|
|
| |
 |
| |
|
July 16, 2010 |
Click here to read printable version |
|
| Voters want an overhaul of nation's high schools |
| |
A new poll released by the Alliance for Excellent Education finds that improving the quality of public high schools through the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (in its current version, No Child Left Behind) is a voting issue for over eight in ten voters. Those polled believe the nation's public high schools are in urgent need of improvement, more so than middle schools or elementary schools. Just one in four give the nation's high schools a good or excellent rating, while 42 percent give them a "C," and one in five a poor or failing grade. Nearly seven in ten voters say a high school diploma is inadequate to get a good-paying job in today's world, and nearly as many believe it does not prepare students to succeed in college. Two-thirds of voters say the high school drop-out rate has a significant impact on the nation's economy and on America's ability to compete globally. A majority of voters say Congress is not paying enough attention to the state of public high schools, and around half of voters say governors and President Obama are not paying enough attention. Additionally, over half of voters say that their decision to vote for a current elected official in the 2010 congressional elections will be affected if Congress takes no action to reform NCLB.
Read more | Back to top
|
|
| For the prosecution... |
| |
In a recent article in Newsweek, Jonathan Alter writes that Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin, "a rare man of conscience in Washington" and one not running for reelection, is in danger of leaving his final term as a "water carrier for teachers' unions." In Alter's view, Obey has "gutted" the Race to the Top initiative to obtain some of the $10 billion dollars to prevent teacher layoffs in a bill recently passed by the House of Representatives. The chair of the House Ways and Means Committee cut from a wide range of agencies to find the funding, including the departments of agriculture, energy, and commerce; the EPA; and the Army Corps of Engineers, but chose the "wrong places" in the Department of Education: $500 million from Race to the Top, $100 million from the charter-schools expansion, and $200 million from the teacher incentive fund. Alter finds Obey is taking from the "terrific 5 percent of education spending devoted to exciting reform proposals" instead of from the 95 percent devoted to business as usual. Since the bill itself is unlikely to pass the Senate without enlisting several Republicans, the act may be meaningless, but the best way to enlist Republican support would be to challenge teacher union seniority rules. This won't happen, according to Alter. "Obama and the Democratic Congress have apparently decided that an election year is the wrong time to continue their historic and highly commendable challenge to the teachers' unions."
Read more | Related | Back to top
|
|
| And for the defense |
| |
In response to Jonathan Alter's piece in Newsweek on Rep. David Obey (see above), Scott Lilly of the Center for American Progress, who worked for Obey on education issues for many years, writes that Obey in no way is "carrying water" for unions, and Alter's allegations of "gutting" the Race to the Top are "dubious." In fact, the congressman's cuts would leave in place 90 percent of funds available for the program over the next year, and "this modest reduction in a new and untested program would leverage $10 billion for U.S. school districts to weather the draconian teacher layoffs, class consolidations, and decline in teaching quality that will occur in their absence." In any event, the cuts weren't Obey's idea, says Lilly, but required by "conservative Democrats and a unified phalanx of Republicans" that include those senators whom Alter feels would be won over by challenges to seniority. What is most salient, in Lilly's opinion, is that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has failed to develop a consensus within his party or within Congress around what Alter calls the administration's "signature" education reforms. "Progressives need to build a solid coalition in support of both financing and reform of our schools," Lilly writes. "We shouldn't label people as someone's 'water carrier' if they ask tough questions about what the financing will accomplish or where the reforms will lead [...] And we can not achieve unity unless we respect each other's opinion and have the evidence to support our individual notions of what constitutes reform."
Read more | Back to top
|
|
| Improving schools in five 'common-sense' steps |
| |
Five large urban school districts have boosted student success and closed achievement gaps through approaches that make such obvious sense, writes The Los Angeles Times, that it would amaze people to know they aren't used everywhere. Looking at the winners of the Broad Prize for Urban Education over the past five years -- the Long Beach and Garden Grove unified school districts in Southern California, the Boston Public Schools, Norfolk Public Schools in Virginia, and the Aldine Independent School District outside Houston -- The Times identified five "common-sense steps" all districts have used to raise achievement despite distinctly different locations, funding, and to some extent, demographics. First, all developed a challenging, clear, and specific curriculum. Second, they set no more than six long-term strategic district-wide goals, and used them to drive practices in every school. Third, each district developed strategies to attract and retain effective teachers, support them, and cultivate a collaborative working environment, such as training teachers how to coach each other. Fourth, by using data to select, pilot, and monitor programs, district staff regularly evaluated whether a given approach or program was improving achievement and eliminated those that weren't working. Finally, leaders in these districts successfully built relationships with parents, community organizations, area businesses, and others with a stake in student success.
