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June 24, 2011 |
Click here to read printable version |
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| Bringing Us Down |
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An education crisis faces young men of color, say Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Gaston Caperton in The Huffington Post, but you won't read about it on the front page of newspapers, and people aren't organizing around it on Facebook or Twitter. Failure to address this crisis will prompt a decline in the education level of the entire American workforce for the first time in our history; young men of color are the key to reclaiming our position as the world leader in college degrees. "In the past, when a president called on us to act for the sake of our shared future, we responded," Gates and Caperton write. "We built war planes and rocket ships. We invested in science and the arts. We achieved prosperity unparalleled in human history." Yet just 26 percent of African-Americans, 18 percent of Hispanic Americans, and 24 percent of Native Americans and Pacific Islanders have at least an associate degree. A recent report by the College Board found that one out of every two young men of color aged 15 to 24 who graduates from high school will end up unemployed, incarcerated, or dead. "As long as educational opportunities are limited for some of us, we all suffer," the authors write. "We rise as one nation and we fall as one nation."
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| Putting it all together |
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A new initiative from The College Board seeks to identify existing -- and needed -- research around the Educational Experience of Young Men of Color, to understand the issues behind the data, and to provide an overview of the legal landscape within which solutions must be developed. The College Board has conducted an extensive data and literature review to determine what is known to date on the situation facing young men of color, and in partnership with the Business Innovation Factory, has engaged these young men directly to understand how they view their experiences, and to add their voice to the discussion of how to better meet their needs. The particular value of the literature review is that it looks at six distinct pathways that young men of color -- and all students -- take after high school, and for the first time synthesizes in one place the literature for males of all four minority groups: African American, Asian American and Pacific Islanders, Hispanic/ Latinos and Native American, and Alaska Natives. The initiative's goal is to isolate and identify the factors that contribute either to the persistence or to the attrition of young men of color from high school to higher education.
See the initiative website | Back to top
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| Cui bono |
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In New Jersey, "initial jubilation" over the $100 million gift from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has turned into protests, suspicion, and a belief that students won't benefit from the money, reports NPR. "Folks are having an issue with the transparency and they're having an issue with trust," says Lucious Jones, a Newark parent and PTA member. People are also suspicious about who is making the decisions and whether they stand to profit. Paul Trachtenberg of Rutgers says the Foundation for Newark's Future, which was started to find matching funds for the Facebook money, gives too much control of public institutions to private donors. Mayor Cory Booker has so far failed to convince some long-time supporters in favor of his plan for the money, including the Rev. Bill Howard at Bethany Baptist Church. "So when I say to him, 'Talk to educators,' he says to me 'I'm talking to the educators!,' except I can't meet any he's talking to," the reverend says. "He's asked me who he should talk to and I've recommended people. They haven't heard from him yet. So the mayor may prove to be absolutely right, he may prove that the ideas he has are the ones we've been waiting for, but poor me, I just don't think so."
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| Quandary |
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A lawsuit filed by the N.A.A.C.P. and the United Federation of Teachers in New York City describes children -- many poor, most of them black -- treated as second-class citizens when their public schools have had to share buildings with charters, The New York Times reports. Yet because black children have been major constituents of charter schools over the past two decades, "war has broken out" within the civil rights community in New York and across the country over the lawsuit, as well as over larger questions of whether school choice helps or hurts minority students. The dispute has turned into a referendum on the N.A.A.C.P.'s mission. After joining the union in the lawsuit, the organization has found itself on the defensive, forced to explain whose rights, exactly, it is trying to protect. Several prominent black leaders in New York have been asked to help broker a settlement, including Representative Charles Rangel and Harlem Children's Zone's Geoffrey Canada, according to people familiar with the discussions. Benjamin Todd Jealous, president of the N.A.A.C.P., said the organization does not necessarily oppose charter schools and is open to all ideas that push good education for children. Rather, litigation seemed the only option after years of complaints by traditional public schools about the difficulties in sharing buildings with charters. "Now," explained Jealous, "we have everybody's full attention."
