we are solvent for two years. That’s with frugal planning and some cuts,” said Ms. Hennessey. “Beyond that, we have to explore grants, and hopefully get some relief as the economy improves.”

Even in Texas, where state support has been strong for early colleges, Diana Natalicio, the president of the University of Texas at El Paso, is not happy that the university must cover the tuition for participants who have finished associate degrees and go on to enroll in her university before graduating from high school.

For this school year, the university raised $270,000 from private donors to cover that cost for 65 high schoolers, she said. Once the students graduate from high school, though, they are eligible for federal Pell Grants, which help pay for tuition.

Aside from issues of funding, Ms. Natalicio has only good things to say about the early colleges in El Paso.

“The students are competing very well on our campus despite the fact they are younger,” she said. “They are well prepared, highly motivated, have a good [grade point average], and good performance in the tough math and science classes.”

Study: Higher STEM ‘Dose’ May Lead to Adult Achievement

By Sarah D Sparks

Education Week

December 7, 2010

The United States may be damned with faint praise this morning, as the newly released 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) results show American 15-year-olds have improved to perform in the middle of the pack of 34 industrialized countries in science, while their math performance remained below the average. The results are apt to goad an already-urgent debate about how to move scientifically talented youngsters from science and math classrooms to economy-spurring science careers.

Yet a new 25-year longitudinal study of America’s top-performing students suggests even a natural interest in or talent for science doesn’t guarantee a student will become an accomplished scientist as an adult. Rather, students who received early and strong “doses” of both STEM courses and enrichment were more likely than their academic peers to become advanced scientists as adults.

In the study, published in the November issue of the Journal of Educational Psychology, Jonathan Wai of Duke University led a team of Vanderbilt University researchers to study nearly 1,500 of the nation’s top-performing .5 percent of students in math, drawn from the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth. Separately, the researchers looked back over the scholastic careers of more than 700 top-performing graduate students in science, technology, engineering, or math.

Specifically, the researchers analyzed the quantity, richness, and intensity—or “dose”—of STEM-related activities students had access to during their school years. These included the academic courses they took, such as Advanced Placement or early-college math and science courses, and the enrichment they received, from participating in a science or math fair, conducting independent research projects, or writing within the disciplines.

“There’s been a lot of focus in gifted education on acceleration, taking regular course material and moving through it faster, and we wanted to look at a broader definition of dose,” Mr. Wai said. Though the study focused on students in the top-performing 1 percent in the nation, he said, “I certainly think this concept of educational dose could be translated to students at all educational levels.”

Students who participated in more than the median number of science and math courses and activities during their school years were about twice as likely by age 33 to earn a doctoral degree or tenure or to publish a journal article in a STEM field than were students who participated in a fewer-than-average number of activities. This held regardless of whether the students were male or female.

The researchers suggested the balance of both rigorous academics and extracurricular activities to allow students to use their knowledge may give students an edge over their equally bright academic peers.

“Educational enrichment and advancement comes in multiple forms and students may not have access to everything,” Mr. Wai told me. “You don’t have to have access to everything in order to have a high dose. What matters is that the student is intellectually engaged and stimulated. I do think we should allow students to go at their own pace, to take advanced courses if they want to, and to have as much access to these educational opportunities as they want and are ready for.”

Gates Pushes District-Charter Collaborations

By Mary Anne Zehr

Education Week

December 7, 2010

Seeking to promote closer ties between charter schools and other public schools, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced Tuesday that it is providing grants to enable charter schools and traditional school districts in nine cities to share best practices and solve problems together.

The nine collaborations are set to receive $100,000 each to carry out signed agreements, and they will compete to be among three selected for significantly larger grants from the foundation. The foundation did not specify dollar amounts for the larger grants.

“It’s new that we have funded districts and charters to come together in this way,” Vicki L. Phillips, the director of K-12 education initiatives for the Seattle-based foundation, said in a telephone interview. “For a long time, there have been tensions between districts and charters over an array of things, from facilities to recruitment and retention of staff. This [effort] is designed to say, ‘We want the highest-performing charters to be successful and the highest-performing districts…

Digital Transformation Key to K-12 Success, Council says

By Ian Quillen

Education Week

December 7, 2010

Online-learning advocates are calling a new report that recommends 10 ways for states to change policy to increase access and equity in digital learning one of the most comprehensive efforts of its kind.

And with two former governors leading the promotion of “Digital Learning Now”—the first document released by the Digital Learning Council since former state chief executives Jeb Bush of Florida and Bob Wise of West Virginia announced the group’s creation in August—there are growing indications that policymakers outside the online-learning realm are considering the potential of digital technologies.

But whether the council’s goals are realistic remains to be seen.

“Do you negotiate for the status quo plus an incremental change, or do you make it aspirational?” said Mr. Wise, who conceded that some of the suggestions—such as restructuring school funding models, teacher-pay structures, and course-completion guidelines—could require daunting policy overhauls in most states.

“What we put down [in writing] today, in a year, technology can rapidly make obsolete. But at least this provides a road map to every governor and every state chief policymaker and educator about steps we can begin implementing right now.”

In a meeting with Education Week editors and reporters, Mr. Wise and council consultants Tom Vander Ark and Bennet Ratcliff emphasized that most of the suggestions were already being carried out in early-adopting states. For example, during Mr. Bush’s tenure in Florida, a 2003 state policy change allowed state education funding to follow students who wanted to take courses from the Florida Virtual School, which operates as its own district and now serves about 97,000. That allowed the school’s enrollment—free to all Florida students—to grow exponentially since then, unlike virtual schools in other states where political pressures have kept state virtual school funding, and thus enrollment, capped.

Mr. Wise and the consultants said other recommendations, such as transferring all state assessments to a digital platform and expanding state infrastructure to make a more hospitable environment for digital learning, are boosted by initiatives such as the common academic standards effort and the Federal Communication Commission’s National Broadband Plan.

“It comes along at just the right time, because now you’ve got 41 [44 at press time] states who have said we want these [common] standards,” said Mr. Wise. “This gives states a chance to really look at how they’re going to implement the common core in curriculum, in teacher preparation and development, in assessments, and how best to do that online.”

While the council—which convened entirely virtually and consists of 100 members from across education, business, technology, and research industries—plans to issue ratings a year from now based on how closely states are following their suggestions, there’s still no guarantee states will listen. Experts say the recommendation to link teacher pay to student course completion and performance could face opposition from teachers’ unions across states, and the suggestion to explore multiple providers of high-quality digital content may in some states necessitate abolition of textbook-adoption policies.

“I think that one of the things we noticed most was that it tends to look at developing policies as if there weren’t any prior policies on the state level,” said Bradley J. Hull, the deputy executive director of the National Association of State Boards of Education. “There’s going to be a lot of work for states to look at what they already have in place.”

John I. Wilson, the executive director of the National Education Association, said advocating performance pay is a recycled idea that does not represent the 21st-century view the report is trying to promote.

Despite a suggestion calling for high-quality digital instruction, he added, the voice and role of teachers is absent from the report, though he does support its call for competency-based pathways that would let students progress at their own pace after mastering course concepts.

With more teacher input for the report, “it would’ve come out very clearly that technology is not a teacher; technology is a tool that enhances the teaching process,” said Mr. Wilson. “You can tell there’s no teacher imprint in this document. I think that it’s a very corporate kind of document.”

‘Driving Innovation’

Some of the report’s guidelines may even garner concern within the online-learning world. For example, while all 16 member states in the Southern Regional Education Board have statewide online schools, Myk Garn, the Atlanta-based organization’s director of technology, said many may have reservations about the suggestion that all students have access to multiple content providers.

“I’ve got to kind of talk to my folks and see how well this aligns with their thinking and their directions,” Mr. Garn said. “What I’m hearing from the Digital Learning Council, and their discussion, which makes sense, is less about the idea of driving quality, but driving innovation; that we’re not going to have the wealth of creative ideas coming in unless we have multiple providers.”

Mr. Garn also said that while the report is comprehensive, it shouldn’t ignore the realistic goal of incremental progress. He noted that policymakers in Michigan are more receptive to the idea of seat-time waivers that allow students to progress through courses at their own pace as a result of a policy passed in 2006 that requires high school students to take at least one online course before graduation, and thus exposes educators to the self-paced nature of online courses.

And, while still difficult, the state level may be the best bet for sweeping technology reform. Educational technology champions generally have praised federal government initiatives like the National Broadband Plan and the National Education Technology Plan, federally generated outlines of how to increase broadband access in communities, and how to integrate technology to transform learning. But they say they understand a Republican-controlled House of Representatives and a Democratic-controlled Senate—the political makeup of Congress come January—could mean a lack of federal push for those goals, even if they are understood as being relatively apolitical.

With Mr. Bush, a Republican, and Mr. Wise, a Democrat, leading the Digital Learning Council, they say the body may have a strong chance to push more substantial reform.

“There are fundamental questions at the national level about what business we’re going to be able to get done,” said Douglas Levin, the executive director of the State Educational Technology Directors Association and a member of the council’s executive committee. “To have [the governors] cross the aisle and say that education is important and that we actually agree on a fair set of ideas … reflects a growing consensus that is not partisan, but plays out in a partisan environment, about productive ways to drive some positive innovation in education.”

Study Looks at Turnover of Charter Principals

Education Week

December 12, 2010

“You’re leaving? Sustainability and Succession in Charter Schools”

Seventy-one percent of charter school leaders say they plan to leave their schools within five years, raising questions about the stability of the culture of those schools, according to a report released last month by the Center on Reinventing Public Education

Achievement First Receives $1 Million From Broad Foundation

Philanthropy News Digest

November 18, 2010

The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation has announced a two-year, $1 million grant to New Haven-based Achievement First to expand its network of charter schools and serve an additional 6,500 low-income students.

Stimulus Supercharges Energy Efficiency Efforts

By Sean Cavanagh

Education Week

November 22, 2010

Until recently, the students and faculty at Silver High School counted on an old steam boiler to provide their building with hot water—and the district’s facilities staff counted on the 1960s-era equipment to break down, and waste energy.

“It was a hog. And a maintenance nightmare,” said Barry Ward, the facilities manager for the Silver Consolidated School District, in Silver City, N.M. “It was not efficient, and it was impossible to buy parts for it.”

When classes opened this fall, the hot-water relic had been replaced with a solar water-heating system, which is now mounted on the roof of the high school’s gymnasium. The vast majority of the $112,000 cost for that addition was paid for by the 2009 federal economic-stimulus program, which is supporting hundreds of millions of dollars worth of similar renewable-energy and energy-efficiency upgrades in school districts around the country.

Those projects are designed to transform and reduce energy consumption in the nation’s schools, through the addition of solar power and other sources of renewable energy, and to cut utility costs through energy efficiency. They’re also meant to build students’ and communities’ understanding of alternative power sources. To that end, teachers and administrators in many districts are incorporating their schools’ new energy features into classroom lessons.

The Silver Consolidated district, which has 3,000 students and sits more than a mile above sea level in the rugged, southwestern part of New Mexico, has used a total of $357,000 in stimulus funding to make a series of energy-efficiency upgrades, including the solar-powered water heater. Other changes included putting three school campuses on an automated energy-management system, which was already in place on other campuses.

The district pays about $450,000 in utility bills each year. The new energy installations could reduce those costs by 20 percent, estimates Mr. Ward, who notes that during a prolonged economic downturn, every penny counts.

“In this environment, that saves jobs,” he said.

Energy Department Boost

Others districts are making similar additions and retrofits. The U.S. Department of Energy is managing many of those projects through stimulus-backed efforts such as the $3 billionState Energy Program, which is devoting about $300 million to schools, as well as through a solar program focused on the nation’s cities, and through block grants for energy efficiency, a significant number of which are devoted to school projects, according to federal officials.

The stimulus aid, part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act approved by Congress nearly two years ago, will bring a number of energy benefits to schools and communities, said Gil Sperling, the senior adviser for policy and programs in the office of energy efficiency and renewable energy at the Energy Department. Along with creating jobs and cutting carbon emissions, the projects are intended to increase students’ understanding of energy use and the environmental and financial benefits of reducing power consumption.

The Obama administration also hopes that the federal investment will encourage other districts to consider making their own renewable-energy efforts, to curb pollution and cut costs, Mr. Sperling said. While the savings for individual school systems varies by project, the prospect of receiving federal money that could bring immediate savings on utility bills appeals to districts, particularly given states’ and schools’ struggles to emerge from the recession.

“They obviously love the budget impact,” he said of schools.

In New Mexico, the flow of stimulus aid is overseen by the state’s office of recovery and reinvestment, led by executive director and former Democratic Gov. Toney Anaya. The federal stimulus act evokes mixed reactions from the public, which has been variously portrayed as either a justified, job-saving intervention or a big-government boondoggle. In promoting the recovery act around the state, Mr. Anaya says he hears clashing opinions, too, but not about school energy projects, where the response, he says, has been overwhelmingly favorable.

His office has set aside about $7 million for those school power efforts, and it received about twice as many applications as it could fund, Mr. Anaya estimates. He attributes some of the program’s popularity to New Mexicans’ familiarity and experience with renewable-energy projects, as well as schools’ need to trim costs.

“The demand is overwhelming from individual school districts,” he said. As far as what motivates them, “at the top of the list is future savings on utility bills.”

In other states, stimulus dollars are supporting broader energy-savings measures in schools. The Denver public schools, for instance, used favorable financing created by the stimulus act to issue $304 million in bonds to make major, energy-focused repairs and renovations, said David A. Suppes, the chief operating officer of the 78,000-student system. That work includes adding new lighting, installing energy-control systems, and replacing windows, roofs, and boilers, he said.

Classroom Lessons

Many schools nationwide are shaping curricula and lessons in science and other subjects around the stimulus-funded energy projects on their campuses.

Hillside Middle School, in Utah, used stimulus aid to build a 22-panel, 5-kilowatt solar array on its roof, with a power converter that ties into the building’s power grid. The power converter monitors the system’s energy production. Eventually, the school plans to feed that information to a website, where students can track it.

One of the teachers who plans to use the site and other aspects of the power system is Jeff Streba, who teaches career and technical education courses at the school, which is part of the 25,000-student Salt Lake City school district. Mr. Streba, who already discusses alternative energy in his 7th and 8th grade classes, says he hopes to use the system to lead students beyond general descriptions of the technology into specifics about how much power it can churn out, at what times.

“When you tell them, ‘It’s a 5-kilowatt system,’ it’s in one ear, out the other,” Mr. Streba said. But when you start talking about what that energy can produce—lighting rooms, powering computers—“that starts making sense,” he said. “A light goes on in their head.”

Hillside Middle School’s grant was awarded through the stimulus-financed Solar for Schools program, which is administered by the Utah State Energy Program. The $3 million effort is paying for the construction of 73 solar arrays around the state, with at least one solar array being placed in each of the state’s 41 school districts, said Elise Brown, the renewable-energy coordinator for the state energy program.

Those installations will save an estimated 8,000 tons of carbon dioxide from being released over 20 years, the equivalent to planting 11,000 trees and letting them grow for 10 years, the state says.

While the solar panels are expected to save each district about $600 a year in energy costs, the main focus of the school projects is educational, Ms. Brown said. All participating schools are required to have at least one teacher attend training sessions to gather ideas on how to integrate renewable-energy projects into classes of their choosing, such as science, math, or another subject. That training is being led by the National Energy Foundation, a nonprofit group in Salt Lake City that develops school materials focused on natural-resource and energy issues.

“It’s a great tool for teaching students how to incorporate renewable energy and recycling into their daily lives,” said Logan Hall, an assistant principal at Hillside Middle School. “It has a much bigger effect that way.”

Research Finds Overlap of 12th Grade Content with That of Other Exams

By Catherine Gewertz

Education Week

December 1, 2010

Initial studies have delivered early but promising indications that it might be possible to use the exam known as “the nation’s report card” for a brand-new purpose: to gauge students’ preparedness for college or work.

At its quarterly meeting here last week, the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policy for theNational Assessment of Educational Progress, released results of studies comparing the content covered in the 12th grade assessment with the content in the SAT and ACT college-entrance exams; in the Accuplacer, a course-placement test used by colleges; and in WorkKeys, a job-skills test used by employers.

The studies found some differences in the tests’ content, but they also found “considerable overlap.” The overlap is enough to make researchers optimistic, NAGB officials said, about proceeding with the rest of the work needed to make a full determination of whether it would be appropriate to say that certain ranges of NAEP scores correlate with preparedness for work or higher education.

They cautioned, however, that the content analyses alone do not provide enough information to enable that. A flock of related studies is under way to help the board determine whether NAEP can be used to make meaningful statements about career or college preparedness, with a decision slated for late 2011.

Lengthy Inquiry

Among the areas being probed are the statistical relationships between NAEP scores and other exams; the skills measured by NAEP that represent those necessary for entry into certain job-training programs; and how well students at various points on the NAEP scale fare in college and work.

One of the studies contemplated, a comparison of how freshmen at Texas colleges performed on NAEP, will probably be abandoned because too few of those students were willing to sit for the exam in a pilot administration, NAGB officials said. That study could have informed the overall research by, among other things, enabling a comparative look at the scores of students who are placed in credit-bearing courses and those who are placed in remedial courses.

The governing board’s inquiry into the use of NAEP as a college- or work-preparedness indicator grew out of work that began in 2002, when it established a special commission to examine strands of questions about the 12th grade NAEP. As the commission’s work progressed, the question of using the exam as a gauge for endeavors beyond high school took shape. The board approved that program of research in March 2009, right after the 12th grade NAEP on which the research is to be based was administered. (“Plans Advance to Link NAEP to College, Work Readiness”, Dec. 3, 2008.)

Early Results

The “content alignment” studies released Nov. 19 found that the content covered by the 12th grade NAEP is similar to but broader than the content in the SAT, ACT, and Accuplacer exams. Some differences were found in the amount of cognitive rigor the tests demanded of students, the types of reading texts they used, how much each exam used multiple-choice or open-ended questions.

The studies found that “some” of the content of NAEP is similar to that of WorkKeys, but WorkKeys tests some content absent from NAEP. The mathematics and reading skills assessed by WorkKeys, for example, focus on applying skills to workplace settings.

The assessment board’s work flows into an increasingly active dialogue on how to measure college and career readiness. In trying to create its own statements on the issue, the board is taking pains to clarify what its definitions do—and do not—mean.

In a presentation to the board last week, Executive Director Cornelia Orr explained that the term “preparedness” was deliberately chosen to connote the academic skills necessary to qualify for placement into entry-level college courses or job-training programs without remediation. That definition excludes certain skill sets that some others include as part of the “readiness” picture, ranging from work-study habits and teamwork to personal qualities such as persistence.

That approach also differs from some others, in that it focuses on what is necessary to enter college coursework or job-training, not what is necessary to achieve a specific level of success in them. The ACT’s college-readiness benchmarks, for instance, identify threshold scores on the ACT exam that establish the likelihood that students will earn passing grades or better in entry-level, credit-bearing college courses.

Number of Students Classified As Learning Disabled Continues to Drop – On Special Education

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By Christina Samuels

Education Week

November 19, 2010

Two months ago, I wrote an article about the the declining numbers of students identified as having “specific learning disabilities,” the largest of the 13 categories that are included in Individuals With Disabilities in Education Act.

When I wrote the story, the latest data available to me were population counts from the 2007-08 school year. Now, data from fall 2008 is available from a different source, and the numbers appear to show the same downward trend.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in fall 2007 approximately 2.573 million youth ages 3 to 21 were classified as having specific learning disabilities, out of 6.606 million children covered by the IDEA. A specific learning disability is defined as a psychological processing disorder that impairs learning but not a student’s overall cognitive ability.

The IDEA Data Accountability Center, which collects more up-to-date data from the states, says that a year later, in fall 2008, 2.537 million 3- to 21-year-olds were classified as having an SLD, out of 6.593 million children covered by the IDEA.

The child counts reflect approximately 36,000 fewer students classified as having a learning disability, and a 13,000 drop in IDEA-eligible students overall. Another sharp drop was seen in the numbers of students classified as having a behavioral or emotional disturbance—from about 500,000 in fall 2007 to approximately 421,000 in fall 2008.

Some categories are rising dramatically, though. Autism is still considered a “low-incidence” disability, but about 296,000 3- to 21-year-olds were classified as having the disorder in fall 2007, compared to about 337,000 3- to 21-year-olds in fall 2008.

The experts I spoke to for my September article said they expected that this downward trend among students with learning disabilities would continue, because the same forces discussed in the article are still in play. Schools are attempting to identify these students earlier, and get them help sooner through processes such as response to intervention, which provide intensive lessons on areas of academic weakness.

However, the judgment of school administrators, who may be under pressure to reduce the size of their special education population, may also be a factor. The harder question to pin down is if students are getting the academic help they need, regardless of classification.

U.S. Rises to International Average in Science

By Eric W.Rebelen

Education Week

December 7, 2010

American students’ science performance climbed to the average for leading industrialized nations, while their mathematics performance remained below the average, despite gains in that subject from the last round of testing in 2006, based on results released today from a prominent international assessment.

In reading, meanwhile, U.S. performance was roughly flat compared with earlier testing cycles, with 15-year-olds staying at about the average for the 34 nations that are part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

In a conference call with reporters, Stuart Keraschsky, the deputy commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said the results from the 2009 administration of the Program for International Student Assessment offer some reason for encouragement, at least in science and math.

“The needle doesn’t move very far very fast in education,” he said. Still, he suggested that the changes seen in achievement in those two subjects “were moving in the right direction.”

But at an education forum in Washington this morning, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan bluntly expressed his concerns with the latest outcome.

“The PISA results, to be brutally honest, show that a host of developed nations are outeducating us,” he said. “Americans need to wake up to this educational reality.”

With regard to the gains in science, he said: “I don’t think that’s much to celebrate. … Being average in science is a mantle of mediocrity.”

PISA compares the performance of U.S. 15-year-olds in reading, math, and science literacy against their peers internationally. It seeks to assess both what students have learned and how well they apply that knowledge in real-world contexts. The results are scored on a scale of 1 to 1,000.

Special Focus on Reading

In science, the U.S. score of 502 increased from 489 in 2006. The new results were not measurably different from the OECD average of 501, according to a highlights report issued by the NCES, an arm of the U.S. Department of Education.

The United States ranked in the same statistical category in science as 12 other nations, including Belgium, the Czech Republic, and Portugal. Meanwhile, 12 OECD nations had measurably higher scores.

At the top of the pack in science, based on the latest results, were Finland, Japan, and South Korea. (The NCES report says that only the 2006 test and the current one for science are comparable.)

Each PISA cycle assesses one of the three subjects in depth, and this time around that subject was reading. The 2009 results include a combined reading-literacy scale, as well as three subscales that attempt to gauge students’ ability to access and retrieve information, integrate and interpret it, and reflect and evaluate it.

Overall, U.S. 15-year-olds had an average reading score of 500, which the NCES said was not measurably different from the OECD average of 493. Only six countries had statistically higher average scores, while the United States was in the same category as 14 others.

American students scored 504 in 2000 and 495 in 2003. Results for 2006 were invalidated because of major errors in the printing of the test given in the United States. (“Printing Errors Invalidate U.S. Reading Scores on PISA,” Nov. 28, 2007.)

The top three OECD performers in reading this time around were South Korea, Finland, and Canada.

U.S. students showed the best relative performance in answering questions that judged students’ ability to reflect and evaluate information. On that measure, the United States ranked seventh out of the 34 OECD nations. The weakest area for U.S. achievement was in accessing and retrieving information, for which students tied for 19th place with France.

Gender Differences

Meanwhile, in math, the U.S. average score was 487, statistically lower than the OECD average of 496. In all, 17 OECD nations had statistically higher scores.

The U.S. score was statistically higher than the average for American test-takers of 474 in 2006, but not measurably different from 2003, the initial year for the same math assessment.

The highest-scoring OECD countries in math were South Korea, Finland, and Switzerland.

The data released today indicate some gender differences in achievement. For example, U.S. males scored higher on average than females in both science and math, while females on average showed stronger results in reading.

PISA was first implemented in 2000. The U.S. sample for the latest results includes both public and private schools, with 165 schools and 5,233 students participating in all. The 2009 data also include results for many other non-OECD nations and educational systems, including Albania, Qatar, and Shanghai, China.

Former Gov. Bob Wise of West Virginia, who heads the Washington-based Alliance for Excellent Education, said in a statement that while the United States has a long way to go, he saw some reasons for encouragement.

“The positive news is that the United States has stopped dropping in the international rankings, and there has even been some improvement in the mean scores in all three subjects since the last assessment, with significant gains in science,” he said.

Mr. Wise also drew attention to data regarding the performance of low-income students.

“Most positively, approximately 25 percent of [U.S.] low-income students tested in the top quartile, showing that with the right support, every child can learn at a high level.”

For his part, Chester E. Finn Jr., the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, drew attention to the strong performance by Shanghai, which participated for the first time in the 2009 administration of PISA.

“Shanghai’s 15-year-olds topped those in every other jurisdiction in all three subjects,” he wrote on Flypaper, the Fordham Institute’s blog. “The 2009 testing cycle marked the first time that youngsters in China-proper participated. To be sure, it was only Shanghai, the country’s flagship city in so many ways, a single megalopolis on which Beijing has lavished much investment and attention, many favorable policies, and even (for China) a relatively high degree of freedom.”

But Mr. Finn, a former education official in the Reagan administration, said “Americans—and the rest of the world—would make a big mistake to suppose for one second that this Shanghai result is some sort of aberration or unique case.”

Let’s Spread the Blame for Reading Underachievement

By Sandra Stotsky

Education Week

December 7, 2010

Why have the reading skills of American high school students shown little or no improvement in several decades, despite substantial increases in funds for elementary and secondary education by federal and state governments? Two possible reasons—a fragmented literature/reading curriculum and a neglect of close reading—spring up from the results of a study, “Literary Study in Grades 9, 10, and 11: A National Survey,” of which I was the principal author. Released this year, the study was sponsored by the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, or ALSCW, and conducted by the University of Arkansas’ Survey Research Center.

One of the study’s core findings is that a fragmented literature curriculum coupled with high school English teachers’ approach to the study of both imaginative literature and nonfiction impedes development of the knowledge and skills the broad middle-third of our students need for authentic college coursework. Additionally, the study found that there is no substitute for a coherent curriculum that addresses culturally and historically significant authors, literary periods, and movements in our own or other civic cultures, or careful analysis of assigned texts.

The ALSCW study presents an analysis of the responses of more than 400 representative public school teachers across the country who were asked what texts they assign in standard and honors courses and what approaches they use to teach students how to understand imaginative literature and literary nonfiction. The study excluded elective, basic, and remedial courses, as well as Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, and other advanced courses because we were interested in students who were reading at about grade level, not the most- or least-able readers

Concurrent with our national study, two of my colleagues at the University of Arkansas (one in the English department and one in the English education department) and I surveyed a representative sample of more than 400 English teachers of standard and honors courses in grades 9, 10, and 11 in Arkansas public schools with a questionnaire almost identical to the one we used in the national survey. My colleagues and I followed the Arkansas-state survey, which was conducted by the Survey Center at the University of New Hampshire, with eight focus-group meetings of English teachers from the state’s four congressional districts. The results of the Arkansas survey, “Literature Study in Grades 9, 10, and 11 in Arkansas,” are almost identical to the results of the national study, serving to validate it.

As the ALSCW report indicates, the content of the literature curriculum for students in standard or honors courses is no longer consistently traditional or uniform. Only in a small percentage of courses do titles repeatedly appear. While we found that 72 percent of students in standard and honors courses read “Romeo and Juliet,” 68 percent read To Kill a Mockingbird, 59 percent read “The Crucible,” and 48 percent read “Julius Caesar” before they graduate from high school, one cannot discern what other titles these students read since percentages for most of the other works mentioned fall below 30 percent. These low frequencies suggest how little is left of a coherent and progressive literature curriculum with respect to two of its primary purposes: to acquaint students with the literary and civic heritage of English-speaking people and to develop an understanding and use of the language needed for college coursework across a broad range of disciplines.

To remedy the deficiencies in what and how students learn in high school English courses, changes need to be made in our high school and college English departments and our education schools.

We also found that the texts teachers assign generally do not increase in difficulty from grade 9 to grade 11. This is not surprising because most English teachers enjoy a great deal of autonomy in what they assign as major titles, poems, short stories, literary nonfiction, and technical or informational texts. And their professional organizations do not provide guidelines for intellectually progressive curriculum sequences in grades 9-12, since the syllabuses used by the College Board were abandoned a half-century ago.

Perhaps more damaging than the absence of a coherent and increasingly challenging literature/reading curriculum are the pedagogical approaches that the study indicated English teachers prefer to use. They do not favor close, analytical reading of assigned works. Instead, they prefer such non-analytical approaches as a personal response or a focus on a work’s historical or biographical context—for instance, class discussions of To Kill a Mockingbird that emphasize the link between the trial of Tom Robinson and the Scottsboro trials rather than focusing on the novel’s plot, characters, style, and moral meaning. More problematically, we found that they are more likely to use a non-analytical approach to interpret literary nonfiction than close reading. Why they do so, we do not know from this study, but much of the academic and pedagogical coursework or professional development they have taken may be to blame.

Unfortunately, non-analytical approaches not only divert student attention from the assigned text, they also consume much of the time teachers can allot for literary study. The use of small-group work to organize literature discussion in the classroom also tends to further diminish the amount of class time on close reading, according to another finding from the study. (The survey results, however, do not indicate how frequently teachers use small-group work.)

While biographical or other materials can supplement a close reading of any text by, for example, introducing the seminal ideas of the author’s time, a stress on personal response or on contextual materials does not replace the need to teach students how to read the text itself. The influence of a reader-response approach on several generations of English teachers must be apparent in every college class. College students cannot easily engage in an argument about any work they are studying if they have not learned that they must first try to understand what the author wrote, nor can they readily invoke historical or cultural context to inform their reading. Today, most students enter and leave high school with little historical and cultural knowledge, as the declining National Assessment of Educational Progress scores in history and civics also inform us. If English teachers do supply their students with contextual materials for an assigned work, the content of such materials is apt to be as new to them as the work is, which means that the teacher’s use of them in the classroom is more likely didactic than analytic. In other words, more time is spent explaining the materials than analyzing the text.

To remedy the deficiencies in what and how students learn in high school English courses, changes need to be made in our high school and college English departments and our education schools.

First, high schools should revise their English curriculum to incorporate a progressively more challenging core of literary and nonliterary texts with cultural and historical significance for our own country and other countries; however, workable principles for shaping sequences of reading assignments in a single course and across grade levels would need to be hammered out.

Second, English and rhetoric and composition departments at colleges and universities need to emphasize the analytical study of literature, especially for those students planning to become secondary English teachers. Third, English and reading education departments in education schools need to teach prospective teachers how to do and teach close reading. The U.S. Department of Education and state legislatures must give priority to the funding of professional-development programs for English and reading teachers that emphasize teaching close, careful reading. Close attention to the designs of language, traditionally fostered through literary analysis, remains vital to the development of an informed, capable citizenry.