Read more | Back to top
|
|
| Getting students to truly 'college- and career-ready' |
| |
The tension between high standards and high graduation rates seems obvious, writes Thomas Toch in The Washington Monthly. Raise standards, and fewer will graduate. But is this so? Given current mediocre standards, Toch feels that with more effective and engaging schools and teachers, American students might well meet higher standards and graduate in greater numbers. Moreover, while it no longer guarantees a middle-class life, a high school diploma is an essential passport to entering or remaining in the middle class. Currently, only 75 percent of students who enter high school graduate, and, of those who do, less than half are ready to take college courses without remediation. Toch posits that if states were to impose the administration's standard for what a high school diploma should represent -- college- and career-ready -- then "the dropout rate would soar to politically untenable heights." This prospect has undermined earlier efforts to raise standards. What holds the most promise, Toch suggests, are the early-warning systems in place in a number of districts across the country that identify struggling students and assign them tutors and mentors, and closely monitor attendances and grades. If these are combined with a culture of high expectations in previously lagging high schools, where teachers and students believe in the importance of high standards and share a commitment to reaching them, much can be accomplished, as evidenced by the gains in graduation rates in New York City, Toch says.
Read more | Back to top
|
|
| Teacher induction leads to student gains, reversing earlier indications |
| |
A new study by Mathematica Policy Research and released by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences finds that teachers who received two years of comprehensive induction services were able to boost student scores in reading and math more successfully than teachers in a comparison group without support, Education Week reports. The study also found, however, that induction services didn't make teachers more likely to stay in their schools, districts, or the profession -- nor were they any more likely to report feeling prepared. The findings are based on the third and final year of results from a randomized experiment focusing on the impact of intensive mentoring programs. The student-achievement findings contrast those of the first two years of the study, which indicated no effects on scores, and researchers say they lack strong evidence from the quantitative analysis to support any specific explanation for this. The new pattern of effects was large enough to boost a student scoring at the 50th percentile in both subjects to the 54th percentile in reading and the 58th percentile in math. Such increases are especially noteworthy because they appeared a year after teachers in the subset had stopped receiving the specialized support.
Read more | See the report | Back to top
|
|
| A little context, please |
| |
Despite much hand-wringing over the apparent gender gap in achievement, evidence suggests that reading deficits in boys at the school, district, and even state level may require solutions that emphasize "context" rather than "crisis," writes Michael Sadowski in The Harvard Education Letter. Gender gaps in reading seem universal and are present in international data, but in a much-cited analysis of the issue, the Center on Education Policy found the size of gaps on state-level reading tests varied widely, suggesting that various gender gaps may differ dramatically by geographical context. Moreover, state tests showed gaps between different racial and ethnic groups much wider than those between genders. Gender-related disparities may also play out differently in wealthy, middle-class, and lower-income communities, and be attributable to a different mix of factors. "Start by determining whether these are gaps in ability or gaps in interest," says Catherine Snow, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. "To the extent that they are gaps in ability, find the appropriate intervention program; to the extent that they are gaps in interest without gaps in ability, then you address it from a totally different point of view, through motivation and different activities and approaches to teaching."
Read more | Back to top
|
|
| Again it is asked: Teaching for Whom? |
| |
Employment by Teach for America (TFA) is now as difficult to attain as admission to an Ivy League grad school, The New York Times reports. A mere 4,500 applicants were selected by the nonprofit to work at high-poverty public schools out of 46,359 applicants this year, up 32 percent over 2009. (The numbers are undoubtedly fueled by a bad economy, The Times notes.) On this its 20th anniversary, TFA hired more seniors than any other employer at many prestigious colleges, including Yale, Dartmouth, Duke, Georgetown, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. At Harvard, 293 seniors -- or 18 percent of the class -- applied, compared with 100 seniors in 2007. The Times relates that in interviews, two-dozen soon-to-be-TFA-teachers mentioned helping poor children and closing the achievement gap as major reasons for applying. However, there are also more material incentives. In a bad economy, it's a two-year job guarantee with a good paycheck; members earn a beginning teacher's salary in the districts where they're placed. Teach for America has also become an elite brand that helps build a résumé, whether or not the person stays in teaching. Research indicates that generally, the more experienced teachers are, the better their students perform, and several studies have criticized Teach for America's turnover rate, its success in recruitment notwithstanding.
