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April 16, 2010 |
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| ED makes a move away from standardized testing |
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A portion of the remaining Race to the Top Fund -- $350 million -- has been earmarked for finding new ways to assess what students learn, Education Week reports. In the final regulations for the competition, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) says it seeks assessments that "more validly measure" students' knowledge and skills than do standardized tests, showing not only what students have learned, but also how that achievement has grown over time and whether students are on track to do well in college. Of the $350 million set aside for new tests, ED plans to award one or two grants of up to $160 million each for "comprehensive assessment systems," and one $30 million grant for development of end-of-course tests at the high school level. The comprehensive assessment systems must yield data that can gauge how well teachers and principals are doing their jobs, how instruction and school programs can be improved, and how schools can be judged for federal accountability purposes. Both kinds of tests must be able to measure whether students are mastering a "common set of college- and career-ready" academic standards, and those standards must be adopted by the end of 2011.
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| A call for 'commonsense' |
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The theory that schools alone can't overcome economic disadvantage may be comforting to educators, but that theory is wrong, write Joel Klein, Michael Lomax, and Janet Murguía in an op-ed in The Washington Post. For instance, there are "startling" differences in the national math scores for low-income African American fourth- and eighth-grade students in different cities. Boston fourth-graders outscored those in Detroit by 33 points on a test in which 10 points approximates a year's worth of learning. The main difference between these children, the authors write, is that they are enrolled in different districts. If broken out for the same students in different schools, the data would be more dramatic -- and more dramatic still if broken out for the same children in different classrooms. To change these drastic variations, several "commonsense" reforms are necessary. The public education system must attract teachers who performed well in college. It must also reward excellence rather than seniority by creating sophisticated evaluation systems that include student performance and merit-based tenure and compensation, also making it easier to remove teachers who prove ineffective. Finally, it must attract teachers to high-needs students and schools, and to subject areas where it is difficult to draw talent because of opportunities in other fields.
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| The end of seniority as the UFT knows it? |
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Two Democratic New York State lawmakers have sponsored a bill that would let principals in New York City choose who loses their jobs if the city needs to lay off teachers due to budget constraints, The New York Times reports. The bill is certain to anger teachers' unions, which remain powerful in the state's capital, Albany. It could also prompt fresh battles between the city's teacher union and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, currently in negotiation over a new teachers' contract. Mr. Bloomberg has said that as many as 8,500 teachers would face layoffs, since the city's Department of Education faces a budget cut of $600 million to $1.2 billion. Last month, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein released numbers showing that because of seniority rules, layoffs would most affect one of the wealthiest and one of the poorest districts in the city: the Upper East Side and the South Bronx, respectively. "I used to be angry at the way they were treating parents," explained State Senator Rubén Díaz of the Bronx, a co-sponsor of the bill. "Now this would allow parents to have a role. If a school needs to get rid of teachers, they should be able to decide their own special needs."
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| She means business |
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According to a profile in CommonWealth magazine, the Central Falls dismissals "are by no means the only big move made" under Rhode Island Education Commissioner Deborah Gist's aggressive agenda for school reform. In October 2009, the former elementary school teacher instructed all 36 of Rhode Island's school districts to end use of seniority as the driving factor in teacher hiring and placement decisions, expanding an order from her predecessor that had applied only to the lowest-performing districts of Central Falls and Providence. (The Providence teachers' union is challenging the policy in court.) Gist has ordered a complete overhaul of teacher evaluation systems, requiring that all teachers be reviewed annually -- and that half their evaluation be based on evidence of student achievement in their classrooms. Gist, formerly Schools Chancellor for Washington, D.C., is also raising the bar for entering teachers, boosting the passing score on Rhode Island's teacher exam from one of the lowest in the country to one of the highest. "She has fundamentally shaken up the status quo," says Warren Simmons, executive director of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University. "She's brought a fresh perspective, she's ambitious, and she means business on behalf of children."
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| Pay for performance |
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In a randomized experiment, Harvard economist Roland Fryer paid students in Dallas, Chicago, the District of Columbia, and New York City for various positive behaviors, TIME magazine reports. Each city had its own model of incentives, and results were widely divergent. In New York City, the $1.5 million paid to 8,320 kids for good test scores did not work in any way that is easy to measure. Under Chicago's model, the kids who earned money for grades attended class more often and got better grades, but fared no better on year-end standardized tests. In Washington, kids improved on standardized reading tests and showed modest gains from routine payment for small accomplishments like attendance and behavior. But in Dallas, paying second-graders to read books significantly boosted reading-comprehension scores on standardized tests, and the gains persisted even after rewards had stopped. "These are substantial effects, as large as many other interventions that people have thought to be successful," says Brian Jacob, a professor of public policy and economics at University of Michigan who has studied incentives. If incentives are designed wisely, TIME writes, it appears that payments "can indeed boost kids' performance as much as or more than many other reforms you've heard about before -- and for a fraction of the cost."