According to Diane Ravitch, in The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, our high school literature curriculum was once coherent. We had a “de facto curriculum for most of the 19th century, when the textbooks in each subject were interchangeable. For the first half of the 20th century as well, we had an implicit national curriculum that was decisively shaped by the college entrance examinations of the College Board; their highly respected examinations were based on a specific and explicit syllabus, designed by teachers and professors in each subject.”

If we are to make all students in this country college-ready, such a syllabus or curriculum framework, updated and broadened, is needed.

The Keys to Keeping Education Reform Rolling in D.C

By Susan Schaeffler

Washington Post

December 4, 2010

As Mayor-elect Vincent C. Gray prepares to take office, the D.C. education community is holding its breath. With the winds of progress at our back, it is critical that we continue to be relentless in our efforts to provide a high-quality education to every student in the District. Though the outgoing administration laid the groundwork for reform, many important and difficult decisions lie ahead.

Gray’s long-standing support for education reform and his campaign pledges to continue pushing ahead are encouraging. As the D.C. Council chairman, Gray championed reforms that have been central to implementing lasting change in the D.C. schools, such as providing universal pre-kindergarten and supporting the mayoral takeover of the public schools. Gray has also been effective in getting buy-in from teachers, parents, school officials, policymakers and district administrators to move these initiatives forward.

As a parent of two children who attend D.C. public schools and CEO of the KIPP DC public charter schools, I offer the following three suggestions for how Gray can continue the progress:

1. Advocate for all students. With D.C. charter school enrollment at a historic high, it will be Gray’s responsibility to lead for all students. During his campaign, he promised to deliver — within three months of taking office — a blueprint for funding parity between District and charter schools.

It is critical that Gray follow through on this promise, because charter schools currently receive less funding per student than the District’s traditional public schools. With nearly 40 percent of D.C. children enrolled in public charters, we cannot afford to shortchange these schools. All children in D.C. public schools ought to have equal treatment, regardless of whether they attend District or charter schools.

2. Provide more time to learn. It’s a stark fact: Students in Taiwan, Japan and South Korea typically spend 40 more days annually in school than children in the United States, and their academic results outpace ours in science by a wide margin. Because of this discrepancy, President Obama has joined the growing chorus calling for lengthening the school day and year.

At KIPP DC, our extended school day, week and year gives students 40 percent more time learning, and this extra time has yielded results. KIPP DC’s fifth-graders typically come to us two or three years below grade level. Yet, when these same students complete eighth grade, 92 percent are scoring proficient or better in math and over 80 percent are proficient in reading on the D.C. achievement test.

Mayor-elect Gray should provide schools with the opportunity to extend the week and year, as well as the funding to pay for it. This currently costs KIPP DC an additional $950 per student — a small price to pay for a generation of students prepared for a college education.

3. Train and retain excellent teachers. Research has shown that the most important factor in a child’s education is the quality of his or her teacher. If we are to accomplish lasting improvements in the District’s public schools, we need creative strategies for attracting and retaining the best teachers. To develop a talent pool for schools throughout the city, KIPP DC and the E.L. Haynes Public Charter School recently created the Capital Teaching Residency (CTR) program, an intensive, year-long teacher training program that prepares teachers in math and science, special education and early childhood education. Like medical residents, teaching residents train alongside the best in their field. By 2015, CTR will have added more than 400 high-performing teachers to D.C. schools.

Teacher quality was a signature issue of Mayor Adrian Fenty and former schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, and the city has made great strides in this area as a result. Because of the new teachers contract, D.C. public schools can begin to reward and attract high-performing teachers and remove low-performing ones. To increase the number of effective teachers in all D.C. schools, Gray should continue these efforts and support teacher training programs such as the Capital Teaching Residency.

At this critical moment, the mayor-elect, and all of our elected officials, must keep us moving in the right direction and support what works to improve all District schools. With this as Mayor-elect Gray’s objective, students in the District can only thrive.

The writer is the founder and chief executive of KIPP D.C. public charter schools.

Half of First-Time Undergrads Finish in 6 Years, Study Finds

By Caralee Adams

Education Week

December 1, 2010

New numbers are out today on college completion from the U.S. Department of Education. About 49 percent of students who began to pursue a certificate or bachelor’s degree in 2003-2004 had completed their work six years later.

The First Look report by the Institute of Education Services tracks the rates at which first-time undergraduates complete degrees, transfer, or drop out.

Highlights of the research:

• Breaking down the numbers among the 2003-04 beginning students: About 9 percent had received a certificate; 9 percent had earned an associate’s degree; and 31 percent had completed a bachelor’s degree from any institution by June 2009.

• About 15 percent who began their studies in 2003-04 remained enrolled but had not yet completed a program of study.

• Of the group tracked, 36 percent had left their schools without a credential of any kind within the six years of the study.

Charters Seek to be First in Line for D.C. Schools

By Deborah Simmons

The Washington Times

November 29, 2010

The classrooms of Meyer Elementary School in Northwest Washington used to be filled with young minds and its playground was full of romping youngsters. Today it stands as a testament to one of the challenges Mayor-elect Vincent C. Gray faces as he tries to fulfill campaign promises to bolster charter schools and implement his age 0-to-24 education plan.

As part of the D.C. Comprehensive Plan Act, the city’s land-use road map, Mr. Gray succeeded last week in getting an amendment passed that would grant charter schools the “right of first refusal” to public school facilities. But there’s a catch.

The bill differs slightly from current law, which gives public charters the first right to lease or purchase closed school buildings. But both the current law and the new measure stipulate that the right applies only after the facilities are no longer needed by the D.C. government.

Therein lies the rub with charter-school advocates, who want the right of first refusal to kick in when the school closes, not, as the current and proposed law both say, when the D.C. government decides it doesn’t want to use the buildings for any purpose – educational or otherwise.

The new measure keeps charter schools at the back of the line and, the advocates say, even gives anti-charters forces within the city government an incentive to find other uses for school buildings.

“If the District of Columbia is changing its law to allow charter schools the first right to ‘use’ vacant school buildings that are unneeded by theDistrict government, that would be an improvement,” said Peter Goff, executive director of the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools.

The director of a local advocacy group was more blunt.

“This is not good news,” Robert Cane, executive director of Friends of Choice in Urban Schools, said of last week’s amendment. “It’s bad news and the reason is that the 1995 school reform law gives charters the right of first offer on surplus D.C. Public Schools buildings.

“Closed schools should be used for their intended purpose,” Mr. Caneadded.

Finding and financing adequate facilities have been long-standing challenges for charter schools, many of which incubate in nontraditional settings, including office and retail space, before securing their own building. Many lack kitchens and play and sports areas – facilities readily available at surplus schools.

The problem takes on a political dimension with closed public schools like Meyer.

One of dozens of schools closed because of underperformance and declining public school enrollment before the 2006 mayoral election, Meyer, which is a neighbor of Howard University, is worth an estimated $13 million.

School-choice advocates lobbied hard and long for Meyer to be used as a charter, but the administration of Mayor Adrian M. Fenty said no.

Exercising the caveat in D.C. law, city officials instead proposed to put the closed schools to other government use, including public safety and works, and a community boxing program.

In some instances, vacant schools only are being reused for educational purposes after a public outcry.

For example, Mr. Fenty proposed using one closed school by then-Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee for the Department of Motor Vehicles and another for public safety training. But stakeholders succeeded in securing both former schools as campuses for the city’s new community college.

Mr. Fenty also pushed to place social service and jobs programs in other closed schools, including the old Merritt Middle School in Mr. Gray‘s backyard.

Charter advocates don’t discount the need for such programs, but they said charter-school growth requires the law to change.

Traditional D.C. public school enrollment has declined in each of the three previous years, while public charter enrollment rose steadily. The increase means nearly 40 percent of school-age children now attend a public charter school.

Much of that growth is attributed to charters’ prekindergarten enrollment, a direction Mr. Gray endorses as part of his birth-to-24 education policy.

At the start of this school year, 49 charter schools offered education programs for 3- and 4-year-olds, with five devoting themselves entirely to such work. Others hope to expand.

Now policymakers need to match growing charter demand with the supply of already-closed schoolhouses.

“We would hope that the Gray administration will recognize charter school primacy to facilities,” Mr. Cane said. “Meyer school is still empty two years later. I think the [D.C.] Council is trying to do something good for charter schools, but didn’t accomplish that goal.”

Texas District Targets Teachers for ELL Training

By Mary Ann Zehr

Education Week

Not a school day goes by that Laurie Hahn Ganser doesn’t use something she’s learned in a professional-development program designed to help regular classroom teachers reach English-language learners.

The English teacher at Lanier High School has received extensive training and coaching from Quality Teaching for English Learners, or QTEL , during the three years the Austin district has implemented the program. Ms. Ganser is poised to become a coach herself as part of the 85,000-student district’s efforts to sustain the training without the consultants it hired to launch it here.

Enough administrators and teachers at Lanier High have bought in to the program and carried out its strategies that district officials credit it for some positive academic outcomes for…

The Science of Teacher Development

By Angelo Collins

Education Week

December 1, 2010

The ongoing focus on school reform has led to broad consensus on at least one point: Improving training and support for teachers is key to improving student learning. Indeed, many districts are investing heavily in professional development and emphasizing collaboration among educators. But do these strategies provide enough of the right kind of support for new teachers, especially in high-demand areas such as science, technology, and math?

Lost in the encouraging news about increased investment in professional development is a sobering fact: The opportunities for teachers to engage in sustained professional learning and collaboration have actually declined in the last decade. A recent nationwide study on professional learning opportunities for teachers confirms what we’ve known all along—that professional development takes time, focus, and commitment to be effective. The study, “Professional Development in the United States: Trends and Challenges,” released in August of this year by the National Staff Development Council, or NSDC (now Learning Forward), and the Stanford Center on Opportunity Policy in Education, or SCOPE, notes that teachers continue to rate increasing professional development in the content of their subject matter as their top priority for further training. It also found that teachers receive less than eight hours of training a year on any given topic. However, for professional development to have an impact on student learning, an analysis of a broad range of studies suggests that between 49 and 100 hours of intensive training in key areas is needed. “States and districts need to introduce more effective and systematic approaches to supporting, developing, and mobilizing educators,” says Stanford University’s Linda Darling-Hammond, the study’s principal investigator.

Improving teaching requires the kind of deep focus on content knowledge and innovations in delivery to all students that can only come when teachers are given opportunities to learn from experts and one another, and to pursue teaching as a scientific process in which new approaches are shared, tested, and continually refined across a far-flung professional community. This should be true not just for science and math teachers, but for all teachers.

We need to move away from the current system of professional development of teachers, which is focused more on triage than on helping improve the overall clinical practice of teaching within a school. We need to make sure that teachers are masters of content, and that they’re supported as they continually expand their instructional skills through a methodical sequence of professional learning activities designed to help them connect students to rigorous content. Teachers need a supportive framework and culture that values peer review and intellectual renewal where new thinking, risk taking, and professional growth are encouraged.

The challenge is not to create intense and in-depth educator learning for its own sake, but to create thriving classrooms for learners. Too often, lackluster mathematics and science teaching is the biggest factor in keeping young people from pursuing further study in these fields.

• Invest in intensive professional development for new teachers. The NSDC-Stanford study suggests that more incoming teachers have access to induction programs, experienced mentors, or other supports than ever before. But those supports have become less intensive and collaborative over time, according to the study. We believe that teachers must learn to apply the same intensive inquiry to their own practice that they expect in their students’ work. For example, over the five years of the fellowship, our fellows engage in a collaborative lesson-study process with their peers that closely mirrors the scientific methods they teach—beginning with an extended study of what it means to really understand an idea, developing and teaching a lesson, gathering evidence of its impact through student work samples or video of lessons, and then assessing and redesigning the lesson as needed.

• Encourage many forms of collaboration. Professional learning communities are proliferating in districts across the country, but collaboration shouldn’t be exclusively by subject area or grade level—or even by school. Our fellows tell us that the most powerful collaboration they’re involved in is the opportunity to collaborate with peers across the country. Katherine Shirey, a physics teacher at Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, Va., meets regularly with fellows from Baltimore to Fredericksburg, Va., and partners remotely with a fellow in Seattle on her lesson study. “My community extends from here to Alaska,” she says. “They are more important than my professors in grad school and my teacher-mentor program, which were significant, but now past. They’ve developed with me over time.”

• Emphasize leadership growth in professional development. Teacher-leaders aren’t born—they are nurtured. The fifth year of our fellowship training focuses exclusively on leadership skills, which we see as building on the previous four years of professional development. “I want to be an educator who is a leader in my school and community,” says Shirey. “When teachers not only want to stay in the classroom but become leaders, that’s inspirational to me.” In fact, three of Shirey’s peers in the Washington, D.C., area are now department chairs.

These strategies can have a clear impact on teacher quality. But together, they also have an even stronger impact on a beginning teacher. With this intensive support, the opportunity to collaborate, and the ability to share their own practice, these novice teachers feel like professionals, and are more likely to stay in the classroom.

Our nation needs a generation of graduates who are prepared for advanced study and careers in science-based fields, but we can’t expect our students to be passionate and knowledgeable about science unless their teachers are.

Angelo Collins is the executive director of the Moorestown, N.J.-based Knowles Science Teaching Foundation, which was established to cultivate and support exemplary high school teachers of science and mathematics and develop the next generation of leaders in education.

School Reform Engine May be Losing Momentum

By David Harrison

Stateline.org

LOUISVILLE, Ky. This has been a busy year for education reformers. Primed by billions in stimulus funding, states spent much of 2010 scrambling to complete ambitious school improvement plans outlined in detail in hundreds of pages of applications for federal ” Race to the Top” funding.

Many have adopted policies that are central to the Obama administration’s education agenda, such as changing the ways teachers are evaluated, giving more latitude to charter schools, revising student tracking systems and putting an emphasis on turning around low-performing schools. As part of a separate but related effort, 41 states have adopted a standard math and English curriculum endorsed by federal officials.

But now, as the year ends, the reform enthusiasm seems to have cooled. Out of 46 applications received, the U.S. Department of Education awarded $4.35 billion in Race to the Top grants to only 11 states and the District of Columbia. The looming end of stimulus money and other federal aid has state education officials anticipating cuts in state funding. And a new corps of lawmakers and governors swept into office Nov. 2 on a promise to limit federal involvement in state policy, a potential setback to the reform efforts.

Alabama’s Gov.-elect Robert Bentley, for instance, has objected to the state school board’s vote to adopt the common core curriculum. Bentley said he wanted the decision postponed until he had a chance to review the new standards.

Given the funding issues, state school officials across the country now are bracing for a pushback against some of the reforms even as they work to implement them.

“If we look at what has happened in recent elections, if we look at the tone of the conversation, it will surprise me if there’s not an increased response by some people who think this is a misplaced effort,” says Utah state superintendent Larry Shumway. “There’s a lot of hard work to be done and most of us are very under-resourced. That may play into the bounce-back we’re going to get.”

Implementing the common curriculum, for example, will be expensive. State tests and textbooks will have to be replaced, and teachers will have to be trained on new materials. It remains to be seen whether states will be willing to spend large sums of money on these changes unless their fiscal situation improves. “It’s one thing to write an application for federal funding,” says Russ Whitehurst, an education specialist at the Brookings Institution, “and quite another thing to implement those reforms. Even without the election results of Nov. 2 most observers thought there was going to be a lot of slippage between the promises that were made and the reforms that were implemented.”

Already, Ohio’s incoming Republican governor, John Kasich, wants to undo an education funding law put in place by current Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland, a move that Strickland says could jeopardize the state’s $400 million Race to the Top grant. In Rhode Island, another Race to the Top winner, Gov.-elect Lincoln Chafee has questioned doubling the number of charter schools in the state, an expansion that was part of Rhode Island’s application.

In other states, including Arizona and New Hampshire, school officials have vowed to push for the reforms laid out in their Race to the Top applications even though they did not win any funding in the competition. But they could find themselves under pressure from the new political environment and tighter budgets.

“We need to have a communal language,” says Virginia Barry, education commissioner in New Hampshire, where Republicans gained control of both legislative chambers. “We need to listen to each other.”

Despite tight budgets and political differences, there could be common ground over some parts of the Obama administration’s education reform agenda. Michigan lawmakers, for instance, will consider a bill introduced by a Republican state senator and a Democratic representative to reform teacher tenure and tie it more closely to student test scores. And new governors in Wisconsin and Florida have talked about tying teacher pay to the performance of their students, a central tenet of Race to the Top, over the objections of teachers unions.

Efforts to reform teacher compensation have found a champion in Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has funded a program to study ways to measure teacher effectiveness in nine school districts and one charter school group.

In a speech to the Council of Chief State School Officers here this month, Gates urged state education officials to pursue reform of school personnel systems despite the bad economy. Instead of rewarding seniority, he said, schools should reward good teaching.

“When you design a (personnel) system that is not rewarding performance,” he said, “every element of it becomes ineffective.”

Computer entrepreneur Bill Gates has been devoting much of his time and considerable amounts of money to school reform efforts. He recently spoke with Stateline.org in Louisville. Here are edited excerpts from that interview.

Q: We’ve been talking about education reform in this country for a long time. We’ve had a lot of school experiments over the years and there hasn’t been a whole lot of improvement. Do you worry sometimes that we might reach reform fatigue?

A: What we consider the most important thing of all, which is measuring and rewarding and transferring teacher effectiveness, really hasn’t been tried. There was a little bit in Tennessee in the early ’80s and there are reasons why that worked a bit for a time and then it didn’t work.

We now have some technology enablement in terms of surveying students, doing teacher videos, having some data systems that track progress and we have a little bit more willingness to make change, because as people look at the test scores both in the absolute and relative to other countries, it’s a more dire situation now than in the past.

Q: Imagine it’s, say, 2020. What would a well-functioning American high school look like?

A: Well, fundamentally the teachers in that system would be getting lots of feedback about what they’re doing well and not so well. They’d be looking at each others’ videotapes and they’d be thinking about who’s the very best at dealing with disruption. Who’s the best at teaching various mathematical concepts? There would be some use of technology that would allow the school day to have been extended without it being an impossibility relative to the budget. Probably no textbooks, some type of digital device and lots of online videos.

Q: How can states get entrenched constituencies to change the status quo?

A: You need to get the teachers to buy in. Teachers do like to work with other good teachers and they do want their students to achieve. Now, when you put that in the face of a new personnel system they’re going to be leery of the change and you do have some who may never embrace change.

If you’re a teacher, 20 years in, investing in your pension, you’re getting your seniority pay, you’re getting your masters pay, it’s really against your interest to have a system that goes back and at least puts some of the money to effectiveness. And so where you have to grandfather some people in, that’s a political calculus that will have to be done. You won’t get everyone, but there’s every reason to think that teachers – once they see a personnel system that isn’t capricious and isn’t high-overhead – they will become the greatest advocates for the thing.

Q: A number of the things you’ve pushed for through the foundation have been reflected in Race to the Top and in other aspects of the Obama administration’s education policy. Your foundation has given a number of grants to these efforts. How do you respond to critics who say that you’re using your considerable grant dollars to drive American education policy?

A: We’re absolutely not. There are huge differences between the awardees of our money and federal money. We’re for student achievement and we’re for anything that gets student achievement up and so is the Department of Education, so are a lot of actors in this thing.

We don’t come at it thinking we know the magic solution. In fact we’ve been evolving as we’ve seen different results. But 90 percent of what we do is to help back innovators who are out there trying different things. I would say if you took all the different ideas about reform you wouldn’t find any particular commonality between what we’re doing and what the Department of Education is doing.

President Obama Declares November 14-20 American Education Week

By Matt E. Steven

Politic365

November 17, 2010

Our nation is only as strong as the education its citizens receive. The White House wants all Americans to understand this message today and in the future.

As a result, President Barack Obama has declared November 14-20 as American Education Week. During this time, he encourages all Americans to support their local schools through events and programs that promote learning at all levels. In a written proclamation, the Commander-In-Chief reinforced the value of education as a right in everyone’s life from birth and to their careers.

President Obama also linked the value of strong global leadership to a quality education. He reminded Americans that in order to prosper, they must educate themselves. In today’s interconnected world economy, nations and people are increasingly competing for the same resources and opportunities.

“To foster the next generation of great American leaders, we must continue to invest in education at all levels, work with States and districts to improve our educational system, and encourage reforms that ensure the development of our students and teachers,” Obama stated.

The proclamation of American Education Week is not just a ceremonial gesture for the president. He reminded Americans of the tangible results his Administration seeks for the nation.

“We have also set a goal of once again having the highest proportion of college graduates of any country across the globe by the year 2020,” the president added.

The nation currently ranks 12th in the percentage of 25 to 34 year olds holding post-secondary degrees, falling from first place, according to a report this summer by the College Board. The numbers improve when older adults are considered. But, it still points to a generation that is falling behind its parents in education.

The president concluded that it is everyone’s responsibility to ensure that American students are educated properly. Most importantly, as a service to all students, we must insist on excellence from them as they strive to reach and exceed their goals.

As NCLB Deadline Gets Closer, More Schools Look At Shrugging Off Compliance

By Rob Rogers

Billings Gazette

November 28, 2010

The moment came during a board meeting last month.

Billings School District 2 trustees were listening to a report on No Child Left Behind compliance, hearing about which schools had the requisite percentage of children testing at grade level in math and reading, required by the 2002 federal law.

The report was something of a mixed bag. In some cases, white students were performing better than their minority counterparts and students from more affluent homes were doing better than those from poorer families.

But taken all together, 89 percent of Billings students were reading at or above grade level and 74 percent were doing math at that same level — a good step above the 83 percent required for reading and the 68 percent required for math.

And that’s the problem, trustees were told. Starting next year, the requirements jump significantly.

Next year, 92 percent of students will have to be reading at grade level and 84 percent will have to be performing in math. The district isn’t up there now and probably won’t be when it comes time to report its data next spring, the board was told.

The fact that every student — 100 percent of them — will be required to test at grade level or above in math and reading in 2014 seems as out of reach as the moon.

Asked by the board for his perspective, Jeff Greenfield, president of the Billings Education Association, the district’s teacher’s union, spoke up.

“In a couple of years, no (school) will pass,” he told them.

The impossibility of having every student test proficient in reading and math is being accepted more and more within the education community.

“In some states, NCLB is becoming irrelevant,” said Jack Jennings, president of the Center for Education Policy in Washington, D.C.

Many educators simply believe No Child Left Behind has run its course.

The law was born in 2002, a Bush administration initiative that requires schools to ensure that every child regardless of background, race or disability tests at grade level in reading and math by 2014.

Each state was left to set its own criteria and path for getting to 100 percent. Each year, schools are required to reach certain benchmarks, known as Adequate Yearly Progress, or AYP.

Schools that fail to reach those goals face sanctions. They start small, like letters that go home to parents informing them their school failed to make AYP and their child has the option to go to another school in the district. At the far end, failing schools can see their staff fired or their principals removed. Schools that show no improvement year after year can be shut down altogether.

For example, high schools in Oakland, Calif. and throughout New Jersey, have been closed and reopened with new staff. No school in Montana has been shut down due to NCLB failures.

Denise Juneau, Montana’s superintendent of schools, praised the law for its goal of ensuring every child gets an adequate education but said the law’s lack of flexibility undermines its primary objective.

“A quality education is not defined only by one test given on one day of the school year,” she said. “Most educators take a much broader look.”

The structure of No Child Left Behind requires states to set their own definition of proficiency, meaning a student reading at grade level in one state may be reading two grades behind in another.

The requirement that all students test at grade level or above in math and reading is broken down to apply both to the school as a whole and to its smaller subgroups based on ethnicity, disability and family income.

If one subgroup fails to meets its proficiency goal, the whole school fails to comply with the law. A subgroup must have at least 30 students.

“Parents have to understand that NCLB’s accountability is very strict,” Jennings said.

NCLB’s big flaw, he said, is that it doesn’t differentiate between “pin-pointed problems and widespread issues.”

Montana is part of a coalition of other rural, Western states that are petitioning the federal government for more flexibility in federal education law.

The idea, Juneau said, is to say to lawmakers, set the standards but give us the flexibility to get there.

“It is a challenge,” said Greg Gallagher, director of standards and achievement for the North Dakota Department of Education.

Like Montana, North Dakota has a number of small, rural schools. Gallagher said regardless of the goals, the process that schools have gone through to reach 100 percent proficiency has yielded impressive results.

“We have seen progress in overall achievement rates (across the state),” he said.

Schools that habitually struggle and once scored proficiency rates in the teens have jumped to rates in the 50s and 60s, he said.

Jumps like that don’t just change a school’s academic profile, it transforms the way teachers look at their students and the way students look at schooling.

Suddenly, success seems possible, he said.

“When you can transform an institutional culture you have changed the world, so to speak,” he said.

Juneau likes that the law has fostered accountability among school districts.

“It did force educators to look at data,” she said. “That has been a great thing for public education.”

Billings School District 2 Superintendent Keith Beeman, who started with the district in July and came to Montana after a decade in California, agreed.

“It really did a great service to education,” he said. “It brought accountability to the local board room.”

Still, with all its positives, they openly admit 100 percent proficiency isn’t a reality.

“Will not happen,” Juneau said.

The federal government relies on individual states to enforce No Child Left Behind.

The law’s harshest sanction, shutting down a failing school, is a real fear for some as 2014 approaches and proficiency targets inch closer to the 100 percent mark. As more and more schools fail to reach the proficiency targets over the next three years, Juneau, whose office enforces NCLB for Montana, said she has no plans to take such draconian measures.

Instead, her office will continue to work with struggling schools to make sure they’re getting the resources they need and that they continue to improve.

Beeman saw schools shut down by the state for failing to reach NCLB targets when he was in California.

And while he’s happy to see less stock put into NCLB requirements, he said schools are still charged with reaching and educating every student, regardless of what laws come out of Washington D.C.

“Good schools districts have not relaxed,” Beeman said. “They realize there’s much more to the education of students than an (Adequate Yearly Progress) indicator.”

The Obama administration has begun to craft a reauthorization of the law that would throw out strict accountability like the proficiency targets. Instead it would focus on measurements that show whether or not students are ready for the workplace or for college when they graduate from high school, Jennings said.

Strict accountability would be reserved for the bottom 5 percent of low-performing schools, he said.

Officials at SD2 point to programs that have long focused on preparing students for career and college upon graduation.

“I think we’re ahead of the game,” said Scott Anderson, referring to SD2′s Career Pathways program.

Anderson is director of high school education for the district. He said the challenge for educators is finding the right approach for each student, something he believes SD2 has done.

Beeman agreed.

“The district does well focusing on the individual child,” he said. “They are perfectly imperfect and that’s the beauty of it.”

Jennings, as a policy expert, likes the approach of focusing on the end result and pouring resources into low-performing schools sitting at the bottom.

“It’s a starting point to discuss what should be done,” he said.

Education and Achievement: A Focus on Latino “Immigrant” Children

By: Garcia, Eugene E
October 2010

Describes the Institute for Teaching English Language Learners’ comprehensive program to boost English language learners’ academic achievement by optimizing the environment, supporting teachers, increasing learning opportunities, and engaging families.

MD.’s Towson University Conquers ‘Graduation Gap’

By Daniel de Vise

The Washington Post
December 12, 2010

Towson University, a Maryland institution that has yet to produce a Nobel prize or a Rhodes Scholar, is gaining a national reputation for something else it doesn’t have: a gap in graduation rates between whites and underrepresented minorities.

The suburban Baltimore school joins Virginia’s George Mason University on a list of 11 higher education institutions nationwide where graduation rates for minority students meet or exceed those of whites, according to an analysis by the Education Trust, a Washington-based think tank that focuses on racial and ethnic achievement gaps.

It put Towson’s graduation rate at 67 percent for white and black students and 70 percent for Hispanics. The report says the school has an overall graduation rate of 65 percent, higher than George Mason’s 58 percent and the national rate of about 55 percent. (The overall rates include students who decline to identify themselves in a racial or ethnic group.)

“The goal has been, if you take them in, you should graduate them,” said Robert Caret, Towson president since 2003.

Several recent reports have highlighted Towson’s success at a time when closing graduation gaps has become a priority for the Obama administration. The president’s American Graduation Initiative calls for the nation to regain the world lead in college completion by 2020.

Several mid-Atlantic institutions, including American and Old Dominion universities and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, have succeeded in closing the gap in graduation rates between white and black students. Others, including Virginia Tech and James Madison University, have closed the gap between Hispanic and non-Hispanic students, according to the Education Trust report, which calculated average graduation rates for 2006 through 2008. Towson and George Mason are unusual for having eliminated both divides.

Founded in 1865 as a teachers college open only to white students, Towson remains a provincial state school but is trying to shake its reputation as a second choice for students turned away from the flagship University of Maryland in College Park. Towson admits nearly two-thirds of its applicants.

In 10 years, according to school data, Towson has raised black graduation rates by 30 points and closed a 14-point gap between blacks and whites. University leaders credit a few simple strategies: admitting students with good grades from strong public high schools, then tracking each student’s progress with a network of mentors, counselors and welcome-to-college classes.

“Regardless of your background, there’s people here for you who understand what you’re going through,” said Kenan Herbert, 23, an African American Towson senior from Brooklyn, N.Y.

Colleges once reported a single graduation rate for all students, a broad average that masked embarrassingly low success rates for blacks and Hispanics at some nationally ranked institutions.

That has changed in the past decade under a law requiring colleges to report minority graduation rates for the first time. Several recent studies have discovered wide gaps at some schools but little or no disparity at others, which proves that “the gaps are not inevitable,” said Mamie Lynch, a researcher at Education Trust.

Nearly two-thirds of the nation’s colleges have graduation rates of less than 50 percent for blacks; success rates for Hispanics are similar.

A 2008 study by Education Sector, another Washington-based think tank, found a black-white graduation gap of 19 points at the University of Michigan, 22 points at the University of Wisconsin and 24 points at the University of Colorado. The 2010 Education Trust report found gaps of 15 points or more separating Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites at flagship public universities in Illinois, Massachusetts and Nebraska, as well as Purdue.

Even schools at the top of the pecking order, including Harvard and Dartmouth, have modest but measurable gaps in minority completion, the Education Trust found, although minorities graduate at high rates.

Towson serves about 17,500 undergraduates, of whom 12 percent are black and 3 percent Hispanic.

Fifteen years ago, as a way to boost graduation rates, school leaders decided to emphasize high school grades as the dominant factor in admitting students. Internal research had convinced them that students who entered Towson with high GPAs tended to graduate, regardless of SAT scores, and that students with high test scores but low grades were more likely to drop out.

The strategy relied partly on the strength of Maryland’s public schools. Towson draws hundreds of minority students from suburban school systems in Baltimore, Montgomery, Anne Arundel and Howard counties, all known for rigor and strong minority achievement.

“We’re getting high SATs and high GPAs from schools where high SATs and high GPAs mean something,” Caret said.