Read more | Related | Back to top
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| The secretary's wager |
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Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is gambling that the threat of preemption will prod Congress to action over NCLB, according to Andrew Rotherham in TIME Magazine. Duncan's waiver proposal drew opposition that Rotherham characterizes as "the first glimmer of education bipartisanship in a long while," adding that "the chattering class" was even more hostile. But while some would have Duncan read the Constitution, Rotherham recommends a look at NCLB itself, in which waiver authority is clearly delineated. Under George W. Bush, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings used waivers several times to launch pilot projects for reform ideas. Education's special interest groups have demanded waivers for years, but object to Duncan's attaching reform conditions to them. School reform groups, conversely, worry that conditions could weaken the law's accountability provisions. Privately, according to Rotherham, reformers fret that by fall, "the figures driving decision-making at the White House are as likely to be the president's reelection numbers as school performance data." Rotherham says none of these are unwarranted concerns, and if Duncan's conditions are too stringent, the administration may draw intense political pressure and/or be challenged in court. For these reasons NCLB will likely be unaltered when students return this fall, and work won't finish on the law until after the next election. Waivers only cement the certainty.
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| Where observations work |
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Despite a welter of policy proposals to promote teacher quality (including incentives in the Race to the Top competition), little has changed in teacher evaluations, pre-service training, or professional development, according to Education Next. One factor has been disagreement over how best to identify and measure effective teaching. A new article in Education Next's journal looks at results from an ongoing study of teacher classroom observation in the Cincinnati Public Schools. The article finds that Cincinnati's evaluations, based on well-executed classroom observations, do in fact identify effective teachers and teaching practices, and teachers' scores under the system reliably predict achievement gains by students in math and reading. During the yearlong Teacher Evaluation System (TES) process, jointly developed by the local teachers union and the district, teachers are typically observed and scored four times: three times by a peer evaluator external to the school and once by a local school administrator. The TES scoring rubric describes the practices, skills, and characteristics that effective teachers should possess and employ. In the view of the authors, the study's findings about TES efficacy support the idea that teacher evaluation systems need not be based on test scores alone.
See the report | Back to top
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| Paltry, but appealing, savings |
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A new report from the Education Commission of the States determines that the average district could produce a maximum savings of 5.43 percent of its total budget by moving to a four-day week. In addition, it finds districts that moved to a four-day week experienced actual savings of only between 0.4 percent and 2.5 percent. These savings are small, but have proved enough for districts to reduce their week by one day. A common notion is that teacher salaries and benefits would be greatly reduced by a four-day week, but the ECS found cost savings to teacher salaries and benefits was a paltry 0.03 percent, since moving to a four-day week still requires instructional staff to work the same number of hours per week, spread over four days instead of five. The largest savings could be produced by reducing operations and maintenance, school administration, student support, transportation, and food-services costs. Yet the ECS found that each district studied still made use of its schools on the fifth non-teaching day, for reasons that include teacher training, student extracurricular activities (including sports) and additional learning programs for at-risk students. For the report, the ECS reviewed financial data from six school districts either currently making use of or in the process of moving to a four-day week.
See the report | Back to top
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| An alternative translation |
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What did the latest National Council on Teacher Quality "Teacher Quality Roadmap" actually say? The Los Angeles Times suggested the roadmap found LAUSD to be wasting $500 million on "pointless training," but John Thompson in Education Week derived a different message. "Strip away the rhetoric," Thompson writes, "and the NCTQ only presented three sets of evidence." First, it showed a specific part of L.A.'s compensation system should be reformed. Second, it showed it is not that hard to fire LAUSD teachers for ineffectiveness, but principals don't believe the process is worth the effort. The study's third set of evidence could have been invaluable, Thompson feels, if presented in an "intellectually honest" manner. It shows a majority of L.A. principals in low-poverty schools are satisfied by the quality of their teacher pool, but only 25 percent of principals of schools where 91 percent or more of their students are low-income are satisfied with the applicants they would use to replace ineffective teachers. Similarly, nearly two thirds of those principals had to hire the majority of their teachers in August or September -- more than twice the numbers reported by principals of schools where only 3/4ths of their students are low-income.