Read more | Back to top
|
|
| Small schools, many choices, significant results |
| |
A new report from MDRC examines the sweeping changes brought about by New York City's 2002 closure of 20 underperforming large high schools and opening of over 200 new secondary schools, as well as the introduction of a centralized high school admissions process through which 80,000 students annually indicate school preference from a wide range of options. "Small schools of choice" (SSCs) have been pivotal to these reforms -- small, academically nonselective, four-year public high schools open to students at all levels of academic achievement and located in historically disadvantaged communities. SSCs emphasize strong, sustained relationships between students and faculty, and each received start-up funding as well as assistance and policy protections from the district to facilitate leadership development, hiring, and implementation. The resulting data are encouraging. By the end of their first year of high school, 58.5 percent of SSC enrollees have been on track to graduate in four years, compared with 48.5 percent of their non-SSC counterparts, a difference of 10 percentage points. These effects are sustained over the next two years. By the fourth year of high school, SSCs increase overall graduation rates by 6.8 percentage points, roughly one-third the gap in graduation rates between white students and students of color in the city. Finally, SSCs' positive effects are seen for a broad range of students, including male high school students of color.
See the report | Related | Back to top
|
|
| Focus on progress and skill levels, not grade levels |
| |
In the latest effort to transform the Kansas City, Mo. schools, the district is about to become what experts say is the largest to group students by ability rather than grade, the Associated Press reports. Starting this fall, officials will begin switching 17,000 students to the new system in a bid to turn around trailing schools and increase "abysmal" tests scores. "The current system of public education in this country is not working," says Superintendent John Covington. "It's an outdated, industrial, agrarian kind of model that lends itself to still allowing students to progress through school based on the amount of time they sit in a chair rather than whether or not they have truly mastered the competencies and skills." Under the new system, students of varying ages work at their own pace, meeting with teachers to decide what part of the curriculum to tackle. Teachers still instruct students as a group as needed, but often students work individually or in small groups on projects tailored to their skill level. Students who progress quickly can finish high school material early and move forward with college coursework. High schoolers who need extra time can stay on another year. Advocates say the approach cuts down on discipline problems because advanced students aren't bored and struggling students aren't frustrated. Researchers evaluated 2009 state test data for over 3,500 students from 15 school districts in Alaska, Colorado, and Florida, and found that students who learned through the different approach were 2.5 times more likely to score at a level that shows they have a good grasp of the material on exams for reading, writing, and mathematics.
Read more | Back to top
|
|
|
|
| |
Hit the lights on the way out
NYC's rubber rooms shut down for good.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/education/29rubber.html?_r=1&ref=education
SAT biased toward easier questions
New study finds African American test-takers actually performed slightly better than the average white test-taker on harder questions, and would benefit by as much as 100 points if the SAT scores were weighted toward more points for harder questions.
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=06&year=2010&base_name=a_new_study_supports_research
NGA launches new initiative
West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin III, the new chair of the National Governors Association, has unveiled Complete to Compete, an effort that will focus on increasing the number of students in the United States who complete college degrees and certificates, and on improving the productivity of the country's higher education institutions.
http://www.subnet.nga.org/ci/1011/
Sounds fun
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee plans to significantly expand the use of standardized tests so that every D.C. student from kindergarten through high school is regularly assessed to measure academic progress and the effectiveness of teachers.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/07/AR2010070704810.html
Love was grand when it was new
In a sign of the Obama administration's strained relations with two of its most powerful political allies, no federal official was scheduled to speak at the convention of either major teacher union this month, partly because union officials feared administration speakers would face heckling.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/05/education/05teachers.html?_r=2&ref=education
Work hard, leave fast?
Teachers at charter schools are more than twice as likely to leave the profession as their peers at traditional public schools, according to a new study by the federally funded National Center on School Choice.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/local/blogs/capital-land/charter-school-teachers-more-likely-to-leave-teaching-97866119.html#ixzz0tl9azKzU
Glad we finally got that one on the agenda
U.S. Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y. has introduced legislation to remove paddles as a form of punishment from U.S. schools.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/bill-ban-corporal-punishment-schools-hits-washington/story?id=11044106 |
|
| NEW GRANT AND FUNDING INFORMATION |
Barbara Bush Foundation: Grants for Literacy
The Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy's grant-making program seeks to develop or expand projects designed to support the development of literacy skills for adult primary care givers and their children. Maximum award: $65,000. Eligibility: organizations with current nonprofit or public status in existence for two or more years as of the date of the application that have maintained fiscal accountability and operated an instructional literacy program in existence for at least two years that includes one or more of the following components: literacy for adults; parent education; pre-literacy or literacy instruction for children pre-K to grade 3; intergenerational literacy activities (Parent and Child Together Time [PACT]). Deadline: September 10, 2010.
