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October 28, 2011 |
Click here to read printable version |
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***NEW PLENARY SESSION OPTIONS for Public Education Network's National Conference, which will take place November 6 - 8, 2011 in Washington, D.C. at the Fairmont Hotel. 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 including Carol Gilligan, University Professor, from New York University, Pedro Noguera, Peter L. Agnew Professor of Education, and S. Paul Reville, Massachusetts Secretary of Education, and Bob Herbert, distinguished Demos Fellow and former New York Times columnist. To register for the conference or one of the plenary sessions, please visit our web site at http://transaction.publiceducation.org/register/Register1.cfm.*** |
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| ESEA inches forward |
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A long-stalled, bipartisan rewrite of NCLB approved by the Senate education committee faces steep political hurdles, reports Alyson Klein in Education Week. Opposition is expected from civil rights and business leaders, who see it as a step back on student accountability, and from Republican lawmakers who say it doesn't adequately reduce the federal role in K-12 education. Supporters of the bill hope to bring it to a vote on the floor in time to forestall waivers to states from key parts of the current law. The rewrite took months of negotiations between Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, and Sen. Michael Enzi, R-Wyo., top Republican on the committee. It retains testing in grades 3 through 8 and in high school, as focus on breaking out achievement data for various subgroups. It would drastically scale back the accountability system. The bill would scrap Adequate Yearly Progress; halt federally directed interventions for all but the lowest-performing schools and schools with persistent socioeconomic achievement gaps; assert federal interventions for turning around the lowest-performing schools based in part on the School Improvement Grant program; require states to craft college-and-career standards but not to join the Common Core State Initiative (nearly all states have already done so); and streamline the Department of Education by consolidating 82 programs into 40 broader baskets of funding.
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| A bar raised |
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Tennessee, which won a half billion dollars in the Race to the Top, has overhauled its teacher evaluation system, and educators are finding it difficult to score at the highest evaluation levels, reports Nashville Public Radio. To attain a top rating, students must demonstrate mastery of the day's lesson, and the evaluation's four-page checklist is incredibly detailed, down to how efficiently handouts are distributed. This specificity is new for every teacher in Tennessee, but especially for veterans, who may not have been observed in years. "We evaluated tenured teachers twice every ten years," says Tennessee Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman. "Virtually every teacher was told they were at the top end of the scale." Dorcel Benson, with 30 years of experience, says she and most teachers do the best they can even when they're handed a tough situation, such as a student who reaches her 4th grade class unable to read. She feels education officials don't fully appreciate the challenges. But while other teachers are spending late nights prepping for the observations, Benson accepts her mediocre rating. "Life is too short," she explains, "and my health is much more valuable to me." Lakesha Dejarnett, who left her job in journalism three years ago to teach, says the new demands are bringing out her best, but wonders how long she and others can handle the added stress.
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| Getting honest |
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In the national debate around education policy, Andrew Rotherham in TIME Magazine writes we are unable to have a discussion about our teaching force that acknowledges several things are all true at once: We have a teacher-quality problem and a management problem; teachers are not to blame for all that's wrong in schools; we can't fire our way to better schools; but removing some percentage of low-performers would be good for students. In Rotherham's view, the current debate sidesteps the core issue of instructional quality. He hastens to say that we have many hardworking, talented, and dedicated teachers worth much more than they're paid. At the same time, in survey after survey, teachers themselves say not all of their colleagues should be teaching, and some have tenure who shouldn't. The data confirm that some teachers are substantially more effective than others, and a small subset are startlingly bad and should be doing something else for a living. But to raise these issues is to invite the charge of "teacher-bashing." On the flip side, in other circles, anything less than complete contempt for teachers unions is seen as softness on reform. Teachers themselves will gain most from an honest appraisal of their profession. Removing a small percentage of chronically low-performers would not only change perceptions, it would change educational performance.
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| Seniority in plain, clear terms |
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A new policy brief from the Annenberg Institute examines the history and intent of seniority rules, unpacking the debate over seniority rights and offering an understanding of underlying issues. It's critical, the authors write, that community organizations understand the broader factors that lead to disparities in teaching quality between schools, how district evaluation procedures work (or don't work), and how both policy and practice can address these concerns. It is also important to honestly debate the impact of seniority on these complex problems. And it is important to consider how districts balance the need for quality instruction and equity in schools with the need for fairness and due process for teachers. In the current political climate, where teachers and unions are under attack for reasons both real and imagined, parents and communities can play a significant role by demanding an informed debate on the underlying issues facing schools. Districts and unions should work together to create evaluation procedures that effectively identify and offer additional training to struggling teachers, and efficiently remove those whose instructional practices don't improve with support. At the same time, districts, communities, and union leadership must take a hard look at some of the challenges faced by high-needs schools, and what district processes might be inadvertently and negatively impacting low-performing schools.