Towson once ignored the struggling schools of Baltimore City. But in 2005, Caret guaranteed admission and a partial scholarship to all students from Baltimore city or county who finished in the top 10 percent of their high school class. In one year, the number of black freshmen from Baltimore rose from 34 to 98.

With growing ranks of minority and first-generation college students, Towson administrators set about building a network of initiatives to shepherd them through the difficult transition to college.

The heart of the effort is a program calledSAGE, or Students Achieve Goals through Education. Each year, nearly 200 entering freshmen from disadvantaged backgrounds are paired with mentors. They connect over the summer. The mentorship lasts through the crucial first year.

Mentors are trained to practice what director Raft Woodus calls “intrusive caring”: gently but firmly prying into every aspect of the freshman’s life, probing for problems.

“You have to eat every day. You have to study,” said Herbert, a mentor. “I make sure they do it. I do it with them.”

Minorities and first-in-their-family college students are steered into another program, Support for Student Success. Initiated by Caret, it offers an 11-week overview of every resource available to Towson students, along with exercises in team-building and study skills. Classes are taught by trained counselors.

Mentorships and “College 101″ courses are becoming common as universities work to raise minority graduation rates. But they are of varying quality.

“Some of them have good programs, some of them don’t. They’ll all say they do,” said Kevin Carey, policy director at Education Sector.

Upcoming Events

Serve a Semester. Change the World.

January 17, 2011, April 15-17, 2011

Semester of Service 2011 launches one month from now on the King Day of Service (January 17). Thousands of educators and students will plan and implement high-impact service-learning projects throughout the semester leading up to Global Youth Service Day (April 15-17, 2011).

Semester of Service links prominent national service events through an extended service-learning framework of at least 70 hours. Participating students apply new knowledge and skills to solve problems of local, national, or global importance, through the development and implementation of high-quality service-learning projects that incorporate the IPARD/C stages.

Semester of Service projects address critical community problems and their root causes – problems such as water scarcity, childhood obesity, environmental degradation, energy conservation, poverty, hunger and homelessness, high school dropouts, and illiteracy.

Student Applications Now Open For The 2011 Virginiahispanic Youth Institute Kick-Off

What is the Hispanic Youth Institute?

The Kick-Off

Beginning in the summer, approximately 100-200 high school students will experience a university campus for a four-day, three-night college empowerment program where students will learn to overcome both real and perceived barriers to college access. The students will participate in college and career workshops, connect with local Hispanic professionals, meet college admissions officers, interact with near-peer mentors, listen to inspirational speakers, and compete for scholarships. Throughout the on-campus experience, the students will build their confidence and receive practical tools to help them along their pathway to college.

A Year-Round Program

Upon completion of the on-campus kick-off program, students are enrolled into year-round programming that reinforces the key themes of college, career and community, while encouraging them to promote a college-going culture to their peers throughout the remainder of their high school years. The Hispanic College Fund works with organizations in the local community to leverage existing resources and fill resource gaps.

Student Voice

“This whole experience has blown my mind,” said Sarah Shannon, alum of the 2010 Virginia Hispanic Youth Institute. “The environment was just perfect for sharing our stories and bonding. I will definitely be recommending this to my friends and my school counselor. I want to return because I think it is really important to share my story with everyone.”

http://symposiums.hispanicyouth.org/createAccount.action?selectedSymposium=40

Apply for an InvenTeam Grant

Deadline: April 22, 2011

Applications for the 2011-2012 InvenTeams are being accepted.

All deadlines are 5:00 p.m. ET.

Apply for 2012 InvenTeams

Process
Applying for an InvenTeam grant is a two-step process. The initial application is available online each fall and due in the spring (for grants awarded the following academic year).

Youth Involvement
Educators often begin the application without youth participants.Youth input is encouraged for the initial application and required for the final application. Many educators recruit youth early to create a richer proposal for the initial application.

Invention Ideas
InvenTeam projects span many fields from assistive devices to environmental technologies and consumer goods. Applicants are encouraged to consider needs of the world’s poorest people (those earning $2/day) when brainstorming invention ideas. Some InvenTeams pursue inventions that also augment STEM curriculum such as Project Lead the Way. See former InvenTeams and their invention projects.

Selection
A panel comprising inventors; educators; InvenTeam student alumni; and MIT faculty, staff, and alumni reviews the applications. Diversity is considered among school settings, demographics, and projects. Up to 35 finalists are selected from the initial applications to continue to the next step.

Excite Awards
Selected finalists receive Excite Awards: These educators attend EurekaFest, a multi-day celebration at MIT in June. Finalists meet current InvenTeams, see their inventions, and attend invention workshops, which count toward Professional Development Points (PDPs). Excite Award winners must attend EurekaFest in order to submit a final InvenTeam grant application. Travel, food, and lodging are provided.

School News

Early Childhood Academy PCS’s String Orchestra Featured on Steve Harvey Morning Show

By Steve Harley

December 1, 2010

Early Childhood Academy PCS’s string orchestra was featured on the Steve Harvey Morning Show’s “School Zone” on December 1, 2010. Tony Richards visited us and the attached audio was aired at 8:43 a.m. yesterday morning. The third grade musicians were led by Early Childhood Academy music teacher, Gerard Battle.

http://www.whur.com/steveharveyshow/blog/media/video/index.one?a=view_video&vid_id=749055

RESOURCES AND OPPORTUNITIES

Museum Grants for African American History and Culture.

Deadline: January 1, 2010

Institute of Museum and Library Services announces funds to enhance institutional capacity and sustainability through professional training, technical assistance, internships, outside expertise, and other tools for museums whose primary purpose is African American life, art, history, and/or culture, encompassing the period of slavery; the era of reconstruction; the Harlem Renaissance; the civil rights movement; and other periods of the African Diaspora.

http://www.imls.gov/applicants/grants/AfricanAmerican.shtm

Discovery Education Digital Services

Discovery Communications revolutionized television with Discovery Channel and is now transforming classrooms through Discovery Education. Powered by the number one nonfiction media company in the world, Discovery Education combines scientifically proven, standards-based digital media and a dynamic user community to empower teachers to improve student achievement. Already, more than half of all U.S. schools access Discovery Education digital services. Explore the future of education at www.discoveryeducation.com and contact Nicole Ojeda at nicole_ojeda@discovery.com for your free trial today!

www.discoveryeducation.com

Teaching Ambassador Applications

Deadline: January 17, 2011

Applications for the US Department of Education’s Teaching Ambassador Fellowship are now available online.

Teaching Ambassadors are outstanding teachers who have a record of leadership, strong communication skills, and policy insight.

Ambassadors work for one year for the US Department of Education, either full-time in Washington, DC or part-time in their home states.

The Teaching Ambassador Fellowship supports the Department’s mission by enabling a cadre of teachers from across the country to contribute their classroom expertise to the national dialogue and in turn facilitate discussions with educators across the country.

www.ed.gov/programs/teacherfellowship

Learning-focused Leadership and Leadership Support: Meaning and Practice in Urban Systems

With support from The Wallace Foundation, a team of researchers from the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy at the University of Washington has undertaken an investigation of leadership in urban schools and districts that are seeking to improve both learning and leadership. The study explored the following overarching question: What does it take for leaders to promote and support powerful, equitable learning in a school and in the district and state system that serves the school? The study pursued this question through a set of coordinated investigations, each with an intensive qualitative or mixed-methods strategy and with overlapping samples, designed to offer images of what is possible in schools and districts that take learning improvement seriously.

http://www.wallacefoundation.org/KnowledgeCenter/KnowledgeTopics/CurrentAreasofFocus/EducationLeadership/Documents/learning-focused-leadership-support-urban-systems.pdf

Incorporating Student Performance Measures into Teacher Evaluation Systems

By Jennifer L. Steele, Laura S. Hamilton, Brian M. Stecher

December 1, 2010

Educational systems that are now attempting to incorporate student achievement gains into teacher evaluations face at least two important challenges: generating valid estimates of teachers’ contributions to student learning and including teachers who do not teach subjects or grades that are tested annually. In a growing effort to recognize and reward teachers for their contributions to students’ learning, a number of states and districts are retooling their teacher evaluation systems to incorporate measures of student performance. This trend stems from evidence that teachers’ evaluations and reward structures have not sufficiently distinguished teachers who are more effective at raising student achievement from those who are less effective. It has also likely been spurred by competitive federal grant programs, such as Race to the Top and the Teacher Incentive Fund, and by philanthropic efforts, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Empowering Effective Teachers Initiative, all of which encourage states and districts to enhance the way they recruit, evaluate, retain, develop, and reward teachers. Given strong empirical evidence that teachers are the most important school-based determinant of student achievement, it seems increasingly imperative to many education advocates that teacher evaluations take account of teachers’ effects on student learning.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/12/student_teacher_eval.html

All Together Now?

By Michael Petrilli

The greatest challenge facing America’s schools today isn’t the budget crisis, or standardized testing, or “teacher quality.” It’s the enormous variation in the academic level of students coming into any given classroom. How we as a country handle this challenge says a lot about our values and priorities, for good and ill. Unfortunately, the issue has become enmeshed in polarizing arguments about race, class, excellence, and equity. What’s needed instead is some honest, frank discussion about the trade-offs associated with any possible solution.

http://educationnext.org/all-together-now/

As Long as it Doesn’t Cost Me

A new poll from the Associated Press finds that 88 percent of Americans feel the country’s education system has a major effect on its economic health, but 47 percent oppose raising taxes to finance public school improvements, the Associated Press reports. “Education is vitally important to our country today,” said Ronald Bartlett, 66, of Marshall, Texas, who works at a mechanic’s shop. “But we’re continually pouring money into the government supposedly to improve education, and it’s not improving.” Views about education’s impact on the national economy differ little by gender, age, race, or levels of education and income. Responses were similar to the same questions in a June 2008 AP-Knowledge Networks poll, though the number saying the economy would get a significant boost from better education has grown somewhat. The new poll also shows that people blame students and their parents for poor college graduation rates, and give high marks to all sectors of American higher education, including for-profit colleges, despite recent criticism of dubious recruiting tactics, high student-loan default rates, and other problems. The poll was conducted September 23-30, and involved interviews on landline and cellular telephones with 1,001 adults nationwide.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40592472/ns/us_news-life/

What Good is Experience if you’re Burnt Out?

A new report from the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research looks at whether teachers in high-poverty schools are as effective as teachers in more affluent schools. Using recent student-level data from Florida and North Carolina, the authors found the average effectiveness of teachers in high-poverty schools is only slightly less than in other schools, and not in all comparisons. Within-school-type variation in effectiveness was common, with highly effective teachers similar across school settings. Observed differences in teacher quality between high- and lower-poverty schools were not due to experience, certification status, and educational attainment, but stemmed from the difference in payoff from increases in these characteristics. For instance, higher productivity from increased experience is stronger in lower-poverty schools, and the lower return for experience in high-poverty schools is likely because exposure to challenging students leads to burn out; teachers in schools with high poverty therefore may not improve much as time goes by. The authors conclude that changing the quality of new recruits or importing teachers with good credentials into high-poverty schools may not close the achievement gap. Measures that induce highly effective teachers to move to high-poverty schools and that promote an environment in which teachers’ skills will improve over time are more likely to be successful.

http://www.caldercenter.org/

No More Mickey Mouse

For urban schools, the standard gifted-and-talented (GT) system is often a waste of time, writes Jay Mathews in The Washington Post. This is demonstrated by a new book by inner-city principal Henry Gradillas, who ran two large high schools in Los Angeles, one of which employed the now-famous Jaime Escalante as chairman of the math department. In 1987, Garfield High School produced 26 percent of all Mexican Americans in the country who passed Advanced Placement Calculus exams. Gradillas relates that Garfield’s high poverty distorted the effect of LAUSD’s GT rules in the 1980s. “We had a number of what I call NFGT [non-functioning gifted and talented] students,” writes Gradillas. “They had IQs that qualified them for the gifted and talented program, but not the grade-point averages. A lot of them were taking Mickey Mouse classes and were in no way living up to their potentials.” He added that the school had many bright, hardworking kids who had not been labeled gifted and talented because they lacked English skills in elementary school when monolingual English-speaking kids were tested for GT. Others may have not had the IQ to qualify for GT, but had drive and did well in higher-level classes. In Mathews’ opinion, Garfield’s experience demonstrates that the GT-label fixation is “similarly useless” in other urban areas, where the most successful schools aim to raise achievement of all students, no matter how high or low they start the year.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/class-struggle/2010/12/why_urban_schools_dont_need_gi.html

Early Boost For Value-Added

Preliminary results of a large-scale study by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation give the strongest evidence to date of the validity of value-added analysis, according to The Los Angeles Times. The $45-million Measures of Effective Teaching study hopes to identify reliable gauges of teacher performance through an intensive look at 3,000 teachers in cities throughout the country. When finished, it will have examined multiple evaluation approaches, including use of sophisticated observation tools, and teachers’ assessments of their own performance. Preliminary results indicate that student gains on standardized tests reflect meaningful learning and critical thinking skills, not just test preparation or memorization. The brief focuses on value-added analysis and student surveys, both of which tend to identify the same teachers as effective or ineffective, findings that held up when teachers taught different classes of students. Because the researchers found value-added measures were so reliable at predicting teachers’ future performance, they urged districts to use these as a benchmark for studying the effect of other measures. In the study’s second year, teachers will be randomly assigned to new classrooms in order to eliminate potential bias caused by how students are placed with teachers. Results from those analyses will be released next spring, with a final report expected in 2012.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-gates-study-new-20101211,0,5216463.story

A Mere 105 Years

The Center on Education Policy (CEP) has released a study that tracks trends in achievement gaps for minority and low-income students in all 50 states, and the picture is bleak, according to The Christian Science Monitor. The report calculates how long it would take to close various gaps at their current rates. For Florida, which is making headway, it would take 28 years to close the African-American/white achievement gap for fourth-grade reading. In Washington State, the task would take 105 years. Gaps for Latino students appear to be closing faster than other groups, but other gaps — such as the Native American/white gap for reading, or some male/female gaps — aren’t closing at all, or are widening. The report declined to rank states — assessment tests are too different — but states like Arizona and Florida, for instance, are clearly doing the best job narrowing the gap between Latino and white students, while Florida also stands out in closing the African-American/white gap. Tennessee is closing gaps for low-income students. “[The report] is in a way saying that we’ve gone through 10 years of talk and some action, but if we’re serious about this, we have to do much more and do it a lot faster,” said Jack Jennings of the CEP.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2010/1214/Persistent-achievement-gap-vexes-education-reformers-Six-takeaways/Progress-on-achievement-gaps-sluggish

Zombie Schools

A new study from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute finds that the lowest-performing public K-8 schools often stay failing for years, neither improving nor closing, Education Week reports. Of 2,025 chronically low-performing elementary and middle schools identified in 10 states in 2003-04, the study found only one percent had improved enough to exceed their states’ average academic performance five years later; fewer than 10 percent had broken out of the lowest 25 percent of schools in their states. Despite this, only 19 percent of failing charters and 11 percent of failing traditional schools had closed. Poorly performing schools of both types were twice as likely to be in an urban center, and had twice as many poor and minority students enrolled. Charters were more likely than district schools to close after years of poor performance — 19 percent vs. 11 percent — but only Arizona, Florida, and California closed significantly more academically poor charter schools than district schools. Even in those states, it was unclear how many schools were closed for academic performance as opposed to low enrollment or fiscal mismanagement. Chester Finn Jr. of the Fordham Institute said the findings suggest that improvement interventions rarely work: “Real turnarounds are extremely scarce, and shutdowns were a little more common but still pretty scarce.”

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/12/14/15fordham.h30.html?tkn=UYUFSFKbDVOnvUcmcrSz8GdD2eBWO%2FXCjYaF&cmp=clp-sb-ascd

Rttt’s Process Found Lacking, Again

A new analysis by the New Teacher Project (TNTP) of scoring for Round 2 of the Race to the Top found critical issues. The scoring problems that TNTP identified in Round 1 continued, and two factors in Round 2 yielded outcomes contradictory to the stated priorities of the contest: the process and tools allowed reviewers too much subjectivity; and the Department of Education did not exercise its discretion to modify the most questionable results. Round 2′s process did not ensure consistency in scoring, with review teams applying different standards to similar application material, and with application material receiving significantly different scoring than it had in the first round though little changed. Some scoring inconsistencies reflected a larger pattern: reviewers who generally approved of an application tended to rate all parts of it positively, while reviewers with a lower opinion of the application deducted points freely. Scoring also did not reflect political commitment, with some states marshalling political will to resolve issues, only to be superseded by states that were more tentative and vague. Going forward, the authors strongly urge the Department of Education to actively manage the work of reviewers, enforcing consistent scoring from one team to another through cross-application review processes. “These changes were necessary after the first round,” the authors write. “They are now overdue.”

http://www.tntp.org/index.php/publications/issue-analysis/view/resetting-race-to-the-top/

Making Resources Count

Education Resource Strategies has released a practical kit of tools designed to help districts begin the process of identifying and addressing resource decisions that don’t support improving student performance. “The Teaching Job: Restructuring for Effectiveness” is one of six publications specifically designed to help district leaders analyze and optimize school system resource allocation, and includes a self-assessment to help district leaders begin to understand the best practices for restructuring the job of teaching, and to match district resources with instructional priorities. The guide offers practical direction for restructuring the teaching job tailored to a district’s situation, and enables district leaders to gauge how their district stacks up in terms of defining and measuring teacher effectiveness, hiring, growth, compensation, and career paths. It also helps to assess school-based support for teachers and the causes of misalignment between resource allocation and strategic goals. It identifies actions that district leaders can take, and helps determine priorities for reallocating resources and leveraging federal dollars.

See the guide: http://erstrategies.org/resources/details/the_teaching_job/

Second Chance with SIG

Billions of dollars in funding for Title I School Improvement Grants (SIG) are allowing states to focus energy and resources on the turnaround of failing schools. However, Round 1 of SIG funding occurred rapidly, without experience or big-picture implementation. Mass Insight has released a guide that explains critical lessons learned as schools and districts undertook turnarounds in Round 1. The guide issues eight recommendations for Round 2. States should now only fund efforts that are bold and truly different; funding can’t go to the same strategies that failed in the past. Second, states should incentivize districts by treating SIG as a competition, an “intra-state Race to the Top.” Third, sub-grants must be adequate, since a successful turnaround takes a great deal of money, and underfunding will likely fail. Fourth, states must closely monitor grantees, ensuring they deliver on performance. Fifth, states should encourage use of Lead Partners — organizations or central office units — to support school leaders during the turnaround effort. Sixth, districts must transform themselves to support changes. Seventh, SIG should prompt a streamlining and minimization of reporting and compliance burdens. Finally, states must undertake comprehensive, effective, and continuous communication strategies around SIG so that administrators, teachers, parents, and community members are aware of it and on board.

See the report: http://stsg.wordpress.com/2010/12/08/school-improvement-grants-take-2/

A Word of Caution

Given experience to date with using student achievement scores as a basis for high-stakes decisions, a new brief from the National Education Policy Center suggests that before implementing an assessment plan, policymakers would do well to carefully examine the issues that make teacher assessment so complex. The brief reviews research that explores the feasibility of combining formative assessment (a basis for professional growth) and summative assessment (a basis for high-stakes decisions like dismissal), as well as various tools to gather evidence of teacher effectiveness. The brief recommends that policymakers use a system that targets continual improvement of teaching staff and timely dismissal of teachers who cannot or will not improve. Policymakers must be clear about the purposes of any assessment, and in the case where formative and summative assessments are combined, address the challenges of dual-purpose systems. All key stakeholders should be involved in system design, and rather than using a single assessment, evidence should come from multiple sources. The criteria for assessing performance, artifacts, or other factors must be well understood by teachers and assessors, and high-quality ongoing training must be given to assessors, who should routinely calibrate their efforts to ensure consistent application of criteria.

http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/getting-teacher-assessment-right

Outstanding

A new analysis based on data collected as part of The Broad Prize process provides insight into which large urban school districts in the United States are doing the best job of educating traditionally disadvantaged groups: African- American, Hispanics, and low-income students. The 30 districts identified in this brief were selected through a special analysis of 2009 state reading and mathematics assessment data. Half of the districts are in Texas or California. In all, cities in 11 states and the District of Columbia were found to be outperforming their state averages in subgroup achievement. Eighteen large urban districts in Alabama, California, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia outperformed their states in serving African-American students; 16 districts in California, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, North Carolina, Texas, and Washington State were better at serving Hispanic students; and 17 districts in Alabama, Arizona, California, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, and Texas were better at serving low-income students. The report also summarizes specific district-wide strategies to raise student achievement that three cities — Gwinnett County Public Schools, Ga.; Long Beach Unified School District, Calif.; and Socorro Independent School District, Tex. — have successfully undertaken.

See the report: http://www.broadprize.org/asset/0-30largedistsbetterperform2010.pdf

Kindler, Gentler Merit Pay

Florida is expected to adopt a merit-pay law next year that would tie teacher compensation to student performance on tests, but the sequel to this year’s failed effort will probably be a milder version than the bill Gov. Charlie Crist vetoed last spring.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/education/os-teacher-merit-pay-proposals-20101209,0,5200505.story

SIG by the numbers

Data released by the U.S. Department of Education on the $3.5 billion School Improvement Grant program show that nearly 25 percent of turnaround grants have gone to rural-area schools.
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/12/10/15turnaround.h30.html?tkn=NWBFs2%2BRITd6h4vlju9HvhPhDuMALCPnASm4&cmp=clp-ecseclips

Expect Lawsuits

A handful of Wyoming legislators are working on a bill that would end teacher tenure in their state.
http://billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/wyoming/article_21cdfd44-8da0-5ba2-ba9c-e9176fc2b77e.html

Outside The Classroom, Too?

Under new guidelines, New York City principals are directed to base their decisions for teacher tenure on a system that measures teachers’ success in and outside the classroom, including student performance on standardized tests; the principals then have to explain their recommendation in three paragraphs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/14/nyregion/14tenure.html?_r=2&ref=education

Still More SIG

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in an interview that he is open to the idea of developing more models for turning around low-performing schools, beyond those spelled out in the regulations for the SIG program. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2010/12/duncan_would_consider_more_imp.html

Trigger Happy

A New Jersey state legislator has introduced a bill that would give parents the power to pull the “trigger” on failing schools.

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/education/20101214_N_J__legislator_proposes__parent_trigger__for_failing_schools.html#ixzz18JAdpzbV

Lackluster

Scores from the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) show that U.S. students continue to trail their peers in higher-performing nations, the Associated Press reports. Out of 34 countries, the U.S. ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science, and 25th in math, far behind the highest scoring countries of South Korea, Finland, Canada, and Singapore, as well as Hong Kong and Shanghai in China. “The results are extraordinarily challenging to us and we have to deal with the brutal truth,” said Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. “We have to get much more serious about investing in education.” The PISA exam is considered the most comprehensive comparison of education levels across nations, focusing on how well students apply knowledge in math, reading, and science to real-life situations. Some 470,000 students took the test in 2009 in 65 countries and educational systems, ranging from underdeveloped nations to the wealthiest. If the United States were to improve its standings in math, reading, and science, the impact could be radical: A recent study projected that if the U.S. boosted its average PISA scores by 25 points over the next 20 years, the U.S. economy would gain $41 trillion over the lifetime of the generation born in 2010.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40544897/ns/us_news-life/

From Margins to Center

In an opinion piece in The Nation, Pedro Noguera writes that the education policies of the Obama administration too closely resemble those of the Bush administration, leading the country in the wrong direction. The midterm elections indicated that a natural constituency for the president — parents of public school children and 2.1 million public school teachers and administrators — is frustrated with his leadership. “Instead of waiting for this administration to recognize that it should head in a new direction,” Noguera writes, “those of us who know the importance of public education must initiate a campaign to defend and improve it. We need to organize parents, teacher unions, school board members, and others around a reform agenda that calls for protecting public education while also calling for its renewal.” In the vacuum created by a divided government, parents and educators must hold politicians accountable for fair school funding, adequate facilities, and reasonable class size. Moreover, complex and controversial issues like charter schools, teacher tenure, and merit pay shouldn’t be framed as either/or propositions. A campaign for support and change in public education can be successful, but it will take work to bring a progressive vision from the margins to the center of political discourse.

http://www.thenation.com/article/156807/reframing-education-debate

Change, with Buy-in

Since Andres Alonso became Chief Executive Officer of the Baltimore Public Schools, its dropout rate has fallen by half, according to The New York Times. More students are graduating, and the system is now gaining students instead of losing them. Baltimore schools are 88 percent black, and 84 percent of students are on free or reduced-price meals. The city’s murder rate is six times that of New York City. In three years, Alonso has overseen a sweeping reorganization, closing failing schools, reducing central office staff by a third, and replacing three-quarters of all school principals. To ensure his changes had support, Alonso held public meetings for parents, librarians, and leaders of nonprofits and churches. “Everything was about creating a surge of energy into the schools,” Alonso said. “I wanted people to have to push to get past each other.” This year, suspensions fell below 10,000, far fewer than the 26,000 the system gave out in 2004. Mental health professionals were placed in every school with middle grades. And principals now have full control over school budgets and are held accountable for performance. They are also required to consult with a committee of parents and community representatives when deciding how school money will be spent.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/02/education/02baltimore.html?_r=2&ref=education

Worse Than in the ’70s

The NAACP held a national education conference in North Carolina to spotlight a growing erosion of the gains made since Brown vs. the Board of Education, The Washington Post reports. Wake County has been the scene of acrimonious dispute since the school board eliminated a decade-old policy that used busing to achieve socioeconomic balance in public schools. Using the county as a backdrop, the NAACP argued that schools around the country are returning to Jim Crow-era patterns of segregation. Yet Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity, which opposes affirmative action, said NAACP’s criticism of the Wake board is out of touch with the reality of public education and with recent Supreme Court rulings. Clegg disputes that schools are becoming more segregated, and argues that falling percentages of white students match a declining number of whites in the population overall. In Clegg’s view, “segregation” doesn’t refer to demographic change but to legal policies explicitly designed to keep people of different races separated from each other. “If you use that definition, not only is there no resegregation in the United States, there is not a single segregated school in the United States,” he said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/03/AR2010120302181.html

For RTTT, Local Opt-Outs

States are proceeding to push comprehensive changes through the Race to the Top program, but many are seeing individual schools and districts withdraw because of the time and money required, Education Week reports. Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, and Ohio have all witnessed schools and districts forfeit federal funds. In Jones County School System in Georgia, for example, teachers and administrators questioned the merit pay plan in their state’s winning application, and will forego $1.3 million. “I support the process and schools taking part in it,” said William Mathews, superintendent of the 5,800-student system. “It just didn’t work for us.” And in Ohio, 50 of 538 districts and schools in its Race to the Top application are declining their share of the state’s $400 million award. In some cases, concerns surfaced about the time and work involved, but in other cases, no agreement could be struck between the school board, union, and administrators over how to count student academic growth in teacher evaluation, as required in Ohio’s plan. Local collective bargaining agreements complicated matters, as well. A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Education has said that states making “significant alterations” to their Race to the Top plans risk losing their awards.
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/12/02/14rtt_ep.h30.html?tkn=YOBFOArNhkeiuezvlqQmc%2BblyWCkDxjfdoB1&cmp=clp-ecseclips

Want Proven Reform? Here’s Your Answer

Writing as a guest on The Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog, Marci Young of Pre-K Now says it’s time to pay attention to a reform that works. Voluntary, high-quality pre-kindergarten has 50 years of solid research behind it, with results that demonstrate how to improve student achievement. As a policy to help narrow the achievement gap, increase high school graduation rates, and reduce crime and delinquency, it is backed by both political parties. It has been shown to yield up to $7 for every public dollar invested, paying dividends to families, school districts, and taxpayers. Yet despite progress toward universal provision, most children still don’t have access to high-quality pre-K. Statistics from the National Institute for Early Education Research show that 75 percent of 4-year-olds and 96 percent of 3-year-olds don’t have access to state-funded pre-K, Head Start, or special education preschool. As federal and state policymakers look for ways to solve our country’s education crisis, high-quality pre-K should be the first step in any comprehensive reform plan.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/guest-bloggers/the-first-step-in-education-re.html

Regarding the Value-Added Model

A new analysis by Dan Goldhaber of the Center for American Progress asks whether the value-added model (VAM) of teacher measurement is reliable enough for widespread use. Goldhaber argues use of VAMs is justified, not only because they furnish important information about teacher effectiveness, but also because “school systems, facing cultural or political constraints, have generally been institutionally incapable of differentiating among teachers.” Researchers find that year-to-year correlations of teacher value-added job performance estimates are in the range of 0.3 to 0.5, comparable to those found in fields like insurance sales or professional baseball (where performance is certainly used for high-stakes personnel decisions). Concerns over VAMs are legitimate, but any type of teacher-performance evaluation with high-stakes consequences for teachers would be controversial. Right now, performance evaluations typically are not high-stakes, either because they aren’t designed as such or because they are so inexact they are irrelevant for teachers. “My judgment is that current teacher policies lean too far in the direction of protecting teachers from the downsides of misclassification at the expense of the overall quality of the teacher workforce,” writes Goldhaber. For this reason, he advocates experimenting with evaluation system reforms (VAM and otherwise) that can better reflect the variation in performance that exists in the teacher workforce.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/12/vam.html

Who’s In Line?

According to a new report from the Center for Reinventing Public Education, 71 percent of charter school principals interviewed expected to leave their schools within five years, raising questions of succession and continuity for the nation’s 5,000 charter schools. Only half of school leaders had succession plans in place, and many plans were weak. Though most school leaders affiliated with charter management organizations (CMOs) had a succession plan, there was confusion over who would make final decisions — school leaders or CMO leaders. The few schools with strong plans had two elements in common: school leaders (all with prior business experience) had taken charge of future plans; and the schools themselves were not in the midst of crisis. The report recommends that charters learn about succession management strategies from the nonprofit sector, with governing boards owning the recruitment and selection of school leaders. Charter authorizers should request strategic plans and emergency leadership replacement plans as part of the application and renewal process, and current school leaders need to mentor next-in-line leaders and leadership team members. Finally, leaders should undertake an emergency replacement plan, a strategic plan, and strategic development of leadership capacities organization-wide. The authors surveyed 400 charter leaders and conducted fieldwork in 24 charter schools in California, Hawaii, and Texas.