http://www.barbarabushfoundation.com/site/c.jhLSK2PALmF/b.4425435/k.544A/Current_Funding_Opportunities.htm
ASCA: School Counselor of the Year
The American School Counselor Association School Counselor of the Year program honors the best of the best -- school counselors who are running top-notch, comprehensive school counseling programs at either the elementary, middle or high school level. Maximum award: This newly enhanced program brings up to 10 finalists and their nominators to Washington, D.C. in early February, where they participate in a Congressional briefing, meet with their members of Congress, and are honored at the School Counselor of the Year Gala. Eligibility: ASCA members who are practicing school counselors with at least five year's experience and currently working in a U.S.-based school. Deadline: September 15, 2010.
http://www.schoolcounselor.org/content2.asp?contentid=544
Mr. Holland's Opus Music Foundation
Mr. Holland's Opus Music Foundation Grants have two programs, the Melody Program that targets qualified school music programs in need of assistance, and the Special Projects Program that targets community schools of the arts, after school programs and youth orchestras in need of assistance. Maximum award: Programs fund instrument repair and the acquisition of new instruments up to $10,000; no cash grants. Eligibility: school music programs K-12; community schools of the arts, after-school programs, and youth orchestras. Deadline: pre-application -- October 1, 2010.
http://www.mhopus.org/Apply
Lowe's Charitable and Educational Foundation: Toolbox for Education Grant
Lowe's Toolbox for Education grant program funds school improvement projects initiated by parents in recognition of the importance of parent involvement in education. Maximum award: $5,000. Eligibility: K-12 schools (including charter, parochial, private, etc.) or parent groups (associated with a non-profit K-12 school). Deadline: October 15, 2010.
http://toolboxforeducation.com/
Air Force Association: Educator Grant Program
The Air Force Association Educator Grant Program is designed to promote aerospace education activities and encourage use of innovative aerospace activities within the prescribed curriculum. Each school year, the association awards grants to worthy projects that significantly influence student learning. The program also encourages establishing an active relationship between the school and the local Air Force Association organization. Maximum award: $250. Eligibility: K-12 classrooms. Deadline: November 10, 2010.
http://www.afa.org/aef/aid/educator.asp
For more grants, see http://www.publiceducation.org/newsblast_grants.asp
The PEN Weekly NewsBlast, published by Public Education Network, is a free electronic newsletter featuring resources and information about public school reform, school finance, and related issues. The NewsBlast is the property of Public Education Network, a national association of 79 local education funds working to improve public school quality in low-income communities throughout the nation. Please forward this e-mail to anyone who enjoys free updates on education news and grant alerts.
Some links in the PEN Weekly NewsBlast may change or expire after their initial publication here, and some links may require local website registration.
Your e-mail address is safe with the NewsBlast. It is our firm policy never to rent, loan, or sell our subscriber list to any other organization, group, or individual.
TO UPDATE OR ADD A NEWSBLAST SUBSCRIPTION
PEN wants you to receive each weekly issue of the NewsBlast at your preferred e-mail address. If you are already a subscriber and would like us to change your e-mail address, please click on "Update Profile/Email Address" near the bottom of the NewsBlast mailing.
People wishing to add a NewsBlast subscription can go to PEN's website (http://www.publiceducation.org) and follow the instructions in the lower left-hand section of the homepage. Current subscribers can unsubscribe by clicking the appropriate link near the bottom of the NewsBlast mailing.
If you use spam filters to protect your inbox, you may wish to take a moment right now to add PEN@publiceducation.org to your e-mail address book, spam-software whitelist, or mail-system whitelist. Adding the address will help ensure that you receive the NewsBlast and that your e-mail software displays HTML and images properly.
To view past issues of the PEN Weekly NewsBlast, visit http://www.publiceducation.org/newsblast_past.asp.
If you would like to submit a proposed article or news item about your local education fund, public school, or school-reform organization for a future issue of the NewsBlast, please send a note to PEN@PublicEducation.org. For the NewsBlast's submission policy, see http://www.publiceducation.org/newsblast_submission_policy.htm.
Kate Guiney
Contributing Editor
PEN Weekly NewsBlast
Public Education Network
601 Thirteenth Street, NW
Suite 710 South
Washington, DC 20005-3808
PEN@PublicEducation.org |
|
|