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| New prospects for Education, Inc. |
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A movement to overhaul the teaching profession has created new revenue streams in the business of education, according to Sarah Garland in the Hechinger Report. Over half of states have changed, or are in the process of changing, their laws to factor student test scores into teacher evaluations. Most are also adding requirements for classroom observations, which in many districts were cursory and infrequent. This has created a booming market in services and products to help states and districts scrambling to comply. Nonprofit groups and for-profit companies are pursuing public contracts to design evaluations, train teachers and principals in their use, and set up online platforms to sort data. Private foundations are subsidizing some contracts, but districts are also spending millions of public dollars, much of it from the Race to the Top initiative. Charlotte Danielson, who developed a well-regarded teacher observation method adopted around the country, says districts and states are right to hire outside experts as they design more rigorous classroom observations. "Entire states seem to be operating under the assumption that anyone can create a rubric. Then they want to use that for high-stakes decisions without having a clue what it takes," she said. But observers worry the fiscal crisis could encourage administrators to seek out inferior products. Low-quality, prepackaged systems could proliferate, just as simplistic multiple-choice tests did under NCLB.
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| Real returns |
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While Occupy Wall Street is shining a useful spotlight on the economic inequality in this country, the single step that would do the most to reduce disparities has nothing to do with finance at all, writes Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times. To be sure, part of the problem is billionaires taxed at lower rates than modest earners, but a bigger source of structural inequity is that many young people never get the skills to compete. Well before kindergarten, significant performance gaps exist between affluent and poor students, and those gaps widen further in school. Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman argues that investments in early childhood education pay a return of 7 percent or more, better than many investments on Wall Street. And David Deming of Harvard found that although critics are right that test score advantages for Head Start participants fade quickly, in other crucial areas, Head Start has a significant long-term impact. Participants are significantly less likely than non-participant siblings to repeat grades, be diagnosed with a learning disability, or suffer the kind of poor health associated with poverty. Head Start alumni are also more likely than their siblings to graduate from high school and attend college. These life outcomes, Kristof writes, are a "stunning" result.
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| A war we could win |
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In a column for the Center for American Progress, Jennifer Rokosa writes that given the overwhelming research evidence that Early Childhood Education programs help low-income children to overcome the staggering challenges of poverty, revisions to the ESEA must align preschool programs with the K-12 educational continuum so that children transition seamlessly between preschool and kindergarten and continue to build on skills learned in preschool. A strong first step, Rokosa says, would be making Title I funds more freely available to preschool programs; currently, a mere 3 percent are dedicated to early childhood education. Legislators should also implement accountability standards that more accurately track preschool achievement; standardized testing is not an effective way to track the complex social, emotional, and intellectual growth that takes place in preschool years. Other steps would be provisions for professional development that specifically address the concerns and challenges of early childhood educators, and that incentivize the creation of high-performing preschool programs in districts across the country. Rokosa points out that the ESEA was originally passed in 1965 as part of the War on Poverty. "It's time that we return to its original purpose by expanding and strengthening federally funded programs for early childhood education," she writes.
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| Young, gifted, and unspecialized |
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In an article in YC Teen, Marco Salazar recounts learning about New York City's specialty high schools two months before the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test. Only one other girl in his eighth-grade class knew about it, and had been using a tutor to prepare. Salazar's parents couldn't afford a tutor, and said it didn't matter what high school he went to. He practiced on his own, but struggled through the test and barely finished it; he didn't make the cut. He enrolled at a local high school, and says he and his parents knew about its low test scores and mediocre graduation rate, but didn't fully grasp what these said about the quality of education the school provided. Salazar quickly got the picture: "My school struggled to afford textbooks, and often two or more students would be left to share one between us. Our classrooms were overcrowded to the point where some of us had to stand, or sit on desks." The NYC Department of Education's website claimed his school offered seven AP classes, but in fact there were only two, and not in the STEM area in which Salazar was strongest. Salazar remembers taking painfully slow classes to earn necessary credits, because the school wouldn't offer more challenging classes for just one or two students. In the 11th grade, when he attended a special STEM summer camp for city minority, female, and low-income students, none of the instructors had heard of his school. All the other kids were from the specialized high schools. From these students, he learned their schools offered electives in subjects like forensics, engineering, and general electricity, and had real labs and equipment. In his school, the teacher handed out a lab assignment with the answers already on it because they lacked the materials to conduct an actual experiment. The story ends well: Salazar was admitted to his "dream school," MIT, and concedes that had he gone to a specialized high school, he might not have stood out as an applicant. But it's clear to him that the specialized system widens racial disparities. "The Department of Education should see to it that a good educational experience is available to all who are willing to put in the effort. I ameliorated my situation as much as possible, and I learned that sometimes you have to pave your own path, a valuable lesson. But I know that for every good student who succeeds at a mediocre school, there are many others with potential who wind up on the wrong track, in the dust," he writes.