See the report: http://www.crpe.org/cs/crpe/view/csr_pubs/350

Core considerations

A new report from ACT provides a research-based estimate of current student performance relative to the Common Core State Standards, which 44 states have now adopted. The report gives a look at current student performance relative to the standards, which can guide states in their implementation and indicate where to target instructional resources to effectively support them. ACT recommends state and local policymakers begin now to align current curricula to the standards, with states providing training and resources to districts and teachers to create instructional units and curricular tools. Teachers will also need access to formative assessment item pools, which provide feedback about student progress, and will need to use these assessments to guide instructional interventions for students. Policymakers should consider the complex implications of the shift from existing standards to the Common Core Standards, since the shift will affect state accountability models. Policymakers should also use this opportunity to leverage research to better define goals on academic growth. Finally, policymakers should thoroughly consider how to more effectively align funding programs to meet these goals, particularly with respect to instructional and curricular practices.

http://www.act.org/research/policymakers/email/FirstLook.html

Game Changer

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is investing $335 million to overhaul the personnel departments of several big school systems, with a large portion of the money financing research to develop a better method for evaluating classroom instruction, The New York Times reports. The effort will have enormous consequences for the movement to hold schools and educators more accountable for student achievement. For teachers, the findings could mean more scrutiny, but can also provide more specific guidance about what is expected in the classroom if new experiments with other measures are adopted — including tests that gauge teachers’ mastery of their subjects, surveys that ask students about the learning environments in their classes, and digital videos of teachers’ lessons, scored by experts. Researchers and educators involved in the project described it as maddeningly complex in its effort to separate the attributes of good teaching from the idiosyncrasies of individual teachers. By next June, researchers will have about 24,000 videotaped lessons. Because some must be scored using more than one protocol, the research will eventually involve reviewing some 64,000 hours of classroom video. In this way, the effort has become a large-scale field trial of using classroom video to help teachers improve and to evaluate them remotely.

The Axe Hits Los Angeles

More than a thousand LAUSD employees, including those who staff school offices, run libraries, and maintain campuses, will be laid off in the system’s latest round of budget reductions, and thousands of others will be shifted to new workplaces, some with less pay and fewer hours.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-1201-lausd-layoffs-20101201,0,5427940.story

Critical Mass

The education leaders of Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Rhode Island, and Virginia have announced they have created a new education-chiefs group to press a policy agenda topped by school choice and performance-driven evaluations for teachers and principals.
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/state_edwatch/2010/11/five_ed_chiefs_undertake_aggressive_reforms_in_new_group.html

Or Maybe Not

Michelle Rhee has also launched a national advocacy group, StudentsFirst, to support political candidates and school districts that embrace substantial changes in public education.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704156304576003372566611618.html

Better Together

Seeking to promote closer ties between charter schools and other public schools, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has announced that it is providing grants to enable charter schools and traditional school districts in nine cities to share best practices and solve problems together.
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/12/07/15charter.h30.html?tkn=OWBFBJh3TmhbmU4rgZZghoaCcpLUDPZUpTXl&cmp=clp-ecseclips

GRANTS AND SCHOLARSHIPS

NEA Youth Leaders for Literacy Grants

Eligibility: US Youth

Deadline: January 5, 2010

Maximum award: $500
The National Education Association (NEA) is partnering with Youth Service America to offer Youth Leaders for Literacy grants to support service-learning projects focused on increasing young people’s interest in reading and improving literacy in schools and communities. Youth Leaders for Literacy will award 30 young people from across the U.S. with $500 grants. Successful projects will be youth-led and address an established literacy need in the applicant’s school or community. The projects will launch on NEA’s Read Across America Day on March 2nd and culminate on Global Youth Service Day, April 15-17. All 50 states and the District of Columbia are eligible to apply. Youth ages 5-25 are welcome to apply along with an adult ally. The application deadline is midnight January 5, 2011. Access the application at

www.YSA.org/grants/nea-youth-leaders-literacy

Special Olympics Get Into It Grants

Eligibility: US Youth

Deadline: January 9, 2010

Maximum award: $1000

Special Olympics is partnering with Youth Service America to offer Get into It grants that bring together students of all abilities to fight childhood obesity in their schools and communities. The program awards grants of $500 or $1,000 to help youth create and implement service-learning programs to fight childhood obesity. The application must be completed by a teacher and a unified pair of students (one with and one without an intellectual disability). Get Into It grant projects launch on Spread the Word to End the Word Day (March 2, 2011) and culminate on Global Youth Service Day (April 15-17, 2011). All 50 states and the District of Columbia are eligible to apply. Applications must be submitted by midnight, January 19, 2011. To learn more about this opportunity, start using the resources offered, and view the online application, visit

www.YSA.org/getintoit

Captain Planet Foundation Grants Deadline

December 31, 2010

Maximum award: $2500

The mission of the Captain Planet Foundation is to fund and support hands-on, environmental projects for children and youths. The Foundation is interested in funding innovative programs that empower children and youth to work towards solving environmental problems in their neighborhoods and communities. All funded projects must involve young people ages 6-18 (elementary through high school). Nonprofit organizations and public schools worldwide are eligible to apply for grants of $250 to $2,500. In order to be considered for funding, proposals must:

Promote understanding of environmental issues

Focus on hands-on involvement

Involve children and young adults 6-18 (elementary through high school)

Promote interaction and cooperation within the group

Help young people develop planning and problem solving skills

Include adult supervision

Commit to follow-up communication with the Foundation

Generally, the range of grants awarded by the Foundation is $250 – $2,500. For more information, visit:www.captainplanetfoundation.org

Gates Millennium Scholars Program Scholarships

Deadline: January 10, 2011

The 2011 Gates Millennium Scholars (GMS) scholarship application is now available. GMS will select 1,000 talented students to receive a good-through-graduation scholarship to use at any college or university of their choice. We provide Gates Millennium Scholars with personal and professional development through our leadership programs along with academic support throughout their college career. The goal of GMS is to promote academic excellence and to provide an opportunity for outstanding minority students with significant financial need to reach their highest potential. For more information visit or to nominate an outstanding youth, visit www.gmsp.org

Lexus/Scholastic Eco Challenge

Deadline: January 19, 2011

Maximum award: $3000
The Lexus Eco Challenge is a life-changing opportunity for teens across the nation to make a difference in the environmental health of our planet, one community at a time. The program is designed to inspire and empower middle and high school students to learn about the environment and take action to improve it. The Challenge is open to students in grades 6-12 who are registered, and enrolled a public or accredited private school or home-schooled, and who are legal residents of the United States or the District of Columbia. Teams can enter if they are part of an after-school science or environmental club, but the Challenge is not open to clubs outside of the school. Maximum award: $30,000 in scholarships and grants. Eligibility: middle and high school teams comprised of five to 10 students and one teacher advisor. For more information visit www.scholastic.com/lexus

AmeriCorps State and National Grants

Deadline: January 25, 2011

CNCS is looking for high-impact organizations across America to submit their strongest applications for how to use AmeriCorps members to address pressing social problems. If the President’s fiscal year 2011 budget request is fully funded, the agency anticipates approximately $311 million to be available for new, recompeting, and continuation grants in all of the AmeriCorps State and National grant categories, and $1 million for AmeriCorps planning grants. This funding will make a focused investment in the six national issue priorities identified in the Serve America Act of improving education, energy conservation, the health of all Americans, and economic opportunity for economically vulnerable individuals; increasing service by and for veterans; and providing disaster services. Public or private nonprofit organizations, including labor organizations, faith-based and other community organizations; institutions of higher education; government entities within states or territories (e.g., cities, counties); Indian Tribes; partnerships and consortia; and intermediaries planning to subgrant funds awarded are eligible to apply. The Corporation encourages organizations that have never received funding from the Corporation or AmeriCorps to apply for these grants. Applications to the Corporation are due January 25, 2011, at 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time, and successful applicants will be notified in early June 2011. For more information, visit: www.americorps.gov/for_organizations/funding/nofa_detail.asp?tbl_nofa_id=83

Siemens We Can Change the World Challenge

Deadline: March 15, 2011

Eligibility: Students from grade K to 12

As citizens and future stewards of our planet, today’s students are in a unique position to become active agents of environmental change. Siemens We Can Change the World Challenge – Encourages students from grades K-12 to team up with their classmates to create replicable solutions to environmental issues in their schools (grades K to five), community (grades six to eight) and world (grades nine to 12). The goal of the Siemens We Can Change the World Challenge is to do more than just give kids a chance to formulate an experiment and carry it out. Contestants explore an environmental problem that affects their community. As part of the challenge, students must also put together guidelines for how other communities could repeat the project, and they share those guidelines as part of the contest. Prizes include scholarships, savings bonds, teacher awards, school grants, adventure trips, and green products. Learn more atwww.wecanchange.com

The Eisner Prize for Excellence in Intergenerational Work

Deadline: January 31, 2011

Maximum award: $100,000

The Eisner Foundation has announced the launch of the inaugural Eisner Prize and is currently soliciting nominations of individuals or non-profit organizations. The Eisner Prize is a cash award of $100,000 and is designed to recognize excellence by an individual or a non-profit organization in uniting and utilizing multiple generations, especially seniors and youth, to bring about positive and lasting changes in their community. The foundation hopes to spur innovation in this field and to reward those who have committed already to excellence in uniting multiple generations for the betterment of our country. Non-profit groups may self-nominate; individual candidates must be nominated by another person or group. To learn more about The Eisner Foundation or to nominate yourself or someone else who may be eligible for The Eisner Prize, please visit www.eisnerfoundation.org/eisnerprize

Ben & Jerry’s Foundation National Grassroots Grant Program

Eligibility: Grassroots, constituent-led organizations

Deadline: Ongoing

Maximum award: $15,000

Through the National Grassroots Grant Program, Ben & Jerry’s Foundations
supports nonprofit community organizations throughout the United States that bring about progressive social change by addressing the underlying conditions of societal and environmental problems. The broad goals of the program are to further social justice, protect the environment, and support sustainable food systems. Grants of up to $15,000 are provided to grassroots, constituent-led organizations that are using community organizing strategies to accomplish their goals as well as organizations that provide technical support and/or resources to such groups. The Foundation does not make grants to support social service programs. Letters of interest may be submitted at any time. www.benandjerrysfoundation.org/the-national-grassroots-grant-program.html

Do Something Seed & Growth Grants

Eligibility: All types of community action.

Deadline: Ongoing

Maximum award: $500

Are you working to start a community action project or program? Do you need money to put your ideas into action? If you answered, “YES!”, you are eligible to apply for a Do Something Seed Grant. We give out a $500 Do Something Seed Grant every week to help young people just like YOU! Do Something Seed Grants are targeted towards project ideas and programs that are just getting started. These grants can be used to jump-start your program or to realize your ideas for the first time. These are grants for all types of community action projects around causes that you care about and are important in your community! Deadlines: Rolling- Apply now! You will be notified whether or not you have won within 2-3 months after submission. www.dosomething.org/grants/seedgrants

Did you create a sustainable community action project, program or organization that you want to grow? Are you looking for funding to take your already successful project to the next level? If you answered “YES!”, you are eligible to apply for a Do Something Growth Grant. We give out a $500 Do Something Growth Grant every week to help young people just like YOU! Do Something Growth Grants are targeted towards projects that are already developed and sustainable. These grants go towards the next steps of your project and organization to help you as you look to expand your project and grow your impact.Deadlines: Rolling- Apply now! You will be notified whether or not you have won within 2-3 months after submission. www.dosomething.org/grants/growthgrants

Inter-American Development Bank Cultural Center: Cultural Development Program Grants

Eligibility: For all Cultural initiatives with social and economic impact in IDB member countries.

Deadline: January 31, 2011

Maximum award: $10,000
The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) provides multilateral financing and expertise for economic, social, and institutional development in Latin America and the Caribbean. The IDB Cultural Center’s Cultural Development Program makes small grants for cultural initiatives with social and economic impact in IDB member countries. The objectives of the program are to recognize and stimulate the activities of cultural development centers; promote the restoration and preservation of historical cultural heritage; support the education of cultural facilitators; and support the development of artistic manifestations such as craft making, visual and plastic arts, music, dance, theater, literature, or any other area of cultural expression that benefits individual and community development. Legally registered nonprofit institutions with a minimum of five years of experience in the cultural and artistic fields may apply. Grants range from $3,000 to $10,000. Proposals must be submitted through the IDB Country Office in the country where the project is to be carried out. The IDB Country Offices will accept proposals from October 1, 2010 through January 31, 2011. Visit the IDB Cultural Center’s website for application guidelines and Country Office contact information: www.iadb.org/en/topics/culture/cultural-center/cultural-development-grants,1671.html

The Hispanic College Fund Announces Application Openings for NASA Internships, Fellowships and Scholarships

Deadline: February 2, 2010

Eligibility: US Citizen with GPA 2.8 or higher

WASHINGTON (Nov. 24, 2010) – As a partner of NASA’s One Stop Shopping Initiative (OSSI) for Internship, Fellowship, and Scholarship Opportunities, the Hispanic College Fund announces the opening of applications until Feb.1, 2010. The OSSI LaunchPad at http://intern.nasa.gov will lead students to the Student On-Line Application for Recruiting (SOLAR) system, which provides the ability to search and apply for up to 15 NASA internship, fellowship and scholarship opportunities. A student’s completed application places him or her in the applicant pool for consideration by mentors. Undergraduate and graduate students interested in science, technology, engineering or mathematics are especially encouraged to apply, but opportunities for students in other disciplines are also available.

To be eligible for the program, students must fulfill the following requirements:

Be a U.S. citizen

At the time the opportunity begins, students must be accepted/enrolled full-time in an accredited junior college, four-year college or university

Grade Point Average must be 2.8 or higher

“So many doors will open for students if they take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to explore a career with NASA and develop critical skills to succeed,” said Dr. Carlos Santiago, chief executive officer of the Hispanic College Fund. “The nation needs more students in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) in order to compete in the global economy. As the premiere national organization providing comprehensive programs that form a high school – to college – to career pathway for Hispanic youth, the Hispanic College Fund is prepared to help strengthen the development of NASA’s workforce pipeline.”

“NASA’s workforce of tomorrow lies primarily in our nation’s student population,” said Mabel Matthews, NASA’s Manager for Higher Education Programs.

As a member organization of the OSSI Broker-Facilitator Corps, the Hispanic College Fund leads a series of recruitment activities, nation-wide outreach, and NASA awareness-building workshops to engage students, faculty, and staff at Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI). The Hispanic College Fund serves as the expert advocate and point of contact for undergraduate and graduate STEM students attending HSIs that are seeking information on and involvement in NASA internship/fellowship opportunities.

Since 2006, the Hispanic College Fund has administered the NASA Motivating Undergraduates in Science and Technology (MUST) Project. MUST prepares high-achieving undergraduates for the STEM workforce and is a scholarship program for underserved and underrepresented students. The project is based around three key programming elements – a scholarship, a paid summer internship at a NASA center, and year-round professional and academic support. Roughly 100 students make up each yearly cohort of MUST scholars.

Starbucks Shared Planet Youth Action Grants

Deadline: January 31, 2011

Maximum Grants: $ 30,000

The Starbucks Foundation is accepting applications from organizations that provide young people a continuum of opportunities to develop creative approaches to address pressing concerns in their communities. Grants are 10,000 to $30,000(USD) on average. Funding will be considered based on numbers of beneficiaries served, geographic reach, organizational capacity, and size of operating budget. Please complete a letter of inquiry for your organization. The Starbucks Foundation will contact you if we’d like to request a full grant proposal. Successful grant applicants will exhibit all of the following qualities: Deliver services to youth, ages 6 – 24; Preference will be given to organizations that focus on young people in the age range of 12 and older, when they are able to take independent action; Provides opportunity to combine learning with action that support communities and further global citizenship; Deliver services, disseminate information, provide training and/or build broad networks; Provide opportunities for Starbucks partners and multiple stores to be engaged in community service. The Starbucks Foundation reviews the submissions on an annual basis; letters of inquiry submitted between October 1, 2010 and January 31, 2011 will be reviewed and considered for the spring 2011 grant round. For more information, visit:www.starbucksfoundation.com

EMpower Youth Development Grants

Eligibility: Organizations working with young people (ages 10-24)

Deadline: Ongoing

EMpower provides funding to locally led organizations in emerging market countries that are working to improve the lives of marginalized youth through education, health, livelihoods or leadership development. Support is provided for service-related activities as well as organizational capacity-building. Funded organizations must work directly with young people (ages 10-24) to improve their health, education, leadership, or livelihoods and must be based in one of the following emerging market countries: Argentina, Brazil, China, Colombia, India (Gujarat, Maharashtra, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh, or West Bengal), Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, Philippines, Russia, South Africa, Turkey, or Vietnam. Applicants must have proof of registration as a non-governmental organization in the country where they are seeking support. Letters of inquiry may be submitted year-round. For more information, visit www.empowerweb.org/grantseekers

Bezos Scholars Program @ the Aspen Institute Seeks Applications from High School Juniors and Educators

Eligibility: Public High School juniors with GPA 3.5 or higher

Deadline: February 11, 2011

The Bezos Scholars Program @ the Aspen Institute seeks twelve top public high school juniors and twelve dynamic educators to receive seven-day, all-expenses-paid scholarships to attend the Aspen Ideas Festival, June 26 to July 2, 2011, in Aspen, Colorado. The program was created by theBezos Family Foundation to help cultivate the next generation of leaders.

The program seeks independent thinkers, demonstrated leaders, and engaged community members. Past Bezos Scholars have met with retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Secretaries of Education Arne Duncan and Margaret Spellings, oceanographer Sylvia Earle, inventor Dean Kamen, Tom’s Shoe’s founder Tom Mycoskie, and journalist Thomas Friedman, among other notables.

Following attendance at the Aspen Ideas Festival, the student and educator teams will return home and create Local Ideas Festivals in their schools.

To be eligible for the program, the student and educator team must be from a public high school (including charter and magnet schools) at which at least 25 percent of students are eligible for the free/reduced lunch program. The school must offer Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, or the opportunity to take college/community college courses.

Student applicants must be public high school juniors during the 2010-11 academic year who: demonstrate leadership in school and community, have a GPA of 3.5 or higher and have scored exceptionally well on PSAT/SAT/or ACT,are enrolled in Advanced Placement/International Baccalaureate/college classes, and are legal U.S. citizens or permanent residents of the U.S.

Visit the Bezos Family Foundation Web site to review the school and scholar criteria, view videos, and download the , program flyer, application form, and an FAQ.

http://www.bezosfamilyfoundation.org/

Bank of America Charitable Foundation Invites Applications for Student Leaders Program

Eligibility: Public High School juniors or Seniors

Deadline: February 11, 2011

The Bank of America Charitable Foundation is accepting applications for its annual Student Leaders Program, a component of the foundation’s signature Neighborhood Excellence initiative. The program is open to eligible high school juniors and seniors in selected market areas who are committed to improving their communities.

Selected student leaders participate in a paid eight-week summer internship with a designated local nonprofit organization where they experience firsthand how they can help shape their communities — now and in the future. To enhance their leadership experience, awardees also participate in a six-day, all-expense-paid student leadership summit in Washington, D.C., provided by Bank of America. The nonprofit internship and student leadership summit exposes students to leadership aspects in the civic, nonprofit, and business arenas. The program’s goal is to nurture and develop the country’s next generation of community leaders.

Five student leaders will be selected from each of the forty-five eligible markets. To be considered for the program, applicants must be a junior or senior in high school (U.S. markets) or enrolled in sixth form/college or college of further education (ages 16 to 18) (UK). Applicants also must be legally authorized to work in the U.S. without sponsorship and be a student in good standing at his or her school.

Visit the Bank of America Web site for complete program information and application procedures as well as information on obtaining posters to publicize the program.

http://www.bankofamerica.com/foundation/index.cfm?template=fd_studentleaders

NEA Youth Leaders for Literacy Grants

Eligibility: Youth ages 5-125

Maximum Grants: $ 500

Deadline: January 5, 2011

The National Education Association (NEA) is partnering with Youth Service America to offer Youth Leaders for Literacy grants to support service-learning projects focused on increasing young people’s interest in reading and improving literacy in schools and communities. Youth Leaders for Literacy will award 30 young people from across the U.S. with $500 grants. Successful projects will be youth-led and address an established literacy need in the applicant’s school or community. The projects will launch on NEA’s Read Across America Day on March 2nd and culminate on Global Youth Service Day, April 15-17. All 50 states and the District of Columbia are eligible to apply. Youth ages 5-25 are welcome to apply along with an adult ally. The application deadline is midnight January 5, 2011. Access the application at: www.YSA.org/grants/nea-youth-leaders-literacy

Pre-College Grant Program RFP

Eligibility: Education Institutes

Maximum Grants: $20,000

Deadline: May 1, 2011

The American Psychological Foundation’s (APF) 2011 Pre-College Grant Program, which awards grants to individuals or institutions to advance psychological science in high schools, is now accepting applications. This program provides financial support for efforts aimed at improving the quality of education in psychological science and its application in the secondary schools. Proposals must focus on supplying education for talented high school students. Attached you will find the formal Request for Proposals. Please feel to distribute this announcement as you see fit. Additional information can be found at http://www.apa.org/apf/funding/pre-college.aspx. If you are unable or do not wish to forward file attachments, please let me know and I can send you the Request for Proposals in the body of an email. The deadline for applications is May 1, 2011.

Special Olympics Get Into It Grants

Maximum Grants: $ 1000

Deadline: January 19, 2011

Special Olympics is partnering with Youth Service America to offer Get Into It grants that bring together students of all abilities to fight childhood obesity in their schools and communities. The program awards grants of $500 or $1,000 to help youth create and implement service-learning programs to fight childhood obesity. The application must be completed by a teacher and a unified pair of students (one with and one without an intellectual disability). Get Into It grant projects launch on Spread the Word to End the Word Day (March 2, 2011) and culminate on Global Youth Service Day (April 15-17, 2011). All 50 states and the District of Columbia are eligible to apply. Applications must be submitted by midnight, January 19, 2011. To learn more about this opportunity, start using the resources offered, and view the online application, visit www.YSA.org/getintoit.

NOVEMBER NEWSLETTER

admin — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 15:48:05 +0000

Learning From Scale-Up Initiatives
Seniors’ Reading and Math NAEP Scores on Rise
At One D.C. School, iPads for Everybody
Ten Years of Preparing Youth for College, Editorial by Friendship PCS Chairman
Major Revision of Teacher Training Programs Urged by Panel of Top Educators
Interest in Opening D.C. Charter Schools Surges
Achievement First Receives $1 Million from Broad Foundation
Education Secretary Arne Duncan on How to Fix a Broken System
David Catania Seeks Education Panel Chairmanship
Michelle Obama’s Plan: 6,000 Salad Bars in Schools In 3 Years
Gray Says Budget Gap Won’t Stop ‘Robust Expansion’ of Infant and Toddler Care
Updated DC CAS Results for Charter Schools Released
Top Teachers Have Uneven Reach in District
Kids to D.C. City Council: Give Us a Safe Place to Go After School
New Effort Aims to Turn Teacher Education ‘Upside Down’
D.C. Offers Lesson in Charter Schools 101

Upcoming Events
National Council on Educating Black Children
International Conference on Knowledge Generation, Communication and Management
Space Station astronauts to downlink with students for International Ed. Week

Resources and Opportunities
AmeriCorps Program Start-Up Online Resource
Better Buildings: Better Schools
Closing the Achievement Gap
Cost Calculator Tool
International Education Week
Partnership for Global Learning Video Library
Real-Time Accountability Dashboard
Seven Strategies For Seven Misalignments

Grants and Scholarships
DHS Scholarship Program

Learning From Scale-Up Initiatives

By Robert C. Granger
Education Week
November 17, 2010

In launching an unprecedented effort to improve school achievement and other youth outcomes by “scaling up” evidence-based programs, the Obama administration has given education a golden opportunity on the research front. With new funding, the administration has shown its commitment to supporting “what works.” These scale-up initiatives—including the White House’sSocial Innovation Fund, or SIF, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ efforts on teen-pregnancy prevention and home visitation, and the U.S. Department of Education’sInvesting in Innovation Fund, or i3,—present a real opportunity for us to learn to do this work better and make lasting impacts on the lives of young people. The i3 Fund is likely the effort most familiar to educators. Among the 49 successful i3 applicants are Success for All, KIPP’s Effective Leadership Development Model, Teach For America, and Reading Recovery, each of which will try to reproduce its effects in new communities, schools, and classrooms. This work faces a serious challenge, however. Research and prior scale-up efforts have shown that programs that are effective at small scale (perhaps because they were implemented in favorable circumstances by the original developer) have trouble maintaining that effectiveness when extended more broadly. We see that the expanded programs make a difference in some locations, but not others, and with some youths, but not enough.

So, how can we scale up good programs effectively? What leads to achieving robust implementation, reaching young people who need the services, and recognizing sites that can support innovation? More specifically, what are the right strategies for expanding such programs, what types of organizations can effectively implement them, and how do local policies and other conditions influence their effectiveness? When is the introduction of a new program an improvement on the status quo? Prior research gives policymakers and practitioners almost no guidance on these important issues, so they have to rely on their past experiences and hope their new work produces positive results at scale.

We need more than practitioner wisdom to improve the success rate of such initiatives—we need to learn from strong data as we go. The good news is that these initiatives allow us the chance to examine with whom and under what conditions programs can serve as the missing ingredients in the “what works” agenda.

Translating research into good policy and practice often requires a leap of faith. Now, we have the opportunity to make sure we land on our feet.

To learn more about what influences program effectiveness, we need three elements: (1) reliable estimates of a program’s impact in a large number of different sites, (2) good measures of the background characteristics of the participants, and (3) data on the conditions within and outside a program that might influence results.

The scale-up initiatives can meet the first criteria, at least potentially. Particularly in i3, proposals that received the biggest grants had to include strong impact evaluations of their expanded efforts. While these awards are grants and not contracts (funders have more control under a contract), funding agencies need to strongly encourage the winners to deliver on their promised impact evaluations. If such rigorous evaluations are done, we will know how much of a difference these innovations make in each new site. So, if the historical problem of varying effectiveness repeats itself, we will be poised to understand why.

For the second element, we can leverage the promised impact evaluations. For example, one finding common to evaluations is that programs are more effective for some subgroups of a target population than for others. Many educational interventions have little or no impact on schools, teachers, or students who do not really need the intervention, or on those who need more than the intervention can deliver. If the Department of Education asks the various local evaluators to gather a common set of baseline data for students involved in the i3 expansions, uniformly capturing information such as age for grade, English-language-learner status, and prior achievement, we could look across sites and groups of similar innovations for patterns. Maybe certain i3 strategies will be most effective with particular students. If we don’t gather common data on the students across sites and grants, we will never find out.

Similarly, for the third item, most developers believe that the innovations will make the most difference when implemented in communities or schools that have a commitment to a new effort, the human and financial resources to put an innovation in place, and few comparable programs already. However, this practical wisdom has not been confirmed by strong data. We should ask the local evaluators to gather uniform information on these factors across the sites, since variation is highly likely. Then, we can see if practical wisdom is borne out in results.

Gathering good data from these scale-up initiatives can also tell us if we’re thinking about past evidence in sensible ways. Is it as important as we think? Does it predict results under some circumstances, but not others? Using prior evidence as a condition of funding has led to concerns that some well-funded and well-evaluated innovations might stifle support for other deserving programs that do not yet have evidence of their positive impact. There is considerable variation in the evidence base for the i3 winners, and the same will likely be true in the other initiatives. The extent of prior evidence can be codified by a group such as the federal What Works Clearinghouse. With consistent data on how much evidence exists about the past performance of each winner, we can determine whether our current standards for evidence predict future effectiveness.

Translating research into good policy and practice often requires a leap of faith. Now, we have the opportunity to make sure we land on our feet. Thanks to rigorous evaluations of the effects of social programs, we know that they are sometimes effective and sometimes not. We need to use the scale-up initiatives to help us learn why. These recommendations will provide an understanding of the characteristics of youths, settings, and resources that predict effects. Knowing all this will help policymakers and practitioners target and support effective programs. In the longer term, it will help us improve outcomes for all young people.

ROBERT C. GRANGER is the president of the William T. Grant Foundation, based in New York City. He also recently chaired the National Board for Education Sciences, which is a presidentially appointed advisory panel for the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences.

Vol. 30, Issue 12, Pages 26-27

Working in the Reggio Way!

de Miranda, Caracas, Venezuela.

Seniors’ Reading and Math NAEP Scores on Rise
By Catherine Gewertz
Education Week
November 18,2010

Twelfth graders’ reading and mathematics scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress have improved only modestly in the past four years, according to results released today, prompting renewed recognition that too few students leave high school well equipped for a promising future.

Results of NAEP, often called “the nation’s report card,” show that between 2005 and 2009, the two most recent administrations of the exam, 12th graders’ average reading scores rose 2 points, from 286 to 288, on a 500-point scale.

While higher than those of 2005, the latest reading scores are 4 points lower than those from 1992, the first NAEP reading assessment in the current trend line. The proportion of students performing at or above the “proficient” level rose from 35 percent in 2005 to 38 percent in 2009—considered statistically significant—although those figures are still lower than 1992 levels. One-quarter of high school seniors, however, are still reading below NAEP’s “basic” level, which means they are not considered to have mastered the material.

On the math part of the exam, average scores rose 3 points—also statistically significant—between 2005 and 2009, from 150 to 153, on a 300-point scale. A greater proportion of students scored at or above the proficient level than did so four years earlier—26 percent compared with 23 percent in 2005. More than a third of 12th graders languish below the basic level.

The 2009 math results cannot be compared with those before 2005, because a new framework introduced that year changed the exam content enough to invalidate such comparisons. (“NAEP Governing Board Gives Nod To More Complex 12th Grade Math,” August 30, 2006.)

Members of the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policy for NAEP, saw some positive news in the 2009 results, but lamented that the numbers weren’t higher. The reading scores “are not quite what they should be,” said West Virginia schools Superintendent Steven L. Paine, a NAGB board member. The math increases are “good but not spectacular,” said Kathi M. King, a NAGB member and math teacher from Maine. “The only good thing” about the trend, she said, “is that it’s in the right direction.”

The scores hold “worrisome” signs that students are not adequately prepared for success in college or work, said former Mississippi Gov. Ronnie Musgrove, who is chairman of a NAGB commission that is researching how NAEP might be used as a measure of college and career readiness.

Comparison With Lower Grades

The academic portrait of the country’s high school seniors arrives as unprecedented levels of attention are being focused on improving young people’s readiness for college or careers. Precisely how NAEP achievement levels correlate with college or career readiness has not been established. A stack of special studies the board commissioned are expected to shed more light on that issue next year. (“Plans Advance to Link NAEP to College, Work Readiness,” Dec. 3, 2008.)

The scores drew a mix of reactions from education policy analysts. One point noted by some is the relative lack of progress for seniors compared with students in 4th and 8th grade. In reading, for instance, 4th and 8th graders’ NAEP scores rose 4 points between 1992 and 2005, while 12th graders’ declined by 4 points.

“Yes, there have been gains [for 12th grade], and they’re significant, but overall, the results are still disappointing, especially in comparison to the big gains at 4th and 8th grade,” said Tom Loveless, a Brookings Institution senior fellow who follows NAEP trends.

One possible explanation for 12th graders’ scores, he said, is that the exam doesn’t adequately reflect what students are actually studying in school. Another is that course content might not be as rigorous as course titles suggest. Mr. Loveless pointed out that math scores rose only 3 points, despite the fact that far more students are taking higher-level courses. Of those who took NAEP in 2009, 42 percent had taken precalculus or calculus. In 1982, only 10 percent of students had done so, according to figures from the National Center for Education Statistics.