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| Segregated, unequal |
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In an opinion piece in The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, representatives of the Wisconsin ACLU and Disability Rights Wisconsin write that private voucher schools are failing Milwaukee children with disabilities, ignoring their obligations to educate and accommodate these children, and forcing Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) to pick up the slack with fewer resources. If the Wisconsin Legislature and governor expand the voucher program, the separation and exclusion of children with disabilities will only get worse. For this reason, the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Wisconsin, and Disability Rights Wisconsin have asked the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the voucher program and to shut down expansion as long as exclusion and segregation remain. Voucher schools do not just get state and local tax dollars, according to the authors. In fact, one reason for an investigation is that the voucher schools receive millions of dollars a year in federal money and services. Receipt of federal money obligates private schools to comply with federal anti-discrimination laws. "This is a separate -- and unequal -- system that cannot continue, let alone expand, in its current discriminatory form," the authors write.
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| SAVE THE DATE! |
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Public Education Network's National Conference will take place November 6 - 8, 2011 in Washington, D.C. at the Fairmont Hotel, so mark your calendars now! The conference theme is New American Revolution: College and Career Readiness for All. Our opening plenary session will feature Vicki Phillips, director of Education, College Ready, from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as other notable session speakers. Additional information coming soon to our website. We look forward to seeing you in Washington, D.C. this fall. Remember to mark your calendars for November 6 - 8, 2011!
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Prepare for a long, contentious summer
The Florida Education Association has announced a class action lawsuit against Gov. Rick Scott and other trustees of the state retirement plan for unconstitutionally imposing a 3 percent pay cut on teachers to balance the budget.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/06/20/2275395/fla-gov-scott-is-sued-by-teachers.html#ixzz1Q5jt2kZq
Power to the principal, teachers, and staff
A new reform effort would create a Michigan-wide school district called the Education Achievement System that would operate the lowest-performing 5 percent of the state's public and charter schools.
http://tinyurl.com/6yczogk
Another glimmer of bipartisanship
Under a bill introduced by a bipartisan trio of U.S. senators, teacher training programs would be held accountable for producing educators who demonstrate the ability to boost student achievement before they even graduate.
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2011/06/bipartisan_bill_seeks_to_remak.html
Focus on school leaders
The Texas-based George W. Bush Institute has joined forces with the Gwinnett County, Georgia school district as part of an effort to find the best ways to develop quality school principals.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/7618962.html#ixzz1Q5vFy5Xe
Perhaps they could turn it into teacher housing
In a sign of just how deep economic and budget problems have grown in the nation's largest state, a new high school built at a cost of $105 million will sit unused for at least a year because California lacks the money to operate it.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2011-06-20-Mothballed-Hillcrest-High-School-Riverside-California_n.htm
Trigger shy?
A new parent-involvement initiative includes $20 million to upgrade or add parent centers across the Los Angeles Unified School District.
http://tinyurl.com/5wbjgc2
With an assist from Race to the Top
The charter school movement appears to be making gains as new laws expanding charter access have worked their way through several state legislatures over the past week.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/16/charter-school-surge-new_n_878110.html
Friend indeed
The Wasserman Foundation has donated $1 million to the Los Angeles Unified School District to help pay for several academic programs and new positions.
http://tinyurl.com/6a7482s
More input for the ESEA
Forty states and the District of Columbia have announced a new "accountability road map."
http://tinyurl.com/6zz3lm9
So much for that clean slate
Texas is close to enacting a law that would provide teachers with detailed information about the criminal histories of their students, opening juvenile files that have always been confidential and are unavailable in most states.