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| Think globally, finance locally |
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In a column in Slate, David Sirota describes his astonishment at finding thousands of dollars pouring into the coffers of the candidate opposing his wife Emily in what he thought would be a run-of-the-mill, low-key school board election. Instead, "slickly produced, oil-CEO-financed" fliers have poured into neighborhood mailboxes "implicitly attacking [his] 11-month-old baby for not being old enough to attend school and explicitly criticizing [his] family for not being able to afford a home." Emily had anticipated a challenging race against the deep-pocketed former investment banker, but thought her own experience as a social worker and community organizer in Denver gave her tools to mount a good ground game. She also felt her longtime policy work at the federal, state, and local level was a good match for the school-board job. Her campaign has been endorsed by the district's state representative and city councilors, by the city auditor, and by key legislators who serve in the state's senior education policymaking positions. But in the last few weeks, news broke that oil CEOs and financial executives were cutting $10,000 and $25,000 checks to her opponent. Groups like Stand for Children were funneling in tens of thousands of dollars of out-of-state financial industry cash. It's clear, Sirota writes, that this local race -- like so many local races across the country -- has turned into "another arena for corporate muscle-flexing and elite political rainmaking."
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| The right choice |
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Recent school board elections in Wake County, North Carolina have delivered an important victory for proponents of integration, writes Richard Kahlenberg on the Answer Sheet blog in The Washington Post. Democrats swept four of five contested school board seats and led substantially in a fifth race headed for a runoff. Most importantly, Kahlenberg writes, board chairman Ron Margiotta, who had led the effort to dismantle the nationally acclaimed socioeconomic school integration plan, was defeated, denying conservatives a majority on the nine-member school board. Kahlenberg feels the vote has national significance because it demonstrates that if school diversity policies are pursued through choice rather than compulsion, they can draw strong public support. Wake County's plan sought to give all students a chance to attend solidly middle-class public schools by limiting the proportion of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch at 40 percent in any one school. The defeat of Margiotta is especially telling, Kahlenberg finds. In what is said to be the most strongly Republican of Wake County's nine school board districts, voters sided with business people, teachers, and civil rights groups in rejecting resegregation. "This development should give hope to supporters of integration that if implemented smartly -- through public school choice rather than compulsory busing -- diversity can win broad support from voters," Kahlenberg says.
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Ramping up research
A slew of quiet changes in the proposed Senate bill to reauthorize the ESEA would substantially increase the role of research in federal education programs.
http://tinyurl.com/3fqfphq
Significant expansion
Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy is sweetening his state's application for a $50 million Race to the Top grant by pledging to expand preschool programs, something not required under the competition rules. The governor committed to fund 1,000 new early childhood education slots targeted to high-need children, at a cost of $12 million annually.
http://ctmirror.com/story/14276/extra-credit-malloy-pledges-1000-new-preschool-seats-states-race-top-application
But no thanks
An Oregon school district has rejected more than $2.5 million in federal funds because it would have gone to performance-based pay bonuses to teachers.
http://www.npr.org/2011/10/25/141693540/oregon-school-district-says-no-to-performance-based-bonus
Branching out
The Occupy Wall Street movement expanded to classroom politics as a group disrupted a special meeting of the panel for education policy in Manhattan.
http://www.ny1.com/content/news_beats/education/149635/education-panel-meeting-disrupted-by--occupy--protesters
Another black eye for the Klein era
Only one in four students who enter high school in New York City are ready for college after four years, and less than half enroll, according to the A-through-F high school report cards recently released by the city.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/education/25progress.html?_r=2&ref=education
Getting a jump
All Los Angeles Unified campuses will begin the 2012-13 school year three weeks earlier than usual under a school board vote to push forward with the long-delayed early-start calendar.