Mr. Loveless and others also echoed a question that has long dogged the 12th grade NAEP: the possibility that 12th graders “blow off” the test. Since no consequences are attached to their performance, many have noted, they have no personal stake in doing well. Peggy G. Carr, the associate commissioner of assessment for the NCES, which oversees NAEP, said the agency is interested in working with states to embed NAEP items in higher-stakes state tests to see if that affects student motivation.

Michael W. Kirst, a Stanford University professor emeritus of education who focuses on college-readiness issues, saw the 12th grade NAEP scores as an encouraging sign that more students are building the skills necessary to succeed in postsecondary education. Mr. Kirst, who has examined the new math and reading frameworks in depth, said they are far more rigorous and demand skills much better matched to college than previous testing blueprints, so overall score gains of 2 and 3 points since 2005 are notable because they reflect progress on a tougher exam.

The new reading framework tilts more heavily toward informational texts that students would face in college or the workplace, such as textbooks and procedural manuals, and the new math framework presumes knowledge that reaches beyond the material covered in two years of algebra and one year of geometry, NAGB officials said.

First-Time State Results

With the 2009 report, state NAEP results were made available for 12th graders for the first time. States must participate in NAEP testing at the 4th and 8th grade levels in order to preserve eligibility for No Child Left Behind funding. But they are not required to do so at the 12th grade level, so state-by-state comparisons have not been possible. However, 11 states volunteered to include 12th graders in 2009.

The results show that five states—Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and South Dakota—had higher average scores than did the nation in both reading and math. Idaho and Illinois outscored the country in reading but not in math, and New Jersey did so in math but not in reading. Arkansas, Florida, and West Virginia turned in lower scores in both subject areas than the national average.

Even within high-scoring states, however, the report shows significant disparities among subgroups of students. White students in Connecticut, for instance, produced an average reading score of 301, while African-American students’ average in that state was 265. Females in New Hampshire outscored males by 18 points on average, and Massachusetts students whose parents had graduated from college outscored those whose parents hadn’t finished high school by 33 points. Similar patterns were seen in the nationwide scores, as the pool of students taking NAEP grows more diverse.

Achievement gaps among subgroups didn’t shrink between 2005 to 2009 in either reading or math, even though all racial and ethnic groups and both males and females turned in higher average math scores than they did in 2005. Progress was more uneven in reading: the only subgroups that made gains in the past four years were white students, males, and Asian-Americans.

The national score report shows that students who wrote long answers to questions involving reading at least once or twice a month and those who aspire to complete college or attend graduate school were much likelier to score well. Similarly, students who took more advanced math—particularly those who reached the level of precalculus—were much more likely to do well on NAEP.

Large portions of students learning English and those with disabilities are not included in NAEP. The 2009 report shows that on average, about one-third of students with disabilities are excluded from the reading and math exams. Among English-language learners, exclusion rates averaged 21 percent on the reading exam and 14 percent on the math. In some states, exclusion rates go much higher.

New Jersey, for instance, excluded 51 percent of its English-learners from the reading test, and Florida excluded 40 percent of its students with disabilities from the math exam.

At One D.C. School, Ipads For Everybody
By Michael Neibauer
Washington Business Journal
November 16, 2010

School computer labs are so passe. At one D.C. institution, middle schoolers are going mobile with the hottest technology around.

The “magical and revolutionary” iPad, as Apple describes it, is coming to Southeast D.C.’s Friendship Tech Prep Academy. Every student will get one, all paid for by the federal government.

With its wireless campus, interactive Promethean white boards and laptop carts, Friendship Tech may be better equipped than your office.

A fledgling arm of the Friendship Public Charter Schoolsystem, the college prep school serves 240 students in sixth and seventh grade out of a former Boys and Girls Club facility off Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue. At full capacity, Friendship Tech will serve 700 students in grades 6-12.

The D.C. Office of the State Superintendent for Education awarded Friendship Tech a $410,000 Enhancing Education Through Technology (Ed Tech) grant to buy more than 240 iPads, and the associated applications and training.

Ed Tech is a U.S. Department of Education program designed to improve student achievement through technology, and ensure students are technology-fluent by the eighth grade. The $260 million annual program was augmented in fiscal 2009 with $650 million in stimulus funds, of which OSSE received $3.2 million.

“iPads are a quantum jump forward over PCs,” said Patricia Brantley, Friendship Charter’s chief operating officer. “Instead of learning to use technology, we now see students are truly using technology to learn.”

The iPad experiment is not Friendship’s first with new technology. But nothing to date, Brantley said, “compares with the iPad project.”
“The level of engagement from classroom teachers, students and parents around the iPad is unprecedented,” she said.

Ten Years of Preparing Youth for College, Editorial by Friendship PCS Chairman By Mark Lerner
The Washington Examiner
November 16, 2010

It was the 10th anniversary homecoming of my charter high school last week and amazing to think that just a decade ago it was an empty public school building-another sad symbol of the collapse of D.C.’s school system. Located on Minnesota Avenue in an underserved Northeast D.C. neighborhood teaming with underperforming schools, there weren’t many onlookers predicting success. But 10 years on, our Collegiate Academy celebrates many firsts.

Collegiate Academy was the first high school in the D.C. metro area to establish an Early College program. Sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, this initiative provides high school students opportunities to experience college and earn college credit. At our high school, professors from the University of Maryland and the University of the District of Columbia teach college-level classes in our classrooms and our students visit their campuses for classes. Today, 150 students participate in this program and nearly 1000 have participated in it over six years.

At Friendship, we are acutely aware that our high school may be the only place that many of our children and their parents encounter the expectation that they go to college. About three of four students are eligible for free or reduced-price school lunch. These facts mean that we must walk the extra mile to prepare students academically, emotionally and financially for the challenges of college. My vision of a college-preparatory neighborhood school created my mission to hire and retain excellent educators and mentors as well as to obtain vital financial aid.

We work hard to ensure that 100 percent of our graduating class is accepted to college. When Collegiate Academy was founded most school reformers estimated that the graduation rate for D.C. Public Schools was about half. Even today it is estimated to be 72 percent. By contrast, our high-school graduation rate is 96 percent. Getting students to understand what awaits them if they leave education without a high-school diploma or a college degree has been critical to our success.

We use data to track students’ performance and encourage a dialogue about it with students and parents: many of our students from regular public schools arrive at Collegiate several grade levels behind. Our work in this area was recognized when Collegiate Academy was the first high school in the District to receive the demanding EPIC-Effective Practice Incentive Community-award that recognizes schools that demonstrate significant gains on standardized test scores.

Beyond test scores, Collegiate Academy has developed a comprehensive Advanced Placement program. These are college-level courses that are common in private and selective high schools and are much more rigorous than D.C.’s standardized tests. More than 400 Collegiate students are currently taking AP courses in subjects such as world history, macroeconomics, psychology, calculus and English language and composition.

Collegiate Academy also offers students the opportunity to earn scholarships that pay their way through college. Last year, 114 students earned Achievers Scholarships funded by the Gates Foundation. And Collegiate was the first and only D.C. high school to graduate more students with prestigious Posse Scholarships than any other high school in the nation.

From our afterschool programs, which extend the school day and week, to our Leadership Development Academy and community service initiatives that connect students to leaders and community issues, we prepare students for college. Students need to be curious learners to succeed at college and Collegiate encourages them to develop academically by offering courses in the arts, law and business.

Realizing that we must encourage our students every step of their way to college, we instituted paid summer internships at our District office for our high-school graduates who are at risk of not taking up college places in the fall.

I feel enormous pride when I learn of what Collegiate Academy’s students have accomplished. Their achievements were hard to imagine contemplating a school system that had failed a generation of children 10 years ago. I’ve seen our students’ many first-time achievements, as have Melinda Gates and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, both of whom visited this year. Many have returned from college to their communities in this city to the lasting benefit of us all.

Some of our students have graduated from Morehouse College, where I myself graduated, to Georgetown University, to the University of Virginia and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and countless other lesser-known colleges. Before them are jobs and careers that are rewarding for themselves and for others that would never have been available to them without a college degree. High expectations got them there.
Looking Through a Global Lens at Mathematics
Asia Society
Schools are constantly looking for ways to create engaging and rigorous courses which motivate, spark inquiry, nurture curiosity and imagination, and promote intense learning that leads to positive action.

In a globally focused school, learners are deeply engaged in studying the world around them in these very ways. They explore issues close to home and those beyond the borders of their state and nation. Students connect with peers around the world to work and learn collaboratively about matters that impact them all. As some programs have proven, a school can thoroughly teach district- and state-required content, enable students to perform well on standards-based assessments and simultaneously instill global competencies.

Is it possible to do it all? Yes, it is. In the upcoming months, this newsletter will show you how through articles examining different curricular areas. This month we look at an area often cited as the most difficult to infuse with international knowledge and skills: mathematics.

Major Revision of Teacher Training Programs Urged by Panel of Top Educators
By Michael Birnbaum
Washington Post Staff Writer
November 16, 2010
Programs that train teachers need to be radically revised, according to a panel composed of some of the country’s top educators, and eight states, including Maryland, have signed on to adopt the recommendations, scheduled to be released Tuesday.

Teacher-training programs have long been criticized for not putting enough emphasis on inside-the-classroom practice, and the recommendations suggest turning programs “upside-down” by putting practical training first and foremost. They advise creating formal mentorship programs for student teachers akin to those at medical schools and suggest that more scrutiny be given to teaching programs.

“This is a seismic moment for teacher education,” said Nancy L. Zimpher, chancellor of the State University of New York and co-chairwoman of the panel that wrote the report. The panel also included the heads of several of the country’s largest education schools, government officials and the leaders of the country’s two main teachers’ unions.

Teacher preparation needs “to connect what you know to what you’re able to do,” Zimpher said. She praised the report for taking a “systematic” approach to improving standards for teacher preparation.

Nationwide, about 150,000 new teachers enter the workforce each year, according to the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, four-fifths from traditional university- or college-based training programs.

But a growing number come from programs such as Teach for America, which bypass traditional education schools, in part because of a perception that the standard routes for teacher preparation have become less useful.

Teach for America argues that the teachers it puts in challenging classrooms after a five-week summer training program are just as ready to teach as their peers who have been through standard teacher-preparation classes. Those assertions have been controversial, but the program has grown in popularity and plans to double in size over the next four years with the help of a $50 million federal grant it won in August.

But even many educators who are skeptical of Teach for America agree that most teacher-preparation programs don’t give their trainees enough practical experience.

In Maryland, the education department signed on to implement the recommendation, although officials say they are already mostly in compliance. California, Colorado, Louisiana, New York, Ohio, Oregon and Tennessee also have pledged to implement the recommendations.

“We feel we’re already implementing much of what’s recommended here,” said Maryland Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick. “I don’t think it’s consistent across this country.”

She said Maryland has found that teachers who have had extensive in-classroom experience before they start teaching full time tend to stay on the job longer than their peers.

She also said the state planned to use a new system to track student performance back to teachers and to the teaching schools that trained them. For now, she said, it would be “diagnostic,” a way to help teaching programs find the areas they need to improve. She said she might be interested in using student performance data in reaccreditation decisions, as Louisiana started to do last year.

The state school system also will try to reduce the number of people receiving training to teach in elementary schools in favor of harder-to-staff areas such as math, science and early childhood, another component of the report, she said.

“Accreditation is being broadly criticized today,” said Arthur Levine, former president of Teachers College at Columbia University, who was on the panel. “What we’re having now is an education war over the best way to prepare people.

Interest in Opening D.C. Charter Schools Surges
By: Lisa Gartner
The Examiner
November 12, 2010

More than 50 people are interested in opening charter schools in the District, the most enthusiasm that the school board has ever seen.

Teachers, principals and people from all walks of life — including psychiatrists and entrepreneurs — packed a Columbia Heights conference room for a D.C. Charter School Board information session on charter application guidelines.

“I was surprised by the session, to see that large number,” said school board member Darren Woodruff, chairman of the schools oversight committee. “You would think with the growth we’ve already had, you’d see a smaller number of people coming out for charters to be authorized, but that hasn’t been the case.”

Woodruff said attendance was high at last year’s sessions, but not like this — and there’s another session planned for December.

The board approved four schools, out of 13 completed applications last year, set to open next fall.

Woodruff said the board likely will approve more than four schools to open in fall 2012, with an emphasis on early-childhood development and high schools. “We’ll be looking for value added to our current portfolio of schools,” he said.

Charter schools spokesman Audrey Williams said an increased interest in education reform — such as documentary “Waiting for ‘Superman’ ” and Oprah Winfrey’s own investment — contributed to the high turnout. “People are seeing where they can help improve or add to the whole education reform effort in the District, and they want to give it a try.”

Currently, 52 D.C. charter schools with more than 90 campuses serve 27,660 students. An annual report from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools found that 38 percent of D.C. public school students are enrolled in charter schools, a rate second in the nation only to New Orleans.

D.C. charter schools’ enrollment increased 7 percent over last school year, while D.C. Public Schools celebrated its first enrollment increase in 39 years — a more modest bump of about 1.6 percent to 46,515.

Erin Dillon, senior policy analyst for independent think tank Education Sector, said that the local charter system’s strong framework and solid funding make it an attractive playground for entrepreneurs, but that demand may soon outstrip itself.

“Eventually the market will be saturated and charter schools will have to start competing with themselves for enrollment,” Dillon said. “That will bring change and turnover in schools, which isn’t always the best thing for the community.”

lgartner@washingtonexaminer.com
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/dc/2010/11/interest-opening-dc-charter-schools-surges#ixzz162AHmG4J

Achievement First Receives $1 Million from Broad Foundation
Philanthropy News Digest
November 18, 2010
The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation has announced a two-year, $1 million grant to New Haven-based Achievement First to expand its network of charter schools and serve an additional 6,500 low-income students.

The organization will use the grant to identify and cultivate strong leaders for the new schools, recruit a core of “excellent” classroom teachers, and provide curricular and instructional support during the development of each new school. With support from the Broad Foundation, the organization hopes to nearly double the number of public charter schools it operates in New York and Connecticut and will expand into Rhode Island, in partnership with the Rhode Island Mayoral Academies.

The announcement comes on the heels of a flurry of grants to Achievement First, including a two-year, $1.7 million award from the U.S. Department of Education and a commitment from theWalton Family Foundation to provide $250,000 for each new Achievement First School that opens.

“Achievement First schools help their students make dramatic academic gains and prepare them for success in college and the real world,” said Broad Foundation founder Eli Broad. “As more families demand quality public school choices for their children, we are proud to help these outstanding public charter schools expand access for underserved students.”

“The Broad Foundation Awards $1 Million Grant to Expand Achievement First Schools in Northeast U.S.” Broad Foundation Press Release 11/16/10.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan on How to Fix a Broken System
By Rebecca BlumensteinREBECCA BLUMENSTEIN
The Wall Street Journal
November 22, 2010

Education, just about everyone seems to agree, is broken in the U.S. The country has tumbled down the international rankings in several measures of educational excellence. Education Secretary Arne Duncan talked with The Wall Street Journal’s Rebecca Blumenstein about what’s being done to fix the system and what still needs to be done.

Here are edited excerpts of that discussion.

Plenty of Obstacles

REBECCA BLUMENSTEIN: There are going to be a lot of budget cuts, there are going to be moves to curb property taxes, and the unions are going to be an obstacle to change. Is President Obama, and are you, willing to fully confront the unions, which obviously are a key constituency of the Democratic party?

ARNE DUNCAN: Well, let me tell you what has happened. Thanks to Race to the Top, you have 37 states that historically dumbed down standards—essentially not because of unions but due to political pressure, due to politicians wanting their students to look good—we’ve seen all these states now adopting common college- and career-ready standards. This is an absolute game changer.

We have this next generation of assessments coming. We saw more than three dozen states remove barriers to charter schools and innovation. We had a couple states that had laws on their books that prohibited the linking of student achievement to teacher evaluations; all those laws have been eliminated. So there’s been a massive amount of change. And we’re going to continue to push for dramatic change.

MS. BLUMENSTEIN: New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg just said that when layoffs do happen, that many states have laws that basically require that the most senior teachers are kept and the least senior teachers go. Often, the best, most energetic teachers are young and the schools don’t have an ability to get rid of who they want to. Are you going to push for changes to those laws?

MR. DUNCAN: Well, those actually are changing and have changed in many places. Much broader than that, we’ve had very few incentives and lots of disincentives for the best teachers and the best principals to go to neighborhoods that need the most help. And so if we’re serious about closing achievement gaps, we have to close what I call the opportunity gap. And we’re putting a huge amount of resources into figuring out how to systematically get the hardest-working, the most committed teachers and principals into underserved communities.

MS. BLUMENSTEIN: Are you and the president willing to confront the unions if they stand as obstacles to change in various areas?

MR. DUNCAN: We’re going to confront everybody and have been—including the unions. And everyone has to change, so anyone who thinks that unions are the only challenge is missing the boat. We have to challenge parents; we have to challenge students themselves; we have to challenge school-board members; we have to challenge politicians at the local, state and federal level.

Our Department of Education has been a huge part of the problem. We’ve been this large, compliance-driven bureaucracy, and we’re fundamentally trying to change the business we’re in. We’re trying to become this engine of innovation and scale up what works, putting a huge amount of discretionary resources behind districts, states, nonprofits and local schools that are doing things in a very different way.

Legislative Prospects

MS. BLUMENSTEIN: Education is the one area where people see a realistic shot at some bipartisan agreement in the new Congress. What is your priority? Are you going to be pushing for reform on the No Child Left Behind Act?

MR. DUNCAN: Yeah. I think there’s a lot in the current law that’s broken. There are pieces that work, but there are lots of really perverse incentives in it.

We’ve worked very closely with House and Senate leadership, Republicans and Democrats, for months. I actually talked to the incoming speaker [Rep. John Boehner] today. And we’re committed to working very, very closely.

MS. BLUMENSTEIN: Why should reforming No Child Left Behind be the top priority over performance pay or any other measures?

MR. DUNCAN: It’s not over anything. All that’s part of it.

What worked in No Child Left Behind is there was a laser-like focus on the achievement gap and disaggregating data. Historically, our country loved to sweep those sorts of tough facts under the rug. And thanks to No Child Left Behind, that’s never going to be the case.

Having said that, lots of things are broken. It was very punitive. Almost no rewards for success. It was very prescriptive. It was top down from Washington. It led to a dumbing down of standards. And it led to a narrowing of the curriculum. So we can reverse all of those things.

We can reward excellence, reward great teachers, great principals, great schools, districts, states.

We have folks beating the odds, raising achievement for students every single day. We need to shine a spotlight and give them more resources.

We want to put $1 billion behind what we’re calling a well-rounded education. So yes, reading and math are fundamental; they’re foundational. But we need science, we need social studies, we need foreign language, we need dance and drama and art and music and [physical education].

The Role of Business

MS. BLUMENSTEIN: What can the people in this room do to influence the outcome?

MR. DUNCAN: I think the most important thing this room can do would be to challenge us and challenge the country to make this the country’s priority in the new year. Your leadership in demanding and driving change—we have not, frankly, had enough passion, enough push from the business community. And your collective voice is extraordinarily powerful.

MS. BLUMENSTEIN: President Obama has a goal of increasing college graduation rates. I believe the U.S. has now sunk to No. 9 in the world and he wants to make us No. 1 by 2020. How is he going to do that, given the state of public education?

MR. DUNCAN: We’re putting a huge emphasis on early-childhood education, which is a long-term play. We’ve talked a lot about K-to-12 reform.

We’ve also put a huge amount of money to make college more affordable, have increased Pell grants, lots of money behind community colleges. And so with a comprehensive—we call it cradle to career—continuum of change, we basically need about another eight million young people to graduate.

David Catania Seeks Education Panel Chairmanship
By Tim Craig
Washington Post
November 22, 2010

D.C. Council member David A. Catania (I-At large) is vying to become the next chairman of the city’s Education Committee, saying he wants to take his “skill set and apply it to school reform.”

Catania, the second-ranking council member in seniority, said he has already begun considering how he would run the committee that has oversight over the city’s 50,000-student school system.

In the coming weeks, Council Chairman Elect Kwame Brown (D) will be deciding committee chairmanships. Catania now chairs the Health Committee.

When Mayor-elect Vincent C. Gray (D) was elected council chairman in 2006, he moved education to the Committee of the Whole, which all 13 council members sit on and which Gray chairs. Gray said that education was so important that all members should have a stake in it.

But Catania argues that education should be broken out as a stand-alone committee.
“If the last four years tell us anything, education is an overwhelmingly important subject matter, and it’s difficult for the chairman of the council to run the institution and chair the most significant subject matter in the city,” Catania said. “It’s overwhelming, and we should go back to having a separate committee.”

Catania said that he did not know Brown’s plans. But many council observers speculate that Brown may place another subject matter, such as economic development, in the Committee of the Whole and allow a council member to take over the Education Committee.

As a chairman, Catania is known as aggressive in oversight. At times, he’s been accused of trying to micromanage the Health Department, but his supporters note he’s been able to implement numerous reforms within the agency.

If Catania doesn’t get to chair a newly-formed Education Committee, he said, he would want to continue to chair the Health Committee.

Brown says he hasn’t decided on chairmanships yet. “I haven’t talked through anything.”
Michelle Obama’s Plan: 6,000 Salad Bars in Schools in 3 Years
By Kelli Kennedy
HuffPost
November 22, 2010

MIAMI — First lady Michelle Obama had Miami elementary school students cheering Monday over a typically contentious dinner topic – vegetables. Even the green ones.

The first lady ate some cherry tomatoes and fresh herbs with the students, who were the first in the country to receive a free salad bar as part of her new initiative to get more veggie displays into school cafeterias.

“If you’re going to change your habits, you’ve got to be ready to try some new stuff…trying some vegetables you might not normally eat,” Obama told students at Riverside Elementary.

Only about 15 percent of public school cafeterias have salad bars. Dozens of schools want to add them, but can’t afford the $2,500 equipment display or the produce to stock it, said Lorelei DiSogra, vice president of nutrition and health for the United Fresh Produce Association. The organization is donating 6,000 salad bars to schools, mostly in low-income neighborhoods, over the next three years as part of Obama’s Let’s Move Salad Bars to Schools initiative.

The first lady has championed healthy eating, even planting a vegetable garden at the White House, to help combat childhood obesity rates that have tripled over the past three decades. Obesity-related health care costs are about $147 billion per year, according to The White House.

On Monday, she encouraged members of Congress to “do their part,” referring to the stalled child nutrition bill that aims to improve school lunches and expand feeding programs for low-income students. Anti-hunger groups and more than 100 Democrats protested the use of food stamp dollars to pay for it.

The proposed new nutrition standards call for using leaner meats and whole wheat buns in school lunchrooms and stocking vending machines with less candy and fewer high-calorie drinks.

Congressional passage of the bill would be only the first step. Decisions on what kinds of foods could be sold – and what ingredients might be limited – would be left to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Dressed in a chic tangerine pantsuit and matching patent leather flats, Obama admired the school’s garden, saying her own garden yielded a good harvest this year.

“You guys are showing that without a stitch of land you can plant a garden because you’ve done it in cement boxes. You don’t have to have a big field to plant vegetables,” Obama said. “They aren’t just fun to plant but they’re critical to your health.”

The first lady chatted with students of the predominantly Latino school in small groups, showing them how to dice scallions to add flavor and explaining that yellow squash doesn’t have much taste, but it’s still tasty mixed with other vegetables.

With the first lady’s endorsement, students ventured into eating food many had never tried before. One student ate an entire green pepper. Another munched on a whole cucumber.

Yurys Otero said he doesn’t like green beans, but would eat cucumbers and spinach from the new salad bar.

“I used to say broccoli – yuck. But brother told me to try it and it’s good,” said the 5th grader.

Gray Says Budget Gap Won’t Stop ‘Robust Expansion’ of Infant and Toddler Care
By Bill Turque
The Washington Post
November 19, 2010

Mayor-elect Vincent C. Gray said Friday that the city’s financial predicament will not keep his administration from expanding access to infant and toddler care, an initiative he regards as the next step in creating a “birth-through-24 continuum” of public education in the District.

“I know we’re in a fiscally challenged era. I didn’t miss that,” Gray told a spirited gathering of educators at a conference sponsored by Pre-K for All D.C., a nonprofit group focused on promoting early child care and education.

But Gray, in his first major education speech since the Nov. 2 election, said budget pressures also create opportunities to bring new clarity to priorities. A “robust expansion” of infant and toddler care – with a focus on children with special needs or those at risk of developmental delays – is critical to controlling education costs later in life, Gray said.

“Doesn’t that make sense? It will reduce the number of children who wind up in special education, sometimes outside of our system, at a huge social and financial cost,” Gray said. The District pays an estimated $280 million a year in tuition and transportation costs to support special education students in private schools.

The District spends about $200 million a year in federal and local funds on early childhood programs. A fraction of that, perhaps $10 million to $20 million, goes to infant and toddler care, officials said. During the campaign, Gray cited waiting lists with as many as 6,000 families seeking infant and toddler services.

Gray, who is facing a $175 million gap in the current District budget and as much as a $400 million shortfall before approval of the fiscal 2012 budget next year, did not say how much he thought the city could afford. But after his speech, he said the expansion could be funded in part by more effective use of federal dollars that are currently spread across a series of disparate programs supporting early childhood education. He said the city would also look to private and philanthropic partners for more help.

Gray sees an infant and toddler initiative as a logical extension of his work as D.C. Council chairman, when he played a key role in a $40 million expansion of pre-K slots for 3- and 4-year-olds in the District’s public schools, public charter schools and community-based organizations. In September, officials reported that the District had effectively achieved “universal Pre-K” with enrollment of approximately 16,000 children.

Gray said he wanted to see the District’s early childhood programs evolve and improve by following the markers set down by the federal Race to the Top grant competition. The program has awarded $75 million to the city over the next four years in exchange for the District’s commitment to improve academic standards and assessments, data systems and teacher quality and to close persistently failing schools.

Although Race to the Top is focused on K-12 education, Gray said it was a useful template. “There is absolutely no reason we shouldn’t use it as a catalytic agent to focus on all public education at the front end and the back end,” he said.

Gray called on the University of the District of Columbia to lead the way in establishing accelerated credentialing programs for infant and toddler professionals, similar to its efforts on behalf of early childhood teachers.

Gray said he also wanted to bring a new rigor to evaluating teacher performance in the early childhood sector by introducing evaluation systems similar to the IMPACT regimen now employed in D.C. public schools. Among those he mentioned was ECERS, or Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale, used in early childhood pre-K and kindergarten.

“So we can say we are absolutely ensuring accountability in those classrooms,” he said.

http://www.dcpubliccharter.com/News-Room.aspx?id=161

Contact: Audrey Williams 202-328-2748
awilliams@dcpubliccharter.com

Washington, D.C. — District of Columbia public charter school students in secondary schools continued to show modest progress in both mathematics and reading on the District of Columbia Comprehensive Assessment System (DC CAS) tests. In the final analysis released today by the DC Public Charter School Board, the results showed that secondary charter school students continue to show the highest proficiency rates. While only five (5) charter schools met Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), as required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), several schools made gains in proficiency over last year’s tests. This year the bar was raised from 60.5% in reading and 55.2% in math for elementary schools, and 57.69% in reading and 55.4% in math for secondary schools. The proficiency targets for this year are 73.7% in reading and 70.1% in math for elementary schools; and 71.8% in reading and 70.3 % in math for secondary schools. (Click here for the complete AYP list of schools.)

After a three-week appeals process, the final results among the charter sector show that secondary schools had the highest proficiency rates. Washington Latin Middle School students had the highest proficiency rate overall in reading (83%) and math (81%). KIPP DC: Key Academy Middle School had the highest math proficiency rate of 81%. Thurgood Marshall Academy had the highest proficiency rates in math (71%) at the high school level. In the elementary schools, Achievement Preparatory Academy had the highest proficiency in both subjects with 77% in reading and 80% in math. St. Coletta Special Education PCS, which serves students with significant cognitive disabilities, administered the DC CAS Alternative Assessment instead of the general assessment DC CAS. (Click here to see the proficiency rates of all schools.)

The goal of the NCLB legislation is to ensure that all students will be proficient or better in reading and math by 2014. To reach that goal, each year schools and districts must meet ever-increasing AYP targets. The three determining factors for making AYP are proficiency targets for reading and math; graduation rates for high school and attendance for elementary and middle school; and 95% participation rate on the test. All student populations must meet AYP targets or safe harbor for the school to meet AYP.

“Performance on the DC CAS test is a critical barometer that the Board looks to as it evaluates a school’s achievement,” said PCSB Board Chair Brian Jones. “While we’re happy to see the gains and growth of students enrolled in the most effective charter schools, we are not complacent. In our continuing effort to raise the bar on charter school performance, the Board will be looking for significantly improved DC CAS scores this year,” Jones said.

A handful of schools showed gains of more than 20 points over last year’s results. Roots PCS Kennedy Street campus showed tremendous improvement in math by increasing proficiency by 46 points, and Potomac Lighthouse PCS improved math proficiency by 33 points. Achievement Prep Academy and William E. Doar, Jr. Middle and High School campus significantly improved their reading proficiency by 21 points each.

Title I schools that have missed AYP for two consecutive years, must comply with NCLB sanctions which include required supports and services for students and teachers, and developing a plan to improve student achievement.

D.C. Charter Schools that Met AYP

Achievement Preparatory Academy
DC Preparatory Academy – Edgewood Elementary (safe harbor)
Mary McLeod Bethune Academy (safe harbor)
*St. Coletta Special Education
William E. Doar, Jr. Middle & High School (safe harbor)

(Safe harbor: A school may make AYP if it reduces the percentage of students scoring below proficient by at least 10%, compared to the prior year, as long as the school also meets the target for graduation or attendance and meets the 95 % participation rate.)

Top 10 Proficiency Rates for the D.C. Charter Schools

	School Category	Reading			Math
Name of School	School Category	Prof 2009	Prof 2010	Gain (Loss)	Prof 2009	Prof 2010	Gain (Loss)
*St. Coletta Special Education PCS	E	81.82	93.42	11.6	80.68	85.53	4.85
Washington Latin – Middle School	S	82.31	82.77	0.46	81.95	81.42	-0.53
Achievement Preparatory Academy PCS	E	56.36	77.03	20.67	81.82	79.73	-2.09
D.C. Preparatory Academy PCS – Edgewood Middle Campus	S	64.94	75	10.06	69.7	77.68	7.98
Kipp Dc: Key Academy PCS	S	77.27	68.51	-8.76	94.16	81.49	-12.67
Kipp Dc: Will Academy PCS	S	60.17	64.71	4.54	74.15	76.8	2.65
E.L. Haynes PCS	E	66.13	67.36	1.23	79.57	69.42	-10.15
Howard University Math And Science PCS	S	72.92	70.18	-2.74	70.4	65.82	-4.58
Paul Junior High PCS	S	62.34	65.94	3.6	66.25	68.13	1.88
Thurgood Marshall Academy PCS	S	66.67	62.07	-4.6	72	71.26	-0.74

*St. Coletta, which serves students with significant cognitive disabilities, administered the DC CAS Alternative Assessment instead of the general assessment DC CAS.