http://www.eschoolnews.com/2011/06/14/texas-teachers-may-get-student-criminal-histories/
The evaluation juggernaut rolls on
A council of Maryland educators and policy makers have approved a new model for evaluating teachers and principals that will be tried out in Prince George's County and six other school systems this fall.
http://tinyurl.com/3wmw86q
Vitally needed
Some foster children in Oregon who make it through state-sponsored care would qualify for tuition waivers at community colleges and four-year institutions under a bill that has cleared the Oregon House.
http://tinyurl.com/6hwlzzh |
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| NEW GRANT AND FUNDING INFORMATION |
Microsoft: DigiGirlz High Tech Camp
Microsoft DigiGirlz High Tech Camp for girls works to dispel stereotypes of the high-tech industry. During the camp session, girls listen to executive speakers, participate in technology tours and demonstrations, network, and learn through hands-on experience in workshops. This year camps will take place at various dates throughout the summer in Stonybrook, NY; Charlotte, NC; Fargo, ND; Redmond, WA; Las Colinas, TX; and St. Louis, MO. Maximum award: free attendance to camp. Eligibility: girls grades 9-11 in the 2010-2011 school year and at least age 13 at time of application, with the exception of the Fargo, ND and Las Colinas, TX locations, where eligibility is restricted to grades 7-10 and 8-11, respectively. Deadline: varies by location.
http://www.microsoft.com/about/diversity/en/us/programs/digigirlz/hightechcamp.aspx
ESA: President's Prizes for Outstanding Achievement in Primary and Secondary Education
The Entomological Society of America's President's Prizes for Outstanding Achievement in Primary and Secondary Education recognize educators who have gone beyond the traditional teaching methods by using insects as educational tools. Maximum award: $400 to the winner's school to purchase teaching materials required to expand the use of insects in the teaching curriculum; $400 to the winner for expenses associated with travel required to present a paper or poster on the use of insects in primary or secondary educational programs at a peer professional venue of their choosing; gratis registration to attend ESA's annual meeting; and an $800 award to the winner for expenses associated with travel, hotel arrangements, and all other costs associated with attending the annual meeting. Eligibility: primary teachers (grades K-6) and secondary teachers (grades 7-12). Deadline: July 1, 2011.
http://www.entsoc.org/awards/professional/educational
ASCD: Outstanding Young Educator Award
The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development is seeking nominations for its Outstanding Young Educator Award, which recognizes a teacher under the age of 40 who demonstrates excellence in his or her profession, a positive impact on students, creativity in the classroom, and leadership in his or her school or district. Maximum award: $10,000; an all-expenses paid trip to the ASCD annual conference in March for the winner and one companion, including registration, travel, hotel, and meals. Eligibility: pre K-12 teachers under age 40; self-nominations accepted. Deadline: August 1, 2011.
http://www.ascd.org/programs/Outstanding-Young-Educator-Award/Outstanding-Young-Educator-Award-Program.aspx
P. Buckley Moss Foundation: Grants for Teachers of Children Who Learn Differently
P. Buckley Moss Foundation Education Grants aid and support teachers who wish to establish an effective learning tool using the arts in teaching children with learning disabilities and other special needs. Maximum award: $1,000. Eligibility: new or evolving programs that integrate the arts into educational programming. Deadline: September 30, 2011.
http://www.mossfoundation.org/mossfoundation.org/paged708.html?id=3
For more grants, see http://www.publiceducation.org/newsblast_grants.asp
"It's unusual to carve out a group of teachers in a local and treat them, in state statute, very differently in terms of right to strike. You've got the kind of nuclear option of the strike, but what's short of that, I think, is the question."
-- Andrew Broy, president of the Illinois Network of Charter Schools, regarding the new dynamic between Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/17/education/17cncteachers.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss
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