http://www.dailybreeze.com/news/ci_19192120?source=rss
They heart vouchers
The Pennsylvania Senate has passed a school voucher plan targeted to low-income children attending poor-performing schools.
http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2011/10/state_senate_passes_school_vou.html |
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| NEW GRANT AND FUNDING INFORMATION |
NCTM: Connecting Mathematics to Other Subject Areas Grants for Grades 9-12
The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Connecting Mathematics to Other Subject Areas Grants help create high school classroom materials or lessons connecting mathematics to other fields. Materials may be in the form of books, visual displays, computer programs or displays, slide shows, videotapes, or other appropriate media. These materials should focus on showing the connectivity of mathematics to other fields or to the world around us. Any acquisition of equipment or payment of personal stipends must be critical to the grant proposal and may not be a major portion of the proposed budget. Any published sources must be documented. Proposals must address the the plan for developing and evaluating materials, the connectivity to other fields or disciplines, and anticipated impact on students' learning. Maximum award: $4,000. Eligibility: current (as of October 14, 2011) Full Individual or E-Members of NCTM who currently teach mathematics in grades 9-12 at least 50 percent of the school day. Deadline: November 11, 2011.
http://www.nctm.org/resources/content.aspx?id=1328
NCTM: 7-12 Classroom Research Grants
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics 7-12 Classroom Research Grants support and encourage classroom-based research in precollege mathematics education in collaboration with college or university mathematics educators. The research must be a significant collaborative effort involving a college or university mathematics educator (a mathematics education researcher or a teacher of mathematics learning, teaching, or curriculum) and one or more grades 7-12 classroom teachers. The proposal may include, but is not restricted to, research on curriculum development and implementation; involvement of at-risk or minority students; students' thinking about a particular mathematics concept or set of concepts; connection of mathematics to other disciplines; focused learning and teaching of mathematics with embedded use of technology (any acquisition of equipment must support the proposed plan but not be the primary focus of the grant); and innovative assessment or evaluation strategies. Maximum award: $6,000. Eligibility: current (as of October 14, 2011) Full Individual or E-Members of NCTM or those who teach at a school having a current (as of October 14, 2011) NCTM PreK-8 school Membership. The college or university mathematics educator must be a member of the NCTM. Deadline: November 11, 2011.
http://www.nctm.org/resources/content.aspx?id=22418
NSTA: Sylvia Shugrue Award for Elementary School Teachers
The National Science Teachers Association Sylvia Shugrue Award honors one elementary school teacher who has established (or is establishing) an interdisciplinary, inquiry-based lesson plan. The lesson plan will fully reference sources of information and any relevant National Science Education Standards and benchmarks found in the Atlas of Science Literacy. Maximum award: $1,000 and up to $500 to attend the NSTA National Conference on Science Education; the recipient of the award will be honored during the Awards Banquet at the NSTA Conference. Eligibility: elementary school teachers (grades K-6); applicants must be a full-time teacher with a minimum of five years of experience. Deadline: November 30, 2011.
http://www.nsta.org/about/awards.aspx?lid=tnavhp#shugrue
NSTA: Maitland P. Simmons Memorial Award for New Teachers
The Maitland P. Simmons Memorial Award for New Teachers provides selected K-12 teachers in their first five years of teaching with funds to attend the annual National Conference on Science Education. Award recipients will be mentored, tracked, and provided with continuing opportunities for meaningful involvement with NSTA and its activities. Maximum award: up to $1,000 to be used to attend the annual National Conference; recipients will be invited to attend a variety of workshops and presentations that are of particular interest to new teachers at the annual National Conference. Eligibility: teachers within the first five years full-time teaching at the time of application who are NSTA members in good standing; to the extent possible, recipients must have been a student member of NSTA as a pre-service teacher. Deadline: November 30, 2011.
http://www.nsta.org/about/awards.aspx?lid=tnavhp#simmons
For more grants, see http://www.publiceducation.org/newsblast_grants.asp
"White men make up less than 50 percent of the U.S. population. We're drawing (future scientists) from less than 50 percent of the talent we have available." -- Mae Jemison, the first black woman astronaut, who has a medical degree and a bachelor's in chemical engineering.
http://tinyurl.com/3dpyuvo
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