	School Category	Top 10 Proficiency Rates for Charter Schools in Math
Name of School	School Category	Prof 2009	Prof 2010	Gain (Loss)	2010 Rank
*St. Coletta Special Education PCS	E	80.68	85.53	4.85	1
Kipp DC: Key Academy PCS	S	94.16	81.49	-12.67	2
Washington Latin – Middle School	S	81.95	81.42	-0.53	3
Achievement Preparatory Academy PCS	E	81.82	79.73	-2.09	4
D.C. Preparatory Academy PCS – Edgewood Middle Campus	S	69.7	77.68	7.98	5
Kipp Dc: Will Academy PCS	S	74.15	76.8	2.65	6
Kipp Dc: Aim Academy PCS	S	83.73	76.21	-7.52	7
Thurgood Marshall Academy PCS	S	72	71.26	-0.74	8
E.L. Haynes PCS	E	79.57	69.42	-10.15	9
Roots PCS – Kennedy Street Campus	E	22.22	68.42	46.2	10

	School Category	Top 10 Proficiency Rates for Charter Schools in Reading
Name of School	School Category	Prof 2009	Prof 2010	Gain (Loss)	2010 Rank
*St. Coletta Special Education PCS	E	81.82	93.42	11.6	1
Washington Latin – Middle School	S	82.31	82.77	0.46	2
Achievement Preparatory Academy PCS	E	56.36	77.03	20.67	3
D.C. Preparatory Academy PCS – Edgewood Middle Campus	S	64.94	75	10.06	4
Two Rivers – Elementary	E	59.12	72.06	12.94	5
Howard University Math And Science PCS	S	72.92	70.18	-2.74	6
Washington Latin – High School	S		69.57		7
Latin American Montessori Bilingual PCS	E		68.97		8
Kipp DC: Key Academy PCS	S	77.27	68.51	-8.76	9
E.L. Haynes PCS	E	66.13	67.36	1.23	10

*St. Coletta, which serves students with significant cognitive disabilities, administered the DC CAS Alternative Assessment instead of the general assessment DC CAS

Top Teachers Have Uneven Reach in District
By Bill Turque
Washington Post
November 14, 2010

The District’s most affluent ward has more than four times as many “highly effective” public schoolteachers as its poorest, underscoring a problem endemic to urban school systems: Their best educators often do not serve the children who need them most.

The inequity is reflected in the distribution of teachers judged to be most effective under the school district’s rigorous new evaluation system, known as IMPACT. Just 5 percent of the 636 top performers work in Southeast Washington’s Ward 8, home to many of the city’s lowest-achieving schools and its highest concentration of children living in poverty.

In contrast, 22 percent of the top-performing teachers are in affluent Ward 3 in Northwest Washington, home to some of the most successful and sought-after public schools. The area has eight fewer schools than Ward 8 and about 60 percent of Ward 8′s enrollment.

The imbalance represents a significant challenge for Mayor-elect Vincent C. Gray (D) and interim Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson, who have pledged to continue the reform measures initiated by former chancellor Michelle A. Rhee. Research frequently cited by Rhee and her supporters suggests that low-achieving children who have three highly effective teachers in successive years can make dramatic academic gains.

Officials caution that many children in Ward 8 and other parts of the city attend school outside their neighborhoods, but they also acknowledge the need to address the maldistribution of teaching talent. Among the measures they have introduced are performance bonuses that are doubled for educators who excel in high-poverty schools.

Henderson was not available to comment. In a statement, spokeswoman Safiya Simmons said: “Although we’ve made great progress – there are highly effective educators in every ward – we acknowledge that there’s still much to do.”

The imbalance is the result of longtime personnel practices in the District and other big public school systems, where traditional lock-step salary schedules provide no financial incentive for teachers to accept jobs in low-performing schools. Seniority rules often allow seasoned educators to transfer to less-challenging posts, leaving behind a higher proportion of younger, greener instructors.

“Good teachers have always transferred over time to easier schools, because there are so few other ways to reward yourself,” said Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, a nonprofit organization that promotes widening educational opportunities for minority and low-income students.

Veteran teachers say spots at schools with high rates of poverty and discipline issues have sometimes been used as punishment, while assignment to a more successful school might be doled out as a reward.

Elizabeth Davis, who has spent most of her 35-year career in Ward 7 and 8 schools, recalled the offer she received from an administrator after winning a teaching award from the MetLife Foundation in May 2007.

“He said, ‘Because you’re a good teacher, you should be in a better school,’ ” Davis said.

Others say the scarcity of top teachers reflects a broader inequity in the distribution of resources in the school system.

“We are catering to folks who don’t live this side of the river,” said Absalom Jordan, chairman of the Ward 8 Education Council. “We still have an education system in the District of Columbia that is separate and unequal.”

The 636 teachers, who represent about 15 percent of the city’s teacher corps, won their highly effective designations during the 2009-10 school year under IMPACT, which was introduced by Rhee.

Teachers are assessed through five classroom observations and detailed criteria that include the ability to explain content clearly, to respond effectively to student misunderstandings and to provide multiple ways to learn course material. For math and reading teachers in grades 4 through 8, 50 percent of the evaluation is based on student growth on the DC-CAS standardized tests.

The collective bargaining agreement approved by teachers last summer provides for performance bonuses for teachers who achieve highly effective status. The highest annual bonuses – as much as $25,000 – are available for highly effective teachers in schools where 60 percent or more of the children are from families that meet federal income guidelines for free or reduced-price lunch. All 21 schools in Ward 8 fall into that category, commonly used by schools as a measure of household poverty.

“All the big financial incentives go to the teachers in the low-income schools,” said Jason Kamras, the D.C. schools official who is the principal architect of IMPACT. “We’re placing a clear priority on serving our children in low-income schools.”

It is hoped that other provisions in the new contract will make a difference, Kamras said, including one that gives principals more discretion over hiring from the annual pool of teachers who lost jobs because of enrollment declines or program changes.

But the bonus system has attracted criticism from some teachers because the contract requires that they waive certain job protections in exchange for the money. It is not known how many have declined the payments.

And critics say IMPACT disadvantages teachers in schools where challenging conditions make learning difficult. They say that the system does not assess the value or effectiveness of teachers who must contend with large numbers of children from broken or dysfunctional homes and dangerous neighborhoods.

“I think the teachers in a lot of instances are doing a lot more than teaching,” said D.C. Council member Yvette Alexander of Ward 7, where just 51 teachers designated highly effective are assigned. “They are counselors and social workers. And until you can address all of these issues, I don’t think it’s fair to evaluate them as effective or ineffective based on student outcomes.”

Kamras said predicted rates of test-score growth in classes where teachers are judged for their “value added” are adjusted for factors such as special education and free lunch.

But teachers said the evaluation system will probably never account for the intangible ways in which they support their students. Bill Rope, a teacher at Hearst Elementary in Ward 3, recalled a colleague at another school who spent his own money and held fundraisers to take his sixth-graders on an annual post-”graduation” trip to Canada so they could experience another country.

“Of course, he couldn’t get any credit under IMPACT for that,” Rope said.

Kids to D.C. City Council: Give Us a Safe Place to Go After School
By Carol Scott
Change.org
November 19, 2010

Today after school, 15 children plan to take a field trip to the City Council offices of Washington D.C. for a lesson on local government.

This won’t be an ordinary civics lesson, though. This will be an education on whether city leaders can cut through red tape so that a local nonprofit isn’t penalized for running a much-needed summer day camp for low-income DC children.

City Gate, a DC nonprofit that focuses on needy children, youth and international residents, is struggling to pay its bills this holiday season because a $60,000 grant they were promised from city money has still not been paid. Leaders at the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) now say the grant, promised to pay for a summer day camp City Gate ran this past summer, no longer exists. It’s an example of how organizations that pledge to do good can be hobbled by bureacratic inertia and a maze of contradicting regulations.

Here’s the brief summary: The city’s OSSE promised a large grant to a nonprofit named YES (Youth Engaged for Success); a part of that money was pledged to City Gate. Due to an unrelated matter, the city’s relationship with YES broke down. After hearing about trouble with YES, City Gate asked the city’s OSSE if they should keep operating the day camp program; OSSE told them yes, says Rev. Lynn Bergfalk, the founder of City Gate. But then, at the end of the summer, after City Gate ran the summer camp, they found out that the city was no longer going to pay the grant.

What’s the point of all of these details? First of all, to show how convoluted the world of nonprofit grantmaking is. As a Change.org reader pointed out in my first post about City Gate, nonprofits are subject to a large amount of restrictions and paperwork in order to qualify for grants. This is as it should be; but in this case, the restrictions are preventing good work from being done.

What’s worse, the back-and-forth administrative drama of this situation obscures the larger issue: the fact that D.C. kids in Ward 8 — one of the poorest sections of the city — need somewhere safe to go after school. City Gate provided it, after being promised money from the city to cover staff and administrative costs. Now, City Gate is dipping into savings and credit cards to pay staff salaries, and may be less able to serve the community that so desperately needs City Gate’s help.

Today, children who benefit from City Gate’s myriad programs for them and their families will visit City Council offices. They’ll ask for the help of adults to wade through this convoluted problem. Will city leaders find a solution? In a message from OSSE, the department “continues to devote a number of staff resources to resolve the number of problems around this grant.” In this impromptu civics class, what lesson will they learn?

Pilot Program to Make Teacher Education More Like Medical Training Headed to Eight States
From staff and wire reports
November 19, 2010

Eight states are beginning a national pilot program to transform teacher education and preparation to emphasize far more in-field, intensive training—as is common practice in medical schools.

“Teaching, like medicine, is a profession of practice,” said State University of New York Chancellor Nancy Zimpher, who is co-chairwoman of the expert panel that released a report on the recommended changes Nov. 16 in Washington, D.C. “Making clinical preparation the centerpiece of teacher education will transform the way we prepare teachers.”

The pilot program—developed by K-12 and higher-education officials, along with teachers unions, to improve instruction—is being rolled out in California, Colorado, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, Ohio, Oregon, and Tennessee. The states agreed to implement the recommendations of the Blue Ribbon Panel on Clinical Preparation and Partnerships for Improved Student Learning, created by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE).

Instead of exposing student teachers to varied classroom experiences at the end of their academic pursuit, the new system would put student teachers into classrooms earlier and more often. It could include rounds, similar to the system used in teaching hospitals in which mentors provide constant critiques to students in real-life situations.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan told the Nov. 16 gathering, which was webcast nationally, that too many colleges stress theory with too little classroom time.

“There is little or no accountability for turning out effective teachers,” Duncan said, calling for “outcome-based” reviews of teacher education programs. “It is time to start holding teacher preparation programs far more accountable for the impact of their graduates on student learning and achievement.”

The expert panel also recommends more online and video demonstrations, as well as case-study analysis by teachers. Video evaluations of teachers-in-training already are being tested in 19 states.

“This is huge, a real turning point,” Zimpher told the Associated Press.

She said the new model will “turn teacher education upside down” and could be in colleges within two years. And in states with pilot programs, the first elements likely will be in place beginning in the fall 2011 semester.

States with pilot programs will work with school districts and their regional teacher colleges, with an emphasis on improving instruction in high-need, low-income urban and rural districts.

The reform would make teacher education and continuing education a shared responsibility of schools and universities.

“NCATE’s call for prospective teachers to receive more clinical experience is a smart first step in a profession that sees nearly half of teachers exit in their first five years of teaching,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.

“The recommendation that teacher education programs work more collaboratively with school districts will help ensure that teacher preparation and hiring are more closely aligned to the needs of communities. Other recommendations—from establishing new research standards to revamping higher-education staffing and instruction—also will help upgrade and update teacher education programs.”

In yet another sign of shakeup in the teacher education process, NCATE and the Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC) last month said they’re in the process of consolidating to form a new accrediting body: the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP).

CAEP’s goals include raising the quality of teaching in the nation’s K-12 schools, as well as creating high accountability standards for teacher colleges.

A 14-member Joint Design Team, composed of equal numbers of NCATE and TEAC leaders, met frequently during the past two years to develop the groups’ consolidation plan. During a two-year transition period, the Joint Design Team will function as the interim CAEP board of directors. The president of TEAC, Frank B. Murray, will chair this board; the president of NCATE, James G. Cibulka, will become CAEP’s president and CEO.

The interim CAEP board will select the initial CAEP board when consolidation is complete, but the chair and president will remain in office.

“We have not approached our task as merely unifying NCATE and TEAC with the least possible change to two accrediting systems that are already quite similar,” says a joint statement by Cibulka and Murray. “Rather, we have set a much more ambitious goal: to create a model unified accreditation system” for ensuring high-quality teacher education.

D.C. Offers Lesson in Charter Schools 101
By Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post
November 15, 2010

The next crop of would-be D.C. charter school operators gathered in a gray conference room on 14th Street one night last week, more than 30 hopeful men and women, each with his or her own pitch.

“Hello,” began one woman. “I am a founder of Believe Charter School. We believe every child in D.C. has the right to a high-quality, first-class education.”

“Hi,” another woman began, offering her idea. “I’m soft-spoken. Sorry. I believe it’s important to prepare kids adequately and empower them.”

“I am a psychologist,” said an older man in a pinstripe suit, “and each day I go home depressed because I see so many 10th- , 11th- and 12th-graders who can’t read.”

The meeting was convened by the District’s public charter school board to explain the application process for opening a charter school, a list of requirements that fits into an hour-long PowerPoint presentation.

The District can approve up to 20 new charters each year. Of 13 applications last year, four schools were conditionally approved to open in fall 2011. In general, business is booming.

The city has 96 charter schools, which enroll more than 28,000 children, or about 38 percent of public school students, the largest percentage of any school system in the nation.

Essentially entrepreneurial ventures, charters receive public school money but have a higher degree of autonomy than traditional public schools in how they teach and operate.

The theory is that public education should be a competitive marketplace of choices.

Charters are supposed to encourage innovation, provide parents with a viable option to traditional public schools and spur struggling schools to improve.

More than two decades into the experiment, though, their academic results vary widely across the country and in the District, which pro-charter groups say has one of the best laws governing charters in the country.

Although some charter schools, notably the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP Academy, perform exceedingly well, standardized reading and math scores among charter students as a whole remained relatively flat this year.

GRANTS & SCHOLARSHIPS

DHS Scholarship Program
Deadline: January 5, 2011
Eligibility: Students pursuing basic science and technology innovations
Supporting students interested in pursuing the basic science and technology innovations that can be applied to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security mission.

Undergraduate students

U.S. citizenship required

Funding available for fall 2011

Full tuition and monthly stipends

Includes 10-week summer internships at federal research facilities or DHS Centers of Excellence

Complete information is available online at

http://www.orau.gov/dhsed/

Questions regarding the DHS Scholarship Program can be sent via e-mail to

dhsed@orau.org

Upcoming Events

National Council on Educating Black Children
April 28, 2011
Rio All -Suite Hotel Las Vegas, NV
National Council on Educating Black Children (NCEBC) is a premier non-profit and civil rights organization with a distinguished focus on improving educational opportunities and outcomes for African American children. By galvanizing “coalitions of the willing”, NCEBC is aggressively implementing solutions that elevate communities by empowering stakeholders who are ready to “take responsibility” for their villages. Everyone who touches on educational achievement and enhancement for African American children is welcome to share and learn. Last year’s annual convention attracted over 450 attendees, including first-time participants and life-long educators, and parents from a wide range of background interests and expertise. Conference Objectives

Showcase the best and proven programs throughout the country that are increasing African American male achievement and development.

Introduce effective programs that increase advocacy and building of the “Public Will” to improve quality of life and increase opportunities to learn for all children, especially African American males.

Engage policy discussions that increase capacity to access financial support NCEBC’s initiatives and programs, particularly those that directly impact African American males

Provide materials and strategies to break down barriers that deny African American children (males in particular) access to the resources necessary for high academic performance

Important Dates

All session proposals & papers are due: December 31, 2010

Notification of acceptance: End January 2011

Pre-conference materials due (for printing & media release): February 15, 2011

Presentation materials (PowerPoint presentations, etc.) due: March 31, 2011

Theme & Topics

This year’s theme is “A Blueprint for Action: Educating Minds and Removing Barriers.” NCEBC has outlined four convention topics inviting schools, families and community leaders to “come and be a part of the solution.”

Creating a Healthy Learning Environment in schools to Inspire Success Among Black students especially males.

Fostering Personal and Emotional Motivators for Successful environments that are educating black students especially Black boys.

Strengthening the Family Unit to Raise Successful Children.

Building Community coalitions and Social Conditions that Foster Success for black students especially Black males.

In this call, we seek proposals for:

Presentations

Panels

Research

Posters (visual presentations to be informally presented in circulation area)

When submitting a proposal for a regular session, please include:

Name of NCEBC Conference Topic Addressed (see above)

Type of presentation

Title of session/presentation

Name of Presenter(s)

Full contact information on the person submitting (sole contact person)

Core issues addressed

Summary or Abstract (up to 500 words)

Submission Instructions

Please submit proposal materials to:

NCEBC Convention Committee

3717 N. Meridian Street, Suite 504

Indianapolis, IN 46208

OR email: ncebc@sbcglobal.net

International Conference on Knowledge Generation, Communication and Management
March 27, 2012

Orlando, Florida USA

We invite you to submit a paper/abstract to The SPRING 5th International Conference on Knowledge Generation, Communication and Management: KGCM 2011 (www.2011iiisconferences.org/kgcma), to be held in Orlando, Florida, USA, on March 27th – 30th, 2011 ~ Orlando, Florida USA.

The deadlines for SPRING KGCM 2011 are the following (Check the web site for possible extensions or new set of deadlines):

Papers/Abstracts Submission and Invited Session Proposals: December 17th, 2010
Authors Notifications: February 7th, 2011
Camera-ready, full papers: February 22nd, 2011

Technical keynote speakers will be selected from early submissions because this selection requires an additional evaluation according to the quality of the paper, assessed by its reviewers, the authors’ CV and the paper’s topic.

Submissions for Face-to-Face or for Virtual Participation are both accepted. Both kinds of submissions will have the same reviewing process and the accepted papers will be included in the same proceedings.

All Submitted papers/abstracts will go through three reviewing processes: (1) double-blind (at least three reviewers), (2) non-blind, and (3) participative peer reviews. These three kinds of review will support the selection process of those papers/abstracts that will be accepted for their presentation at the conference, as well as those to be selected for their publication in JSCI Journal.

Pre-Conference and Post-conference Virtual sessions (via electronic forums) will be held for each session included in the conference program, so that sessions papers can be read before the conference, and authors presenting at the same session can interact during one week before and after the conference. Authors can also participate in peer-to-peer reviewing in virtual sessions.

Authors of accepted papers who registered in the conference can have access to the evaluations and possible feedback provided by the reviewers who recommended the acceptance of their papers/abstracts, so they can accordingly improve the final version of their papers. Non-registered authors will not have access to the reviews of their respective submissions.

Registration fees of an effective invited session organizer will be waived according to the policy described in the web page (click on ‘Invited Session’, then on ‘Benefits for the Organizers of Invited Sessions’), where you can get information about the ten benefits for an invited session organizer. For Invited Sessions Proposals, please visit the conference web site, or directly tohttp://www.2011iiisconferences.org/kgcma/organizer.asp

Authors of the best 10%-20% of the papers presented at the conference (included those virtually presented) will be invited to adapt their papers for their publication in the Journal of Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics.

Best regards,

SPRING KGCM 2011 Organizing Committee

If you wish to be removed from this mailing list, please send an email to remove@mail.2011iiisconferences.org with REMOVE MLCONFERENCES in the subject line. Address: Torre Profesional La California, Av. Francisco

Space Station Astronauts to Downlink With Students for International Ed. Week
November 23, 2010
Online
To highlight International Education Week (IEW), NASA and the U.S. Department of Education will host a live long-distance call for students with International Space Station residents Scott Kelly, Shannon Walker and Doug Wheelock.

NASA Associate Administrator for Education Leland Melvin and Secretary of Education Arne Duncanwill join students from Hart Middle School and Deal Middle School in Washington D.C. to discuss living and working in space with the ISS crew.

The downlink is scheduled for Tuesday, Nov. 23, from 11:20 to 11:40 a.m. EST, and will air live on NASA Television and the agency’s website. The event will take place at the Department of Education’s auditorium located at 400 Maryland Avenue, S.W. in Washington.

Both schools have teachers from the Teach for America program who helped develop the event. Teach for America is a network of top college graduates and professionals who commit to teach for two years to expand educational opportunities in urban and rural public schools.

This year’s IEW theme is “International Education: Striving for a Sustainable Future.” IEW continues a long-standing partnership between NASA and the Education Department that celebrates the benefits of international education and exchange worldwide.

Kelly, Walker and Wheelock are living and conducting science experiments aboard the space station for about six months. Wheelock, who is commander of the station’s Expedition 25, and Walker are due to return to Earth Thursday, Nov. 25. Kelly will remain on board, serving as the Expedition 26 commander until March.

The live, in-flight education downlink is one of a series with educational organizations in the U.S. and abroad to improve teaching and learning in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. It is an integral component of Teaching From Space, a NASA Education program that promotes learning opportunities and builds partnerships with the education community using the unique environment of space and NASA’s human spaceflight program.

For NASA TV downlink, schedule and streaming video information, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

RESOURCES
NECBC 2011 Convention Registration
http://ncebc.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/2011-NCEBC-Convention-Brochure.pdf
Rennie Centre for Educations Research and Policy
http://www.nmefdn.org/uploads/RennCentrEducatorSurveyReport.pdf
Weekend Warrior Series
Friday School Visit: Your choice of either middle or elementary.

Excel Academy (Middle): Excel Academy Charter School prepares middle school students to succeed in high school and college, apply their learning to solve relevant problems, and engage productively in their communities. See their amazing results here.

Democracy Prep Blackstone Valley (Elementary): The mission of Democracy Prep Public Schools is to educate responsible citizen-scholars for success in the college of their choice and a life of active citizenship. DPBV first opened its doors to 76 kindergarten scholars in August 2009. Democracy Prep Blackstone Valley will grow to serve scholars in kindergarten through the 4th grade.

To Register: Please complete this application and email it to WWS@buildingexcellentschools.org. You will receive an email confirming receipt of your application followed by a short survey to complete your registration.

Click here for the Weekend Warrior Series Application.

For more information or to submit your application, please email WWS@buildingexcellentschools.org.

Julianne Wurm is the author of a best-selling book entitled, Working in the Reggio Way: A Beginner’s Guide for American Teachers, based on three years of living in Italy and original research she conducted in the famous schools of Reggio Emilia, Italy. She is currently at work on her next 2 books, exploring a more complex set of questions involved in working in Reggio-inspired ways and focusing attention on the 0-3 component of the Reggio approach, the Nido. As well, Ms. Wurm is documenting her own work with a number of schools as their process unfolds and the teachers and families engage in teaching and learning using Reggio-inspired ways.

December 3, 2010

Day 1: Working in the Reggio Way 9 am- 3 pm

This follows the outline of Julianne’s first book and is lively and engaging! We explore establishing an educational vision, environment, time, projects, documentation and participation.

December 4, 2010

Day 2: More Working in the Reggio Way 9 am – 3 pm . Where are we now? Lessons from the last 8 years . Americanisms . Sopratutto: tenets of Reggio-inspired practice . American Challenges/Projects up close/ student-centered versus teacher directed . Assemblea and the Pedagogy of Listening: The heart of the educational program . Documentation/Projects .The Nido And so much more.

These days build on one another and you can attend the first the second or both!

$100 per person for one day $190 for both days. Lunch included in registration- contact Julianne for group rates:Julianne@juliannewurm.comJulianne@juliannewurm.com>

Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington
6125 Montrose Road
Rockville, MD 20852
p 301-348-3714
f 301-881-3716

agordon@jccgw.orgagordon@jccgw.org>agordon@jccgw.orgagordon@jccgw.org>>

www.jccgw.org

Click here to register. http://www.eventbrite.com/event/795129253

OCTOBER NEWSLETTER

admin — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 09:21:33 +0000

It’s Elementary: K-6 Ideas Could Keep Students From Dropping Out of School Later

Suicide Surge: Schools Confront Anti-Gay Bullying

Deadlines Loom on Districts’ Race to Top Plans

What Does ‘Career-Ready’ Mean, Anyway?

What a Real Turnaround Looks Like

A Literacy Crisis

The State of Education

What ‘Superman’ Leaves Out

Questionable CMO Practice Rife in Ohio

Consistent Markers on the Road to Dropping Out

Wasted Opportunities

What are they Thinking?

Compounding the Effects of Poverty and Disability

Gains, But What do they Indicate?

Mentoring: Ensuring it’s Effective

Charter School Group Fund Launches $160 Million Campaign

UPCOMING EVENTS

2010 Innovation and Excellence Forum: Call for Presenters

GRANTS & SCHOLARSHIPS

Prudential Spirit of Community Awards

Youth Garden Grants

Echoing Green Fellowships

Project Ignition Grants

Office Depot Foundation Grants

AmeriCorps State & National

WaysToHelp.org Grants

Starbucks Shared Planet Youth Action Grants

JPMorgan Chase Foundation International Grants

PepsiCo Foundation International Grants

Got Breakfast? Foundation: Silent Heroes

ALA/Young Adult Library Services Association: Great Stories CLUB Grants

Knowles Science Teaching Foundation: Teaching Fellowships

RESOURCES

School Turnaround Field Guide

Origins of Chartering – Timeline

Get Set Students’ Video

Jumpstart’s Read for the Record

Jumpbunch

It’s Elementary: K-6 Ideas Could Keep Students From Dropping Out of School Later

By Markeshia Ricks, Montgomery Advertiser, Ala. (MCT)
October 26, 2010

E.D. Nixon and T.S. Morris are elementary schools, but the concepts being used there could be key tools in combating the student dropout rate in later grades.
Neither school would seem likely to turn out high-performing students. They serve high minority populations of students, many of whom come from impoverished homes. But both schools have managed to turn what some might see as obstacles into academic excellence.

Both are on a prestigious list of “torchbearer schools,” a program created in 2004 to recognize Alabama schools that are high poverty, but also high performing. Among other criteria, the schools must have at least an 80 percent poverty rate and 80 percent of students must score level three or four on the reading and math sections of the Alabama Reading and Mathematics Test.

During the 2007-2008 school year E.D. Nixon Elementary was named to the torchbearer list and T.S. Morris Elementary was named to the list for the 2009-2010 school year.

But the high achievements of these schools that face many challenges often raises the question of why every school in Alabama, particularly high schools, can’t hit the same benchmarks.

The principals at E.D. Nixon and T.S. Morris said that every school can achieve what they have and drive down the state’s dropout rate if they’re willing to stop doing business as usual.

‘Every Student Can Learn’
Though E.D. Nixon and T.S. Morris are in two different neighborhoods and run by different principals you’ll hear the same thing at both—”every student can learn.”

T.S. Morris Principal Tamara Winston said that the school has high expectations of its students and its teachers. But even better, she said, the school has a very deliberate strategy for making sure that those expectations are met.

Winston said it starts with school leadership and teachers being on the same page. That means using data about student performance to make decisions, having teachers mentor each other and collaborate on lesson plans.

“We want to make sure that everyone is on the same bus and that everyone on the bus is in the right seat,” she said. “We need everyone to be on board.”

‘Not Your Average Teacher’
At E.D. Nixon, Principal Anthony Lewis said having the right teachers on board is imperative and sometimes those teachers aren’t the ones with the most degrees or the most years in the classroom.

He said that sometimes they are the teachers who are most willing to adapt their teaching style to meet the needs of their students.

“When I first got here, we had a lot of retirement parties,” Lewis said. “There are a lot of bright teachers out there, and some of them have two and three degrees, but they’re simply not right for Nixon.”

When you look around Nixon, you’ll see a younger teaching staff. Lewis said that is by design.

“Young teachers are moldable,” he said. “They’ve come here because they bought into the vision that all children can learn.”

Mark Coty, a fourth-grade teacher who has taught at E.D. Nixon for seven years, said that Lewis has given the teachers a standard to live by called the three R’s. They stand for rigor, relevance and relationship. That means the schoolwork is challenging, it relates to the lives of the students and the students know their teachers care about their well being.

“They love this school,” Coty said. “And we love them.

In addition to these things, Lewis also said meeting students where they are academically and not just where they should be academically is a priority at Nixon.

For a third-grader with weak reading skills, it might mean spending additional time in a second-grade reading class. For the fourth-grader with exceptional math skills, it could mean getting to move up a grade level in that subject.

“The students that come here, come with a lot of baggage from home,” he said. “It might be a home where there is no money, or they might have two parents who work a lot.

“We can’t change a child’s home life, but what we can do is affect what they do here at school.”

Both Lewis and Winston said their schools get tremendous community support and work hard to generate as much support from the parents of their students. At both schools, parents can attend workshops. At Nixon, they soon will have a place where they can use computers and work on things such as GEDs and resumes.

Rewarding Experience
Lewis said he never thought he wanted to teach in an elementary school, much less lead one.

“Part of my internship was done at an elementary school, and I vowed that I would never teach at an elementary school,” said Lewis, who taught biology and special education at Jefferson Davis High School for six years. “I just felt like, high school kids were more independent, and elementary school was much more ‘touchy-feely.’”

Lewis said that for many years and even today, women dominate elementary schools. He wasn’t sure if he would fit in as a black male. But that’s changed.

“I’m sold and now I never want to work in a high school again,” he said with a chuckle. “It’s because I see the immediate rewards.”

And so do the students and teachers.

Third-grade teacher Aundria Sewell, who has spent all of her five years as a teacher at Nixon, said teachers there are often at school long after their students go home because they believe in what they’re doing.

“We understand our students and that some of their parents want to do more, but are not able to because they don’t have the background,” she said. “So we stay here until 6 p.m. getting lesson plans ready so that we can accomplish as much as we can when they get here.”

Bridge to Somewhere
Lewis said he believes that the main reason that middle and high schools don’t often buy in to the concepts of project-based activity and facilitated learning, which allows the student more control over their learning experience, is because they’re concerned about behavioral problems.

“Having students sitting on their butts for 30-to-40 minutes at a stretch in class hasn’t been successful,” he said. “There needs to be at least 12 minutes or more of cooperative learning. That means that teachers aren’t doing most of the talking. The students do most of the talking and that means that learning is taking place.”

Lewis said that at Nixon there are lots of things that are done differently, and the teachers know they have the flexibility to do them that way.

For instance, students at E.D. Nixon don’t sit in traditional rows. Their desks are grouped together so they can talk to each other. They work on many hands-on projects where they can get out of their seats and move around the classroom without constantly asking permission. Their teachers also don’t spend the entire day standing in front of them lecturing from a book.