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| A 'largely unexplored side of school choice' |
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An overwhelming majority of Arizona elementary students stay enrolled in the same school regardless of how well the school performs, according to a new study from the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University. Low mobility is the norm despite strong statutes encouraging charter school development, open enrollment, tuition tax vouchers, and homeschooling options, which in combination have led analysts to describe Arizona as the first "education market" in the country. The Arizona Republic reports that the study found the pattern the same for students attending traditional public schools and for those attending charter schools. Statewide at the beginning of the 2009 academic year, 85 percent of elementary students re-enrolled in the school they had attended at the end of the 2008 academic year. For schools labeled "excelling," the re-enrollment rate was 91 percent, and for schools labeled "failing" or "underperforming," 84 percent. "To use a business analogy, these are repeat customers," said Professor David Garcia, who wrote the report. His analysis reaches two conclusions: Educators should not overemphasize school choice as a way to reform public education, and parents use more than labels when choosing a school. In 2008, approximately eight percent of Arizona's public school students attended charters.
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| Milwaukee's vouchers yield little |
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Halfway into a five-year evaluation of Milwaukee's 20-year-old school-voucher program, the oldest in the country, new data show that low-income students who use public vouchers to attend private schools are still scoring the same academically as their peers in Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS), according to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The results come from a series of reports released by researchers from the School Choice Demonstration Project, a national research organization that randomly selected 800 kids in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program in the 2005-06 school year and matched them to 800 non-vouchered peers in MPS, with the goal of following them through the 2011-12 school year. It is the first longitudinal look at Milwaukee's program. Critics of vouchers say that if the program was working as well as initially predicted, students attending private schools with vouchers would be outperforming MPS students. They also point out that MPS is at a disadvantage because it educates far more special education students -- who use up substantial resources -- than voucher schools, which have historically lower rates of SPED students. Several of the reports examine other aspects of the program, such as the effect of student mobility in Milwaukee.
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| America's lost boys |
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A new study from the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry argues that the conditions that contribute to a high representation of African American males among incarcerated youth (60 percent) begin early in life, and are often exacerbated by experiences in school. The report projects that by 2029, prisons will house almost 30,000 of the 600,000 African American four-year-olds now living in the country. According to study author Oscar Barbarin, African American males come to school with fewer skills than their Caucasian or female counterparts at this age, who generally have better developed language, literacy, and self-regulation. Boys' limitations are often not properly recognized or addressed as they progress though school, and this is can be compounded by behavioral issues, as well as by racial segregation within schools. Barbarin agrees that programs such as Head Start, Boys and Girls Clubs, and state-funded early childhood programs have tried to address these issues. However, Barbarin feels that the principle of the "three Xs" -- "Expose, Explain, Expand" -- can go a long way toward engaging children and encouraging pride by way of a caring, responsible, and ethical philosophy. Barbarin writes, "Once the juveniles enter the justice system, the repeat offender rate is sixty percent. This research calls for optimism in spite of a vicious downward cycle experienced by many young males, which marginalizes them at school, at work, at home, and in their communities."
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| What price success? |
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President Obama's health care and student loan victories have overshadowed the collapse of another key domestic priority: helping more students graduate from college, writes The New Republic's Kevin Carey. Because of last-minute political developments, the administration allowed negotiators of the reconciliation bill to strip out a "smart, progressive" package of reforms that could have helped millions of low- and moderate-income students earn college degrees. "The administration now has no plausible agenda to reach its much-lauded goal of having the United States regain the international lead in the proportion of college graduates by 2020," writes Carey. "The danger is that, in the flush of success offered by student loan reform, it will pretend otherwise." The $12 billion plan would have been the foundation of a new multi-year effort to work with governors, legislators, universities, and community colleges to help millions more earn valuable higher-education credentials. It included new support for cash-strapped community colleges and an unprecedented push for states to hold colleges accountable for helping students learn and get degrees. Currently, 34 million Americans over age 24 report their highest level of education as "some college, no degree."