Lewis said he believes the main reason students drop out of school is because they don’t feel connected.

“A lot of kids are not engaged and they don’t have that self-efficacy,” he said.

Lewis said that middle and high schools don’t appear to be doing enough to keep students from being bored. He’s not suggesting that students need to be entertained, but believe they should be given more interesting ways to learn.

Lewis said his former students who are now at McIntyre and Bellingrath middle schools often visit and tell him of their boredom.

“If you’re in seventh grade with just a textbook and a teacher it’s easy to disengage,” he said. “We encourage our students to move around.

He said he wishes there would be some kind of bridge between the elementary schools and the middle schools that allows teachers at that level to use more of the same learning tools that elementary schools have.

“In middle school, students all of a sudden have a responsibility to be grown,” he said. “They don’t have a lot of the equipment and hands-on things that we have at the elementary level. In elementary school, learning is fun.”

“When learning is fun, they don’t miss school because they don’t want to miss anything.”

Suicide Surge: Schools Confront Anti-Gay Bullying

By the Associated Press
Education Week
October 11, 2010

A spate of teen suicides linked to anti-gay harassment is prompting school officials nationwide to rethink their efforts against bullying — and in the process, risk entanglement in a bitter ideological debate.

The conflict: Gay-rights supporters insist that any effective anti-bullying program must include specific components addressing harassment of gay youth. But religious conservatives condemn that approach as an unnecessary and manipulative tactic to sway young people’s views of homosexuality.

It’s a highly emotional topic. Witness the hate mail — from the left and right — directed at Minnesota’s Anoka-Hennepin School District while it reviews its anti-bullying strategies in the aftermath of a gay student’s suicide.

The invective is “some of the worst I’ve ever seen,” Superintendent Dennis Carlson said. “We may invite the Department of Justice to come in and help us mediate this discussion between people who seem to want to go at each other.”

Carlson’s district in the northern suburbs of Minneapolis is politically diverse, and there are strong, divided views on how to combat bullying.

“We believe the bullying policy should put the emphasis on the wrong actions of the bullies and not the characteristics of the victims,” said Chuck Darrell of the conservative Minnesota Family Council.

That’s a wrongheaded, potentially dangerous approach, according to the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network — which tries to improve the school climate for gay students nationwide.

“Policies have to name the problem in order to have an impact,” said GLSEN’s executive director, Eliza Byard. “Only the ones that name it see an improvement.”

According to a 2009 GLSEN survey of 7,261 students, only 18 percent said their schools had a comprehensive program addressing anti-gay bullying, while gay students in schools that had such programs were less likely to be victimized and more likely to report problems to staff.

Across the political spectrum, every group weighing in on the issue had deplored the recent deaths — the latest in a long series of suicides over many years by harassed gay teens, but dramatic nonetheless because of the high toll in a short span.

The most recent and highest-profile case involved Rutgers University freshman Tyler Clementi, 18, who killed himself by jumping off the George Washington bridge after his roommate secretly recorded him with another male student, then broadcast the video online.

But at least four younger teens have killed themselves since July after being targeted by anti-gay bullying, including Justin Aaberg, 15, of Andover, Minn., who hanged himself in his room in July. His friends told his mother he’d been a frequent target of bullies mocking his sexual orientation.

Five other students in his Anoka-Hennepin school district have killed themselves in the past year, and gay-rights advocates say bullying may have played a role in two of these cases as well.

Carlson, the district superintendent, lost a teenage daughter of his own in a car crash, and says he shares the anguish of the parents bereaved by suicide. He acknowledges that a controversial district policy calling for “neutrality” in classroom discussions of sexual orientation may have created an impression among some teachers, students and outsiders that school staff wouldn’t intervene aggressively to combat anti-gay bullying.

The district — Minnesota’s largest — serves nearly 40,000 students in 13 towns. The school board adopted the neutrality policy in 2009 as a balancing act, trying not to offend either liberal or conservative families.

Rebecca Dearing, 17, a junior who belongs to the gay-straight alliance at the district’s Champlin Park High School, said the neutrality policy caused teachers to shy away from halting anti-gay harassment — sometimes leaving her gay friends feeling vulnerable to the point where they don’t come to school.

“This shouldn’t be a political issue any more, when it’s affecting the lives of our students,” she said. “It’s a human issue that needs to be dealt with. They can be doing more and they’re not.”

In August, amid the furor over the suicides, the district clarified its anti-bullying program — saying that it was not governed by the neutrality provision and had always been intended to encourage vigilant, proactive adult intervention to curb anti-gay harassment. Staffers were told failure to intervene would be punished.

Justin Aaberg’s mother, Tammy Aaberg, is convinced the broader neutrality policy has been damaging to gay students and wants it changed. She said she heard belatedly from Justin’s friends about instances in past years where he was harassed that she was never notified about even through staff members were aware.

Now she sees signs that the district wants to be more diligent, but isn’t fully reassured.

“Most of the teachers and principals, and maybe even now the superintendent, they mean well — they want to intervene,” she said. “But the teachers still don’t know what they can and can’t do.”

Nadia Boufous Phelps, the school psychologist at Anoka’s Blaine High School, is co-advisor for its gay-straight alliance — to which 27 of the 3,000 students belong. She welcomes the attempt to clarify the stance toward anti-gay bullying.

“In the past, the staff often would not intervene,” she said. “Now the district has come out loud and clear, if you hear “That’s so gay,’ if you witness anything, you must do something.”

Still, she said, “We still have a long way to go”

Carlson says his district, seven years ago, was among the first in the state to implement a comprehensive anti-bullying program. Now he’s exasperated by the highly charged, politicized debate that has flared since Aaberg’s suicide.

“It’s a terribly sensitive situation,” he said. “Hurtful statements on either side are not helpful … and the kids are watching.”

Phil Duran, staff attorney for the statewide gay rights group OutFront Minnesota, says Carlson and his colleagues are constrained by school board members who do not want to anger conservative voters in the district.

“They’re between a rock and a hard place,” he said. “I do think they want to do the right thing — I don’t think they known what the right thing is.”

Nationally, the recent suicides have intensified calls on Congress to pass a pending bill, the Safe Schools Improvement Act. It would require schools receiving federal funds to implement bullying prevention programs that specifically address anti-gay harassment.

Supporters of the act say it has bipartisan support, but the likelihood of Democratic losses in the Nov. 2 election cloud its prospects, and it is vehemently opposed by many conservatives.

“A lot of these anti-bullying programs are crossing the lines far beyond bullying prevention into adult-oriented material and politics,” said Candi Cushman, education analyst for Focus on the Family. Mission America president Linda Harvey said the act would “incorporate mandatory pro-gay propaganda.”

According to GLSEN, 10 states have anti-bullying laws along the lines of the Safe Schools Act — requiring specific components addressing anti-gay harassment. But gay-rights activists say enforcement and compliance is not uniform.

For example, Dave Reynolds of the Trevor Project, which seeks to combat teen suicides, says many California schools are not in compliance with the state’s 10-year-old law. One problem area, he said, is California’s Central Valley — the source of many calls to the Trevor Project’s suicide hot line.

Jeffree Merteuil-Clark, 17, is a junior who’s active in the gay-straight alliance at Frontier High School in Bakersfield, a Central Valley city not far from Tehachapi. That’s the town where 13-year-old Seth Walsh, hanged himself outside his home last month after enduring taunts from classmates about being gay. He died after nine days in a coma.

Merteuil-Clark said the teachers who are sympathetic to bullied gay students tend to be cautious, fearing they might antagonize Kern County school administrators who want to “sweep the problem under the rug.”

“Growing up gay in Kern County, you have all this opposition to you,” he said. “It does have an impact on you. When you’re little, you think the rest of the world hates you.”

The debate has proved to be a minefield for the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program, one of the largest in the nation, as it strives to serve schools ranging from progressive to conservative.

“We have to be extremely careful,” said Marlene Snyder, the Olweus development director, describing a community-by-community approach which enables schools to tailor the program as they see fit in regard to anti-gay bullying.

“We’ve worked in all kinds of schools,” Snyder said. “Some have very much taken on the homophobic situation. Other schools won’t touch it with a 10-foot pole.”

GLSEN sees a mixed picture nationwide — gay-straight alliances continue to spread, numbering more than 4,000 nationwide, yet nine of 10 gay students in its latest survey reported suffering anti-gay harassment,

Asked for an example of an effective program, GLSEN leader Eliza Byard cited New York City’s Respect for All Initiative. The district, which serves 1.1 million students, makes specific mention of sexual orientation in its anti-bullying training for teachers and its materials for students.

“There’s always more to do,” said Elayna Konstan, head of the Office of School and Youth Development. “We’re always trying to do this work better.”

Of course, even a highly praised anti-bullying program doesn’t spare New York City from its own share of anti-gay violence. Police charged members of a street gang with brutally beating a recruit they suspected of being gay and torturing him and two other people last week.

Deadlines Loom on Districts’ Race to Top Plans

By Sean Cavanagh
Education Week
October 13, 2010

The deadline pressure states faced in submitting applications in the federal Race to the Top competition is now being felt at the local level, as school districts scurry to craft work plans that show how they will execute ambitious changes in education policy.

Eleven states, plus the District of Columbia, have won a combined $4 billion this year through the program, which was intended to support changes in teacher evaluation, data systems, math and science education, and other areas.

All of the winners secured varying degrees of commitment from local school systems and teachers’ unions to help carry out their Race to the Top plans. Now the winners in the second round of the competition, which was part of the 2009 economic-stimulus package, have until Nov. 22 to submit “scope of work” plans from their school districts and other participating local education entities to the U.S. Department of Education.

Completing that work is crucial: States are not allowed to give Race to the Top money to schools and districts until the plans outlining their goals, timelines, and budgets are approved, and if enough

local entities fail to submit plans, the winning states’ funding could, at least in theory, be jeopardized, federal officials say.

The Education Department gave the round-two winners 90 days from the time the awards were announced, in August, to submit the local plans. For inspiration, the recent awardees can look to the two first-round winners, Delaware and Tennessee, both of which met their 90-day deadlines earlier this year.

The upcoming deadlines bring a host of challenges.

Some districts have been asked by their states to include descriptions of how they will lay the groundwork for agreements with teachers’ unions on teacher evaluation and pay for performance. Some districts are attempting to figure out which individual projects can realistically be funded through their local shares of Race to the Top aid, and which will require money from other sources.

In Florida, which won $700 million through the Race to the Top, state officials encouraged districts to submit scope-of-work plans by Oct. 13, so that the officials can review them and provide feedback. By Nov. 9, all 65 Florida districts taking part in the Race to the Top—out of 67 traditional school systems in the state—must have their plans in, to give the state time to work out problems by the Nov. 22 federal deadline.

The Collier County, Fla., school system, which is expected to receive $4 million through Race to the Top funding, is making progress on its plan, but isn’t likely to make the October goal, said Mary Ann Gemmill, the chief administrative officer for the 43,000-student district.

“We felt we could do better with the deliverable if we pushed it back,” she said. “We’re going to pray for perfection on November 9.”

New Systems Required

Florida’s application called for the creation of a new system to evaluate teachers and principals, based partly on growth in student achievement on tests. By November, the state expects each participating district to submit a comprehensive timeline that explains how it will address all teacher- and principal-evaluation requirements of the state’s application, over the four-year grant period.

By May, each district will be expected to have a revised evaluation system in place for teachers whose performance can be judged under the state’s current testing structure, Florida officials said.

In Collier County, the toughest challenge is creating a blueprint for the evaluation. District officials have been working with union representatives in recent weeks to put it together, Ms. Gemmill said.

“We know where we have to start, and we know where we have to end up,” she explained.

Florida officials are pleased with the districts’ progress on their plans, said Frances Haithcock, the state’s chancellor for K-12 schools. Districts are likely to have an easier time meeting deadlines in some areas where the state already has invested considerable time and resources, such as helping struggling schools, she said, than they will have hammering out agreements about teacher evaluation.

Local Role Crucial

Federal Money, Local Plans

Winners of the federal Race to the Top grants are expected to submit to the U.S. Department of Education “scope of work” plans for the local educational agencies (LEAs) that are participating in their programs. Those plans describe basic goals, timelines, and budgets for LEAs carrying out the state’s plans. The winners face several expectations in working with their LEAs:

• At least 50 percent of states’ federal awards have to go to LEAs.

• Winners of the second round of Race to the Top have until Nov. 22 to submit their LEAs’ scope-of-work plans to the federal government.

• Many states have set earlier scope-of-work deadlines for LEAs, to allow for review of their plans.

• States cannot allocate Race to the Top funds to LEAs until their scope-of-work plans are approved.

• If LEAs fail to submit plans, states can reallocate their money to other LEAs, with federal approval.

Source: U.S. Department of Education

Local implementation will prove critical to states’ Race to the Top plans. At least 50 percent of individual states’ awards must go to local education agencies, and states cannot give money to local entities until their scopes of work are approved, federal Education Department officials said in a statement. Federal money has been obligated to the states, but it only can be drawn down as the states fulfill their plans, department officials explained.

If districts fail to meet requirements for scope-of-work plans, states can seek federal permission to reallocate aid to other Race to the Top districts, the department said.

Conceivably, the department could withhold Race to the Top money if significantly fewer local districts completed scopes of work than originally signed on to their states’ applications, but federal officials said they were confident state and local obligations would be met.

Florida officials said they have helped districts with their scope-of-work plans by visiting school systems, answering questions over the phone, and staging webinars to explain the process.

In Ohio, which was awarded $400 million in the competition, state officials have held several regional meetings to provide technical assistance to schools and districts. Ohio has set an Oct. 22 deadline for districts to submit their plans.

Costly Promises

A common concern among district officials is that their Race to the Top funding will not cover the costs of implementing the program locally.

The Lee County, Fla., school system is expected to receive $9 million over four years, said Greg Adkins, the chief human-resources officer for the 82,000-student district. But the price tag for carrying out some of the grant’s requirements—particularly improving data reporting—is likely to carry costs above that limit, he said.

The grant money “sounds large at the state level,” Mr. Adkins said, “but when you get to the local level, it’s not much to help us accomplish these goals.”

Ohio state officials have heard similar local concerns, said Michael Sawyers, the state’s assistant superintendent of education. The state could help them by providing some of the state’s share of Race to the Top aid, he said. The state is also encouraging local schools and districts consider pooling their funding in areas such as professional development to make the money go further, he said.

School districts in another winning state, Maryland, have asked districts to turn in scope-of-work plans by Nov. 3, to allow for sufficient state review and changes over the weeks leading up to Nov. 22, said James V. Foran, the assistant superintendent for the state’s division of academic reform and innovation.

Maryland districts have some leeway in working out potentially vexing teacher-evaluation issues, Mr. Foran said, while a council created by Gov. Martin O’Malley, a Democrat, studies that topic.

But the Race to the Top plans are due as Maryland districts face an unrelated deadline to submit comprehensive master plans to the state, Mr. Foran said. And some districts must have their Race to the Top scopes of work approved by local school boards.

“The biggest challenge they face, by far,” he said, “is time.”

Coverage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is supported in part by grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.

What Does ‘Career-Ready’ Mean, Anyway?

By Sarah D. Sparks
Education Week
October 1, 2010

For those of you who’ve been asking yourselves what this push for “college and career readiness” will actually mean, the Education and Labor Departments are trying to flesh things out a bit.

Both the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ occupational classification system and the Education Department’s academic program classifications have been revised this year, so the two agencies are taking the opportunity to realign the two. They are producing a “crosswalk” tool to analyze the relationships between the academic courses available and the needs of local labor markets. At the same time, the bureau is also developing a new National Employment Matrix to describe requirements for 750 different jobs, from teaching to chemical engineering.

The matrix will lay out the typical education degrees, work experience, state licensing or certification and on-the-job training needed to be considered competent (and thus employable) in different jobs, according to Dixie Sommers, the Labor Department’s assistant commissioner for occupational statistics and employment projections.

Both labor and education officials hope to use the new crosswalk tool and employment matrix to explore, “What is the intersection between education and employment? What happens to people come out of postsecondary degree programs; do they get a job [in field]?” Ms. Sommers said.

The education criteria can guide local officials on what businesses to solicit to bring in jobs for their community’s education level. Yet for schools, the numbers also could prove helpful to keep students on track academically. For example, a guidance counselor working with a student interested in medicine can help him compare jobs available with a diploma, such as a physical therapist aide, all the way up to a neurosurgeon, which would require advanced doctoral work and fellowships, and other jobs in between.

Keep an eye out for an initial listing of 100 jobs described using the new criteria, which will be put out for public comment in the next few months.

What a Real Turnaround Looks Like

Public Education Network
October 1, 2010

After years of high drop-out rates and dismal test scores, a group of teachers at the high school in Brockton, Mass. organized a school-wide campaign that involved reading and writing lessons in every class in all subjects, including gym. The results have been excellent, reports The New York Times. In 2001 testing, more students passed the state tests after failing the year before than at any other school in the state. This year and last, Brockton outperformed 90 percent of Massachusetts high schools. At 4,100 students, the school contravenes the received wisdom that small is better. In engineering the turnaround, the self-appointed group determined that reading, writing, speaking, and reasoning were the most important skills, and recruited nearly every educator in the building — not just English, but math, science, and guidance counselors — to teach those skills. The committee devised a rubric to help teachers understand what good writing looks like, and devoted faculty meetings to instructing department heads on its use. Then, the school’s 300 teachers were trained in small groups. The committee offered help to reluctant teachers, and since all committee members were in the union, scrupulously hewed to union rules. “In schools, no matter the size — and Brockton is one of the biggest — what matters is uniting people behind a common purpose, setting high expectations, and sticking with it,” explained David P. Driscoll, Massachusetts education commissioner at the time.

A Literacy Crisis

Public Education Network
October 1, 2010

A new policy brief from the Alliance for Excellent Education describes how over the last 37 years, the performance of thirteen- and seventeen-year-olds on the National Assessment of Educational Progress reveals that nearly six million of 22 million American secondary students struggle to read and write. Research demonstrates that around grade four, students must move from learning to read to reading to learn, contending with increasingly complex material each year. Without consistent content-area literacy support, many lose ground due to limited background knowledge and lack of reading strategies to comprehend concepts introduced in textbooks. When faced with students who struggle to read, teachers often lack sufficient training in integrating literacy into content areas, and tend to water down the curriculum and reduce task demands on students. As a remedy, the brief strongly recommends that subject-area teachers become more skilled in the kinds of reading and writing that are essential to their own academic content areas, and foster students’ abilities to read technical text, subject-matter material, and digital content independently. It also proposes that the Common Core State Standards, along with aligned assessments, can serve as a first step to raise the level of literacy achievement for all students in the United States.

The State of Education

Public Education Network
October 1, 2010

In an interview with NBC, President Obama asserted that, “We can’t spend our way out of [the problems in public education]. I think that when you look at the statistics, the fact is that our per-pupil spending has gone up during the last couple of decades even as results have gone down.” He stressed that money must be tied to significant reforms, including a longer school year and elevating the profession of teaching. The president called his administration’s Race to the Top initiative one of the “most powerful tools for reform” in many years. He also said that the vast majority of teachers want to do a good job, but our system must identify struggling teachers and give them the support and the training they need. “Ultimately, if some teachers are not doing a good job, they’ve gotta go,” he added. He explained that in addition to its focus on failing schools serving lower-income children, his administration is concerned about the decline in math and science scores in middle-class districts. Hiring teachers is key to reversing that trend. He also underscored parental responsibility, urging parents to become engaged in their children’s learning, as he is with his own school-aged children (whom he acknowledged went to a private school better than the average Washington, D.C. school).

What ‘Superman’ Leaves Out

Public Education Network
October 1, 2010

In a review of the much-discussed documentary Waiting for Superman, Dana Goldstein writes in The Nation that it “is a moving but vastly oversimplified brief on American educational inequality.” The film shows “working- and middle-class parents desperate to get their charming, healthy, well-behaved children into successful public charter schools,” but doesn’t show “teen moms, households without an adult English speaker or headed by a drug addict, or any of the millions of children who never have a chance to enter a charter school lottery (or get help with their homework or a nice breakfast) because adults simply aren’t engaged in their education.” It also leaves out charter school teachers such as those at Green Dot schools in Los Angeles, happily unionized, and regular neighborhood schools like PS 83 in East Harlem and the George Hall Elementary School in Mobile, Alabama, nationally recognized for successfully educating poor kids. The film also ignores what Goldstein characterizes as “intra-union ferment,” with affiliates across the country talking about effective teaching in a meaningful way. Randi Weingarten, president of the AFT, is given particularly negative treatment; in fact, she has shown strong commitment to retooling the profession to better emphasize professional excellence and student achievement.

Questionable CMO Practice Rife in Ohio

Public Education Network
October 1, 2010

According to a new report from Policy Matters Ohio, charter school law in the state has upended standard governance practices and allowed for the proliferation of ineffective, poorly run schools. Policy Matters reviewed management agreements, audits, websites, board lists and other charter school documents, and found clear evidence that management organizations, rather than the boards legally responsible for the schools, are in control. These organizations undercut board independence in a number of ways, such as controlling school revenues, setting up schools, picking board members, limiting board decision-making power, and reducing board ability to contract for independent services. Such practices can make it next to impossible for boards to break free from the managers they ostensibly hire. The report lists the organizations that present Ohio’s most troubling cases: the Richard Allen system of charters, Constellation Schools, Kids Count of Dayton, Mosaica Education, White Hat, Imagine Schools, the Leona Group, and National Heritage Academies. The report recommends charter law be revamped in the state, school-management relationships be closely scrutinized, transparency be required of all organizations, and the numerous violations uncovered be thoroughly investigated.

Consistent Markers on the Road to Dropping Out

Public Education Network
October 1, 2010

A new report from the Baltimore Education Research Consortium summarizes commonalities that join together individual stories of Baltimore City School dropouts. After examining surface-level demographics, the report probes into behavioral characteristics of these students in the years preceding the dropout event. The study finds the majority who eventually drop out of Baltimore high schools enter ninth grade with a pattern of chronic absenteeism that reaches back at least several years. A majority of eventual dropouts are overage for grade by the time they enter ninth grade for the first time, and have increasingly high levels of absenteeism and course failure over their years in high school. Grade retention patterns within the district (possibly influenced by accountability pressures related to test scores in the elementary and middle grades) may contribute to the issue and should be examined closely. The report recommends that alternatives to grade retention be implemented to prevent large numbers of overage students in middle and high schools. The study also recommends interventions during the early middle grades to prevent many dropout outcomes, with non-traditional credit-earning options offered to older enrolled students (17 and older) who already have patterns of chronic absenteeism and course failure.

Wasted Opportunities

Public Education Network
October 1, 2010

High-quality professional learning is critical to meeting constantly evolving challenges, but the majority of school systems know very little about what educators learn in professional development, how effectively they use what they learn, and to what extent students benefit, writes Hayes Mizell in Education Week. Most PD focuses on process, which often “masquerades as content.” Conversations are dominated by references to speakers, consultants, books, videos, webinars, workshops, courses, conferences, and presentations, with little attention to outcomes. Participation is assumed to equal results, and many states mandate PD in order to renew certification or advance on the pay scale. Most states make no effort to determine the effects of the mandated professional development: Some may benefit, many probably do not; no one knows. School systems routinely use professional-development days to disseminate updates on new laws or regulations, or instructions on administering standardized tests. As a remedy, professional development must be responsive to the objective learning needs of teachers and students, needs supported by student- or teacher-performance data. This is not possible without new expectations and behaviors from the three parties responsible for professional development: administrators who authorize it, educators who organize it, and teachers who engage in it.

What are they Thinking?

Public Education Network
October 1, 2010

Lately, teacher colleges and teacher preparation have come in for scrutiny and heavy criticism. Authors of a new report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute surveyed a diverse group of education professors on this and a range of issues facing the teaching profession, such as teacher tenure, state and national standards, measures of accountability, and alternative certification programs. The authors state that the ranks of teacher educators are “suffused” with “idealism, good intentions, and progressivist thinking,” showing less concern for educator challenges like managing classrooms and student discipline, implementing differentiated instruction, and working with state standards. They found that most education professors believe their field needs to change, yet are ambivalent about alternatives that recruit teachers through nontraditional paths (with the exception of Teach for America). Most professors offer some support for a number of policy initiatives aimed at improving the teaching corps, but oppose the use of student assessment data to evaluate teachers. Many of the questions in the survey yielded near 50-50 splits, indicating a professoriate that is increasingly segmented into opposing camps. The authors based their report on survey findings from a nationwide, randomly selected sample of 716 teacher educators in four-year colleges and universities.

Compounding the Effects of Poverty and Disability

Public Education Network
October 1, 2010

Preliminary data from a 10-year study conducted by University of California at Berkeley that compared California foster kids against their at-risk peers suggests that academic challenges posed by poverty, disability, and language barriers are compounded when children also have to shuffle from school to school because they have no permanent family, the Associated Press reports. Foster children consistently scored lower in state English and math tests, even when factors such as income, race, and learning disabilities were taken into account. The findings confirm earlier studies analyzing foster children in the Midwest and Washington state, but the final California report, due out later this year, will be the first to examine how different circumstances within the foster care network affect student learning, researchers said. There are some 400,000 children in foster care at any one time in the United States. The average time a child spends in the foster care system is about 27 months, advocates say. Legislation sponsored by Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., would direct child-welfare agencies to collaborate with local school districts to ensure that foster children remain in their current schools after they move to new school districts if it’s in their best interest.

Gains, But What do they Indicate?

Public Education Network
October 1, 2010

A new analysis from the Center on Education Policy looks at states with five years of comparable test data, finding student achievement in reading and math rose between 2005 and 2009 on state tests as well as on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). The gains in state and NAEP scores in most of these states overlapped, which may indicate higher levels of knowledge and skills in reading and math. Of the 21 states examined, 20 posted gains in proficiency on their state test, and 17 showed gains in reaching the basic level on NAEP. In grade 4 math, 18 of 19 states improved proficiency on state tests, and 15 showed gains in basic attainment on NAEP. The greatest agreement was in grade 8, where 19 of 21 states showed gains in math on the state tests and on NAEP, while 16 of 21 states showed gains in reading on both. In grade 4, 15 of 19 states showed upward trends on both assessments in math, and the same was true for 13 of 21 states in reading. The greater gains on state scores could be the result of instruction more closely aligned to state content standards than to NAEP, or may indicate inappropriate teaching to the test. Ultimately, students may be more motivated to perform well on state assessments, which have higher stakes for teachers and students.

Mentoring: Ensuring it’s Effective

Public Education Network
October 1, 2010

A new analysis from the Society for Research in Child Development of three recent large-scale evaluation studies of school-based mentoring programs suggests that the most successful programs use a clearly defined program model with well-articulated standards for practice; provide ongoing monitoring and support so that program models are implemented with fidelity; and ensure that all eligible students are matched with appropriate mentors. These programs enlist adult mentors rather than older student mentors, a group whose effectiveness has not been clearly established. They also are structured so that mentors and mentees meet consistently and are supported in developing mentoring relationships that can be maintained. The authors stress that analysis does not show evidence of effects on academic achievement. However, successful mentoring programs do seem to yield important influences on student learning and resilience in at-risk youth. Outcomes from school-based mentoring in decreased truancy and school misconduct may contribute to improved academic achievement over time, but this has yet to be examined. Evaluations of interventions in schools focusing directly on academic skills or social and emotional learning have reported stronger effects than current school-based mentoring programs, which do not necessarily reflect these areas of emphasis.

Charter School Group Fund Launches $160 Million Campaign

Philanthropy News Digest
October 1, 2010

The Denver-based Charter School Growth Fund has launched a $160 million capital campaign to help support the creation of non-traditional public schools nationwide, the Associated Press reports.

Once established, charter schools typically operate with a combination of public and private funding. Start-up funding, on the other hand, tends to be private, posing a challenge for parents, teachers, or business leaders who want to open a charter school. Start-up schools also have to pay rent for facilities and receive on average $2,200 less per student than traditional public schools, said Peter Groff, president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

The Obama administration has encouraged the creation of new charter schools as part of its efforts to improve public education in the United States. Indeed, states that applied for the billions in funding available through the government’s Race to the Top competition were required to have accommodating policies in place toward charter schools.

To date, the fund has raised half its goal from a range of individual and institutional donors, including the Walton Family Foundation and Netflix founder Reed Hastings. The campaign aims to establish 335,000 additional spots for children at charter schools in the next decade.

“There was a belief that there were lots of great schools out there, many of which wanted to be able to grow and serve more students,” said Charter School Growth Fund CEO Kevin Hall. “We will help full fill their mission of dramatically changing education in their community.”

UPCOMING EVENTS

2010 Innovation and Excellence Forum: Call for Presenters

Deadline: November 1, 2010

The Alliance for Excellent Education is pleased to announce that it will be holding an online forum highlighting successful practices in middle and high school education with online/blended learning and technology. This forum will offer an opportunity for policymakers, educators, researchers, advocates, the media, and others to learn about promising practices that prepare all students for college and work. The forum will feature schools, districts, and states that are effectively using online/blended learning and technology to raise student outcomes.

Speaker proposals for the 2010 Innovation and Excellence: Spotlight on High Schools, Online/Blended Learning, and Technology forum are now being accepted and reviewed according to relevance, effectiveness, and policy implications as described below.

Relevance:

Proposals that include the innovative use of online/blended learning and/or technology to drive or support middle and high school reform that ensures students are college and work ready are welcome, including those at the school, district, or state levels. However, of particular interest are success stories related to the innovative use of online/blended learning and/or technology that facilitates one or more of the following:

overall school reform efforts that have transformed the school culture and student outcomes;
improved teacher effectiveness and teacher distribution in low-performing high schools;
increased access to remedial and enrichment courses, including those that are difficult to offer in tough budget times;
efforts to increase interest and postsecondary participation in STEM fields;
improved home and school access to teachers, students, experts, virtual tutoring, and digital content;
improved outcomes for over-age and under-credited students;
use of multiple pathways to graduate students ready for college and work, including education in alternative settings or variations on a typical school day; and
data-driven decision making for personalized learning, including the use of data systems to prevent dropouts, identify students for intervention, and guide instructional improvement.

Also of interest are schools and/or districts, particularly those in rural and urban areas, that have beaten the odds of high-poverty, high-minority, and high-achieving demographics.

Effectiveness:

Proposals should specify how the highlighted program has increased student achievement, graduation rates, and college- and work-readiness rates. Also of interest are programs that show evidence of increased attendance, decreased discipline problems, improved teaching skills, equitable teacher distribution, and improved leadership and school climate. Quantitative data is best, though qualitative data is also useful.

Policy Implications:

Proposals should explain how the presenters plan to illustrate lessons learned from their work, and it should discuss the implementation, sustainability, and scalability of the program, as well as implications for school, district, state, and/or national education policy.