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| It's about time |
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Education Resource Strategies (ERS) with the National Center on Time & Learning has released a paper that documents how districts fail to use time and individual attention in strategic ways to improve instruction. In an analysis of six typical districts, additional time was triggered primarily by course failure, and increased individual attention resulted almost exclusively from placement in special education. Schools structured time in rigid blocks, unvaried in length or frequency based on subject. By contrast, in exemplary schools, teachers use data on student progress to give students extra time and attention throughout the year when they need it to master important concepts and skills, allocating time to match academic priorities and to fit instructional needs. "We're hoping that districts will first look at their use of existing time and their structures for providing individual attention to make sure they are targeting their efforts to meet the needs of each student," says ERS Director Stephen Frank. "Some districts also clearly need to add more time for students and teachers to the school day and school year. In tough times, it may seem difficult to talk about adding time, but this needs to be on the negotiating table with other priorities, especially in districts where the day is shorter than seven hours."
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AFT affiliate throws down
Massachusetts' second-largest teacher union, which represents the state's big cities, has decided to boycott Massachusetts' application for the Race to the Top. http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/articles/2010/04/14/american_federation_of_teachers_massachusetts_boycotts_obamas_education_fund/?s_campaign=8315
Jousting over merit pay in FLA
The Florida House passed a teacher merit-pay bill that would put the state at the forefront of a national push to tie teacher compensation to student performance; its union has pushed back.
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/education/os-merit-pay-house-vote-04-09-2010-20100408,0,6043864.story
Related: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/04/12/1576259/state-teachers-union-targets-education.html
Wishing aloud for someone's death is especially unfunny in Jersey
New Jersey Education Association president Joe Coppola said the "prayer" for Gov. Chris Christie's death was a joke and was never meant to be made public.
http://www.app.com/article/20100409/NEWS03/100409024/Memo-hints-at-Gov.-Chris-Christie-s-death--union-offers-an-apology
Out of tragedy, notable progress
Gulf Coast students displaced by Hurricane Katrina have surpassed their Texas counterparts in some subjects on statewide tests, according to the Texas Education Agency.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/6948490.html
Idaho ditches state standardized assessments
Because of their cost, Idaho will not administer the Direct Writing Assessment or the Direct Math Assessment in the 2010-11 school year, per Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna.
http://www.idahostatesman.com/2010/04/06/1143611/luna-state-will-not-administer.html#ixzz0kzhYCIYl
Still unconstitutional, last time we checked
A judge has ordered a small Mississippi school district to stop allowing hundreds of white students to transfer out of majority black schools, calling the practice a violation of a desegregation order and federal law.
http://www.clarionledger.com/article/20100413/NEWS/100413017/Miss.+schools+must+end+racial+imbalance |
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| NEW GRANT AND FUNDING INFORMATION |
MetLife Foundation: Partners in Arts Education Program
The MetLife Foundation Partners in Arts Education Program enhances arts learning in K-12 public schools by supporting exemplary community school/public school partnerships that serve large numbers of public school students during the school day; exemplify best practices in creating and sustaining effective partnerships; provide pedagogically sound arts education experiences; prioritize student learning and achievement; and address national, state, and/or local arts education standards. Maximum award: $20,000. Eligibility: organizations that are full members in good standing of the National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts. Non-member organizations should submit a membership application and first-year dues payments at least one week prior to submitting an application. Must be located in certain cities -- see application guidelines. Deadline: May 26, 2010.
http://www.nationalguild.org/programs/partners.htm
NSTA: New Science Teacher Academy
The NSTA New Science Teacher Academy Foundation is a professional development initiative created to promote quality science teaching, enhance teacher confidence and classroom excellence, and improve teacher content knowledge. Maximum award: program expenses. Eligibility: middle or high school science teachers entering their second or third year of teaching, working a schedule with 51 percent of their classes in science. Deadline: May 30, 2010.
http://www.nsta.org/academy/
Campbell's: Labels for Education
The Campbell's, Inc. Labels for Education Program gives schools free educational equipment in exchange for labels from Campbell products. Maximum award: varies. Eligibility: Schools or parents coordinate label drives to raise resources for schools. Deadline: N/A.
http://www.labelsforeducation.com/about-the-program.aspx
For more grants, see http://www.publiceducation.org/newsblast_grants.asp
"These are tax-paid institutions, we need to open them up. Community schools will make it easier for families to access the service they need to succeed." -- Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, speaking at the Coalition of Community Schools' National Forum in Philadelphia, April 7, 2010
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20100407_Sebelius_calls_for_schools_to_become_community_havens.html
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