Proposals not focused on secondary level initiatives that promote college and work readiness will not be considered. Submitting a proposal may also lead to additional opportunities to highlight your school, district, or state in other Alliance for Excellent Education efforts. Please submit a one- to two-page proposal addressing the above criteria to digitallearning@all4ed.org by Monday, November 1, 2010, with the subject line “Innovation Series.” The Alliance will cover travel-related expenses for one presenter. If you have questions, contact Chip Slaven using the email address above or by phone at (202) 828-0828. Selections and a date for the first forum will be announced shortly after the submission deadline. If your proposal is chosen, the Alliance for Excellent Education will contact you directly.

GRANTS & SCHOLARSHIPS

Prudential Spirit of Community Awards

Eligibility: Grade 5-12 Students
Deadline: November 1, 2010
Award: $1,000

Prudential Spirit of Community Awards (Deadline: November 1)

The Prudential Spirit of Community Awards program is the United States’ largest youth recognition program based exclusively on volunteer community service. The program was created in 1995 by Prudential in partnership with the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) to honor students for outstanding service to others at the local, state, and national level. The program’s goals are to applaud young people who already are making a positive difference in their towns and neighborhoods, and to inspire others to think about how they might contribute to their communities. To be eligible, a student must be a legal resident of a U.S. state, have engaged in a volunteer activity that occurred during the last 12 months, and submit a completed application to a school principal or head of a designated local organization. 12 students will receive the maximum award, and a trip to Washington, DC.

http://spirit.prudential.com

Youth Garden Grants

Eligibility: Schools & community organizations
Deadline: November 1, 2010
Maximum Award: $1,000

Home Depot and the National Gardening Association (NGA) are partnering again to offer the Youth Garden Grants, given to child-centered garden programs. Priorities will be given to programs that emphasize one or more of these elements: educational focus or curricular/program integration, nutrition or plant-to-food connections, environmental awareness/education, entrepreneurship, social aspects of gardening such as leadership development, team building, community support, or service-learning. Schools, youth groups, community centers, camps, clubs, treatment facilities, and intergenerational groups throughout the United States are eligible. Applicants must plan to garden with at least 15 children between the ages of 3 and 18 years. Previous Youth Garden Grant winners who wish to reapply may do so, but must wait one year (e.g., if you won in 2010, you can apply again in 2012) and have significantly expanded their garden programs. This year, 100 grants are available, with five programs receiving a $500 gift card to Home Depot, a $500 gift card to the Gardening with Kids catalog, and educational materials from the National Gardening Association. Ninety-five programs will receive a $500 gift card to Home Depot and educational materials from NGA.

www.kidsgardening.org/ygg.asp

Echoing Green Fellowships

Eligibility: Start-ups
Deadline: November 12, 2010
Award: $90,000

The two-year Echoing Green Fellowship program will provide start-up capital and technical assistance to help new leaders launch their organizations and build capacity. This highly-competitive award will give 12-20 individuals $60,000, or two-person partnerships a grant of $90,000 to support their work. In addition, a health insurance stipend, yearly professional development stipend, access to conferences led by organizational development experts, technical support, and other benefits are included in the package.

www.echoinggreen.org/fellowship/application-overview

Project Ignition Grants

Eligibility: High school students & staff
Deadline: November 15, 2010
Award: $2,000

Applications for grants are now available online for high school students and adults interested in addressing teen driver safety through service-learning initiatives. State Farm and the National Youth Leadership Council are proud to continue their collaboration on Project Ignition in this seventh year. Students and staff from any public high school in the U.S. and in the Canadian Provinces of Alberta, Ontario and New Brunswick can apply. Applications are due November 15, 2010, and twenty-five high schools will receive $2,000 grants in December, 2010 to support implementation of their programs between January and April, 2011.

www.sfprojectignition.com

Office Depot Foundation Grants

Eligibility: Community organizations
Deadline: November 15, 2010
Award: $3,000

The Foundation’s funding focus includes: Making a Difference in Children’s Lives – to support activities that serve, teach and inspire children, youth and families; Building Communities – to support civic organizations and activities that serve the needs of our community; and Disaster Relief – to support disaster relief efforts of recognized national, regional and local agencies, and to provide disaster relief to Office Depot associates who have experienced catastrophic loss. An online eligibility survey and grant application can be found on the Grant Making Guidelines page. Applications are retrieved on a monthly basis and are reviewed by a committee. Please allow at least 12 weeks after you submit your completed application before you receive a response. The majority of grants issued are in the vicinity of $1,000 and are supported by in-kind donations when inventory allows.

www.officedepotfoundation.com/funding.asp

AmeriCorps State & National

Eligibility: Public or private non-profit organizations
Deadline: January 25, 2010

CNCS is looking for high-impact organizations across America to submit their strongest applications for how to use AmeriCorps members to address pressing social problems. If the President’s fiscal year 2011 budget request is fully funded, the agency anticipates approximately $311 million to be available for new, recompeting, and continuation grants in all of the AmeriCorps State and National grant categories, and $1 million for AmeriCorps planning grants. This funding will make a focused investment in the six national issue priorities identified in the Serve America Act of improving education, energy conservation, the health of all Americans, and economic opportunity for economically vulnerable individuals; increasing service by and for veterans; and providing disaster services. Organizations, including institutions of higher education; Labor organizations, faith-based and other community organizations; government entities within states or territories (e.g., cities, counties); Indian Tribes; partnerships and consortia; and intermediaries planning to subgrant funds awarded are eligible to apply. The Corporation encourages organizations that have never received funding from the Corporation or AmeriCorps to apply for these grants.

Successful applicants will be notified in early June 2011

www.americorps.gov/for_organizations/funding/nofa_detail.asp?tbl_nofa_id=83

WaysToHelp.org Grants

Eligibility: Teenagers
Deadline: Ongoing

WaysToHelp.org invites teens to apply for grants to fund their community service ideas across any one of 16 issue areas. Applications are short – just 5,000 words or less – and should summarize: how the project will involve others, who it will help, what effect it’s expected to have, when it will start and how the funds will be used. Grant requests are reviewed and responded to on a monthly basis. www.waystohelp.org

Starbucks Shared Planet Youth Action Grants

Eligibility: Community organizations
Deadline: January 31, 2011
Maximum Award: $30,000

The Starbucks Foundation is accepting applications from organizations that provide young people a continuum of opportunities to develop creative approaches to address pressing concerns in their communities. Funding will be considered based on numbers of beneficiaries served, geographic reach, organizational capacity, and size of operating budget. Please complete a letter of inquiry for your organization. The Starbucks Foundation will contact you if we’d like to request a full grant proposal. Successful grant applicants will exhibit all of the following qualities: Deliver services to youth, ages 6 – 24; Preference will be given to organizations that focus on young people in the age range of 12 and older, when they are able to take independent action; Provides opportunity to combine learning with action that support communities and further global citizenship; Deliver services, disseminate information, provide training and/or build broad networks; Provide opportunities for Starbucks partners and multiple stores to be engaged in community service. The Starbucks Foundation reviews the submissions on an annual basis; letters of inquiry submitted will be reviewed and considered for the spring 2011 grant round.

www.starbucksfoundation.com

JPMorgan Chase Foundation International Grants

Eligibility: NGOs
Deadline: Ongoing
The JPMorgan Chase Foundation welcomes grant inquiries from non-governmental organizations working internationally in the Foundation’s three focus areas: community development; youth education; and arts and culture. Of particular interest are requests in the areas of microfinance and support for small business development; low-income housing; youth education in low-income communities; and arts and culture projects aimed at promoting asset development in low-income communities. To be considered for a grant, an organization must be working in one of the countries outside the U.S. where JPMorgan Chase has a grants program.

www.jpmorganchase.com/corporate/Corporate-Responsibility/grant_programs.htm

PepsiCo Foundation International Grants

Eligibility: Nonprofit organizations
Deadline: Ongoing
Maximum Award: $100,000

The PepsiCo Foundation seeks to foster healthy, vibrant, and self-sufficient communities worldwide through global partnerships that improve the quality of life across communities in areas of great need. Grants provide support in the areas of health, including food security and improved nutrition; environment, including water security, sustainable agriculture, and adaptive approaches to climate change; and education, including access to education and training for the underserved and women’s empowerment. The Foundation aims to provide support to underserved regions across the globe. Registered nonprofit organizations (501(c)(3) organizations in the United States or the equivalent internationally) are eligible to apply. Requests are accepted through the Foundation’s letter of interest application process. Letters of interest may be submitted year round. www.pepsico.com/Purpose/PepsiCo-Foundation/Grants.html

Got Breakfast? Foundation: Silent Heroes

Eligibility: Schools & non-profit organizations
Deadline: November 15, 2010
Award: $5,000

The got breakfast? Foundation Silent Hero program encourages applicants to expand the reach of underutilized child nutrition programs, most notably the National School Breakfast Program. The program recognizes, encourages, and rewards those silent heroes who help children start their day off right by serving breakfast.

http://www.gotbreakfast.org/

ALA/Young Adult Library Services Association: Great Stories CLUB Grants

Eligibility: Libraries
Deadline: November 19, 2010
Maximum Award: $200

The American Library Association Public Programs Office and the Young Adult Library Services Association are accepting applications for the next round of Great Stories CLUB grants. The Great Stories CLUB (Connecting Libraries, Underserved teens, and Books) is a book club program designed to reach underserved, troubled teen populations through books that are relevant to their lives. Eligibility: all types of libraries (public, school, academic, and special) located within or working in partnership with facilities serving troubled teens in the United States and its territories.

http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/ppo/programming/greatstories/club.cfm

Knowles Science Teaching Foundation: Teaching Fellowships

Eligibility: High school science and math teachers
Deadline: January 12, 2011
Maximum Award: $150,000

The Knowles Science Teaching Foundation is now accepting applications for its KSTF Teaching Fellowships, which support America’s best teachers of high school mathematics and science at the critical early juncture of their career. Award includes tuition assistance, monthly stipends, and support for summer professional development; regular meetings, online discussions, and a structured mentor relationship for each fellow.

http://www.kstf.org/fellowships/teaching.html

RESOURCES

School Turnaround Field Guide

5,000 underperforming schools are being targeted by the current administration in an attempt to achieve a ‘turnaround’ in their success. This paper takes a detailed view of the challenges faced by such schools. It identifies key organisations that are involved in ‘ turnaround’, analyzes the various successes and failures of earlier attempts, and recommends additional steps to take to ensure the current effort produces positive and widespread results.

http://www.fsg-impact.org/ideas/pdf/School_Turnaround_Field_Guide.pdf

Origins of Chartering – Timeline

This informative page documents the progress of the chartering idea, from 1974 to the present day.

http://www.educationevolving.org/choice/origins-of-chartering

Get Set Students’ Video

A video of the 2010 GET SET students at FPCS-Woodridge Campus discussing and testing the case they made to carry medicine in the Amazon as part of their Malaria Meltdown Project.

http://dcacpswordpressposts.blogspot.com/2010/10/fwd-please-use-this-video-link-in-next.html

Jumpstart’s Read for the Record

Jumpstart’s Read for the Record©, presented in partnership with Pearson, is Jumpstart’s world record breaking campaign that brings children and adults together to read the same book, on the same day, in homes and communities all over the world. The campaign also kicks off Jumpstart’s yearlong program, preparing preschool children in low-income neighborhoods for success in school and life.

http://www.readfortherecord.org/site/PageServer

Jumpbunch

Jumpbunch is a young and exciting company that is committed to the health education of children through a structured physical education curriculum for your locations. Jumpbunch will provide your facility with a trained coach weekly. Coaches are equipped with age-appropriate lessons plans, music, safe equipment, and the skills needed to ensure that children learn while having fun!:-) All activities are designed to develop eye/hand co-ordination, large and fine motor skills, muscle mass and body balance. Jumpbunch services Charter Schools, Daycares, Summer camps, Special Education programs, MOM groups and a range of venues catering to children. We offer more than 70 different activity plans. For example, basketball, soccer games, relays, obstacles courses, football, field hockey, magic scarfs, golf, paddles sports and much more!

Contact “Coach James” at (301)254-5633 to schedule a meeting and a FREE Demonstration

http://www.jumpbunch.com/

SEPTEMBER NEWSLETTER

admin — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 22:26:17 +0000

Resources and Opportunities

Grants and Scholarships

Upcoming Events

Race to Top Winners Face Data System Challenges

admin — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 23:13:15 +0000

Sarah D. Sparks
Education Week
September 14, 2010

In the Race to the Top, state data systems were somewhat overshadowed by more high-profile and controversial sections of the competition, such as teacher evaluations and school turnaround plans.

Yet several key reforms in winning states hinge on the effectiveness of those data systems, and judges and outside experts worry states could face some heavy lifting to ensure their data systems keep up with their policy plans.

“There is a heavy data component” in Race to the Top, or RTT, reforms, said Alex M. Jackl, the director of information systems for the Washington-based Council of Chief State School Officers. “There’s hope for some real progress to be made, but there are some challenges and some real risks we’re just going to flush that money down the toilet. Most of the winning states call for a fairly major rewrite or upgrade of their data systems, and most of those states’ systems are not ready for the level of detail required of their data.”

Many states have multiple independent or loosely connected data systems for K-12 and higher education, children’s welfare and health services, and labor agencies, all of which have evolved organically over time in response to a governor’s request here, a legislator’s bill there. According to the Washington-based Data Quality Campaign, which promotes greater use of student data in education, only a handful of states had longitudinal data systems of any kind in 2005. Today only 11 states—including grant-winners Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and Delaware—meet the campaign’s 10 essential data system elements, such as having unique student and teacher identifier numbers.

Moreover, none of the winners have taken more than a handful of the actions the campaign deems necessary to ensure educators can actually use the data to improve instruction. As a result, Race to the Top winners’ state data systems are “sort of all over the board in terms of their maturation and interoperability,” said Larry L. Fruth, the executive director and chief executive officer of the SIF, or Schools Interoperability Framework, Association, a Washington-based nonprofit that supports data standards among state and local education systems.

Tight Timelines?

Even though the $4-billion grant competition required states to remove firewalls against data sharing as a precondition for applying, states could earn only 47 points in the competition for upgrading data systems to improve instruction—the least of any section of the competition. Most winning states built on existing plans developed for another federal grant program, the Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems initiative, which was created in 2002 to encourage states to ramp up their education data-collection systems.

States then added innovations such as: data “portals” to allow teachers and administrators in schools to access state data on their students; evaluation tools to help school improvement teams identify problems or link students to health and social services; value-added trackers to connect student test performance to teachers, and teachers to their college-preparation programs; and early-warning systems to alert educators quickly if a student falls off the track leading to college-ready graduation.

Judges for the competition seemed to agree with Mr. Fruth’s assessment. Among the most common criticisms was that applicants’ timelines to upgrade their data infrastructure seemed too tight, and delays in the data system rollout would ripple out into other proposals. For example, one reviewer praised Georgia’s planned P-20 comprehensive longitudinal data-collection system, but voiced concern that “full implementation … is dependent on access to adequate funding and the capacity of the state’s many small districts to provide timely, accurate source data.”

Georgia’s Plan

For its part, Georgia officials are developing a task force to align new parts of that state’s longitudinal database. This month the state will roll out a new “tunneling tool” that will allow administrators and educators to pull up state longitudinal records on students from regular school computers.

Georgia’s proposals for Race to the Top were “not necessarily geared to the tunnel [tool] the way we were implementing it,” according to Debra Holdren, the director of the state’s concurrent Statewide Longitudinal Data System grant project, but the state has adapted its longitudinal data system work to align the two grants better. “The data that we are compiling and sharing back to the districts is necessary to implementing Race to the Top,” she said.

Yet Ms. Holdren admitted that she has not been a part of RTT discussions, which have taken place mostly in the governor’s office, even though the state’s Race to the Top proposals revolve around the longitudinal data system.

Georgia is hardly alone in that, according to Paige Kowalski, a senior associate at the Data Quality Campaign. “There’s still a big disconnect between the policymakers and the people who are building the data systems,” she said.

Building Flexibility

Mr. Jackl and other researchers worry that pressure could put staff-strapped states into a “survival mode” when rolling out the upgrades. States have 90 days to plan for implementation and begin rolling out reforms.

”One of the fears I really do have is when large bureaucracies write new laws or create new rules for a system to get grant money, you build the best system you can and a few years later you can’t undo it when you find a few problems,” said Arie van de Ploeg, senior researcher for the Naperville, Ill.-based Learning Point Associates, now a division of the American Institutes of Research. “It’s going to be really hard to change them nimbly.”

Mr. Jackl argued states will have to spend some of their grant funds to tear down old, monolithic data systems and implement something “more flexible and modular.”

”Two years down the road if [the Elementary and Secondary Education Act] is reauthorized, who knows what the requirements are going to be?” Mr. Jackl said.

One of the oldest state systems in the country is planning just that kind of overhaul. Nancy Copa, the executive staff director for accountability, research and measurement in the Florida education department, said Florida is spending the first month of its Race to the Top project planning how to align that grant with two concurrent federal longitudinal data-system grants, as well as overhaul the state’s three K-12, community college, and career- and adult-education data systems, creating a new consolidated platform. “We’re trying to have less disparate systems,” Ms. Copa said.

Something Special About Friendship’s Collegiate Academy

admin — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 20:02:11 +0000

Mark Lerner
DC Charter Schools Examiner
September 30th, 2010

Earlier this week, I wrote about how the media needed to turn its attention away from its near-saturation coverage of D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee. As I pointed out, charter school leaders have been at the forefront of school reform in D.C. for over a decade. While Miss Rhee has been treated as a rock star on NBC this week, one of the city’s real charter school rock stars, Donald Hense, whose first charter opened in D.C. 13 years ago, hosted Education Secretary Arne Duncan yesterday.

Mr. Hense is Chairman of Friendship Public Charter School, which has six charter campuses in the District serving children from pre-K through twelfth grade. Additionally, Friendship partners with Baltimore City Public Schools at 3 campuses and with D.C. Public Schools at the former Anacostia High School in Southeast D.C. to turn around failing city-run high schools. In total, Friendship serves nearly 6,500 mostly economically disadvantaged students.

Secretary Duncan’s visit yesterday marked National GEAR UP Day, an acronym that stands for Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs. GEAR UP is designed to support students academically, socially, and emotionally, and provides resources to facilitate parental involvement, college awareness, mentoring, tutoring, and financial aid. In short, GEAR UP’s goal is to supply keys to college acceptance and college graduation.

“We are committed to the GEAR UP program because it aligns with our culture of high expectations at Collegiate Academy. We owe special thanks to Secretary Duncan and Congressman Fattah for their role in supporting this important program and for joining us to celebrate its success at our state-of-the-art Smart Lab,” Mr. Hense said of the event. Funds from the grant are used to for college scholarships, which the Gates Foundation also contributes to the school. Melinda Gates was a special guest.

This year 114 Collegiate Academy students earned the prestigious D.C. Achievers Scholarships, paying their way through college. The school’s data explains why. Collegiate’s graduation rate, at 96 percent, is 24 percentage points higher than D.C. Public Schools and greater than the U.S. national average, which includes suburban and rural counties that face none of the challenges of Northeast D.C. Fully 100% of Collegiate’s graduates are accepted to college.

A huge part of Collegiate’s success is due to the emphasis that leadership and teachers place on college preparedness. Recently the Washington Post’s Jay Mathews noted the High School’s success with Advanced Placement courses. More than 400 Collegiate students are currently taking AP courses, that’s 28% of all of the African-American students who take AP courses in the city are found at this one charter.

Another factor in the recognition that Collegiate is achieving results are the 150 students participating in its Early College pathway courses. More than 50 students take courses for college credit. The University of Maryland recently signed up to offer classes to Collegiate students. At yesterday’s event Secretary Duncan asked students if they were going to college. A sea of hands shot up.

Clearly, there’s something special going on at Friendship’s Collegiate Academy. Amid all the coverage about Miss Rhee, we need to hear more about D.C.’s heroic charter school leaders.

D.C. Charter School Used to Tout Student-Aid Program

admin — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 19:55:55 +0000

By Deborah Simmons
The Washington Times
September 29, 2010

Friendship one school involved

Two days after President Obama disparaged D.C. Public Schools on national television, Education Secretary Arne Duncan used a highly successful public charter school as a backdrop to publicize a federal college-access program.

Mr. Duncan and Rep. Chaka Fattah, Pennsylvania Democrat, visited Friendship Collegiate Academy in Northeast, There, via videoconference, he and other supporters kicked off National GEAR UP Day on Wednesday to highlight the federally funded Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs, which serve 670,000 U.S. students.

About 5,000 schools nationwide participate in the program, but Friendship Collegiate is the only D.C. public charter to do so.

Public charter schools are practically the only alternative to traditional schooling that D.C. parents have after the Obama administration began defunding a federal voucher program for low-income families.

Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee has instituted several reforms over her three year-tenure, but they have yet to produce the graduation results shown by schools like Friendship Collegiate.

Opened a decade ago in a formerly abandoned schoolhouse, Friendship Collegiate has a 94 percent graduation rate, 22 percentage points higher than the D.C. Public Schools System. Moreover, 100 percent of Friendship’s graduates are accepted to college, and 96 percent of their collegians graduate from college.

Friendship is already producing the results of GEAR UP, largely because the students are taking college courses via partnerships with the University of Maryland and the University of the District of Columbia and participating in mentoring programs, and because the students are self-motivated and have strong parental support.

“Even when they come home in the summer, we make sure our college students get the support they need,” said Donald Hense, founding chairman of Friendship schools, which has several campuses in D.C. and Baltimore.

A major component of GEAR UP, which offers financial aid and encourages campus tour, is parental engagement.

“Parents are a child’s first teacher and good parent-teachers relationships foster motivated children,” Mr. Duncan said after the hour-long conference.

Unfortunately, Mr. Fattah said, schools “have treated parents as nuisances rather than assets.”

Miss Manners could have heard a pin drop as students listened to parents and educators exchange questions and answers with Mr. Fattah and Mr. Duncan. Many of the students are preparing to become first-generation college students.

Some of them aren’t even preparing to go to college but still benefit from GEAR UP and Friendship’s college prep emphasis.

Friendship senior Emmanuel Johnson doesn’t plan to attend a post-secondary school. He’s aiming for the Air Force.

But Friendship is pushing him academically and that helps instill the leadership skills that will help him reach his “full potential in the military.”

Mr. Duncan and Mr. Obama, both of whom advocate public charter schools, have been outspoken in recent days about the state of education in general and D.C. schools in particular.

On Sunday, Mr. Duncan and Ms. Rhee appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” where he said U.S. education reform has a “long, long” way to go.

He also praised Ms. Rhee’s reforms and said he is a “huge fan.” And he has recommended that she be retained as schools chief.

His comments led an elected D.C. school official to say on Monday that Mr. Duncan should “butt out” of local school affairs.

Asked for reaction to that comment Wednesday, Mr. Duncan’s press secretary, Justin Hamilton, said, “We’ll let the secretary’s comments speak for themselves.”

Mr. Obama appeared Monday on “The Today Show,” where, when asked by a viewer whether he would send daughters Malia and Sasha to a D.C. public school, he said, “The answer is ‘no,’ right now.

“The D.C. public school systems are struggling,” though “they have made some important strides over the last several years to move in the right direction of reform.”

Power A Bright Future Grant Program

admin — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 14:23:27 +0000

Clorox

Deadline: September 27, 2010

Maximum Award: $50,000
Parents and teachers across the country can nominate school programs for a chance to receive a $50,000 grand-prize grant or one of three $20,000 grants from the Clorox Company to help provide critically needed resources to diminishing school programs. Visit www.Clorox.com to submit a photo and tell us about the program. Nominations will be accepted between August 12 and September 27, 2010 in the following categories:

- Learn: Education-focused programs (e.g. establishing a school recycling program)

- Play: Sports and exercise-focused programs (e.g. building a playground)

- Create: Arts-focused programs (e.g. funding an after-school music program)

www.Clorox.com

Obama Urges Students to ‘Dream Big’ in Back-to-School Speech in Philadelphia

admin — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 14:14:45 +0000

The Washington Post

Nick Anderson

September 14, 2010

PHILADELPHIA – With an acknowledgment that he had slacked off in school himself on occasion, Obama exhorted the nation’s students Tuesday to show “discipline and drive” to help their country compete in the global economy.

Obama delivered his second annual back-to-school speech from an elite, selective public school in this city that contrasts sharply with the turnaround-success stories his administration is seeking to promote.

The address, described as a nonpolitical event, was shown on the White House Web site and on C-SPAN. The president urged students at Philadelphia’s Julia R. Master man Laboratory and Demonstration School, as well as his national audience, to study and stay out of trouble.

“That kind of discipline and drive – that kind of hard work – is absolutely essential for success,” Obama said.

He added: “I wasn’t always the best student when I was younger; I made my share of mistakes. . . . I was kind of a goof-off.” He recalled that his mother prodded him to buckle down.

“My attitude was what I imagine every teenager’s attitude is when your parents have a conversation with you like that. I was like, ‘I don’t need to hear all this.’ ” Obama said his mother told him he could get into any college if he tried. “She gave me a hard look and she said, ‘Remember what that’s like? Effort?’ ”

The president said he took the advice to heart. He went on to earn an undergraduate degree from Columbia and a law degree from Harvard.

Masterman students probably have already heard and heeded such advice. The school, which has about 1,200 students in grades 5 through 12, draws the city’s academic cream through competitive admissions. With nearly all of its graduates headed to four-year colleges and most of its upper-grade students taking a heavy load of Advanced Placement courses, Master man ranks 45th on U.S. News & World Report’s list of top high schools. (Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County ranks first.)

Much of Obama’s education focus during his presidency has been on high schools at the other end of the spectrum, those known as “dropout factories.” His administration is pouring billions of dollars into efforts to identify chronically struggling schools and turn them around, sometimes by firing teachers. That effort has provoked much debate.

But Tuesday’s speech was directed at students, not policymakers.

The 19-minute address steered clear of politics, yet touched on some themes that are on voters’ minds in the run-up to November’s midterm elections.”I know a lot of you are also feeling the strain of some difficult times,” Obama told the students. “You know what’s going on in the news, and you also know what’s going on in some of your own families. You’ve read about the war in Afghanistan. You hear about the recession we’ve been through.”

Then he said: “Nothing – absolutely nothing – is beyond your reach. So long as you’re willing to dream big. So long as you’re willing to work hard. So long as you’re willing to stay focused on your education. There’s not a single thing that any of you cannot accomplish – not a single thing.”

Obama also decried school bullies and urged tolerance. “In some places, the problem is even more serious. There are neighborhoods in my home town of Chicago and there are neighborhoods right here in Philadelphia where kids are doing each other serious harm,” he said, adding that “life is precious, and part of what makes it so wonderful is its diversity.”

Last year, Obama gave a similar televised pep talk at Wakefield High School in Arlington. That speech roused controversy beforehand as critics suggested that it could inject ideology into the classroom. The debate was stoked when the Education Department released a proposed lesson plan with a section – later changed – that suggested that students who watched the speech could write about how they could help the president.

This year, there was no such proposed lesson plan, and there was little debate before the address.

Obama is not the first president to give a motivational speech to students in a school setting; President George H.W. Bush did so in 1991.

Carlton Mosley, 17, a 12th-grader at Master man who was in the audience in the school’s ornate two-story auditorium, said Obama’s message resonated with students. “Who could disagree with following your dreams and working hard?” he said. Mosley called the speech “an amazing experience – like he was speaking right to me.”

“You Determine Nation’s Success”

admin — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 14:10:11 +0000

Sep 14, 2010

PHILADELPHIA, September 14, 2010—U.S. President Barack Obama spoke to students throughout the nation today.

“Nobody gets to write your destiny but you. Your future is in your hands,” the President said today. “And nothing—absolutely nothing—is beyond your reach.”

But to realize dreams, President Obama encouraged America’s youngest generation to work hard and get as much out of education as possible. “The kinds of opportunities that are open to you are going to be determined by how far you go in school. The farther you go in school, the farther you’re going to go in life.”

In a global 21st century, it seems no one is too young not to pay heed—or reap the benefits—of a global society. “At a time when other countries are competing with us like never before, when students around the world in Beijing, China, or Bangalore, India, are working harder than ever, and doing better than ever, your success in school is not just going to determine your success, it’s going to determine America’s success in the 21st century.”It’s not just about competition; it’s about understanding the world and finding ways to make it better. The President referenced a a letter he recently received from a 12-year old girl, who is already very wise about the world. Tamerria Robinson wrote, “I try to achieve my dreams and help others do the same. That is how the world should work.”

The President agrees that is how the world should work, but reminded students that the vision is possible only if every student takes responsibility for his or her own education. “An education has never been more important,” the President concluded.

The Asia Society Partnership for Global Learning echoes the President’s words to get the most out of a world-class education. Have a great and very productive school year!

DC Association of Chartered Public Schools

DECEMBER NEWSLETTER

Contents

Mentor Program Introduces Students to STEM-Related Fields

By Jamaal Abdul-Alim

Education Week

December 17, 2010

Study: States Must Move Faster to Close Achievement Gaps

By Mary Ann Zehr

Education Week

December 14, 2010

Schools Try to Establish a College-Going Culture

By Caralee J. Adams

Education Week

December 8, 2010

International Study Examines Parent Actions, Attitudes on Math Learning

By Erik Robelen

Education Week

December 7, 2010

PISA: How Top-Scoring Nations Get There

By Catherine Gewertz

Education Week

December 7, 2010

Program Builds School Supports for Foster Pupils

By Sarah D. Sparks

Education Week

December 8, 2010

Gates Study Offers Teacher-Effectiveness Clues

By Stephen Sawchuk

Education Week

December 20, 2010

Mayor-Elect Aims at Eliminating Achievement Gap among D.C. Kids

By Donald L. Hense

The Washington Times

December 10, 2010

The Worst Schools

The Washington Post

December 18, 2010

Gray Eyes More

By Deborah Simmons

The Washington Post

December 12, 2010

School Boards Group Questions U.S. Guidance on Bullying

By Mark Walsh

December 15, 2010

Education Week

Getting K-12 into the Discussion of College Completion

By Caralee Adams

Education Week

December 16, 2010

Cutbacks Force Some Early Colleges to Close Down

By Mary Ann Zehr

Education Week

December 20, 2010

Study: Higher STEM ‘Dose’ May Lead to Adult Achievement

By Sarah D Sparks

Education Week

December 7, 2010

Gates Pushes District-Charter Collaborations

By Mary Anne Zehr

Education Week

December 7, 2010

Digital Transformation Key to K-12 Success, Council says

By Ian Quillen

Education Week

December 7, 2010

Study Looks at Turnover of Charter Principals

Education Week

December 12, 2010

Achievement First Receives $1 Million From Broad Foundation

Philanthropy News Digest

November 18, 2010

Stimulus Supercharges Energy Efficiency Efforts

By Sean Cavanagh

Education Week

November 22, 2010

Research Finds Overlap of 12th Grade Content with That of Other Exams

By Catherine Gewertz

Education Week

December 1, 2010

The Washington Post
December 12, 2010