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March 20, 2009 Relationships and rigor In an op-ed in The New York Times, David Brooks writes that a well-known anecdote from President Obama's childhood -- his mother waking him at 4:30 each morning to tutor him before school -- perfectly encapsulates what's required to reform American education. When young Barry complained, his mother responded, "This is no picnic for me either, Buster." That exchange contains what Brooks feels are the crucial traits for academic success: rigor and relationships. Mr. Obama had an adult passionately invested in his future, but also, in Brooks's words, one "disinclined to put up with any crap." "We've spent years working on ways to restructure schools, but what matters most is the relationship between one student and one teacher. You ask a kid who has graduated from high school to list the teachers who mattered in his life, and he will reel off names. You ask a kid who dropped out, and he will not even understand the question." No Child Left Behind has ushered in the ability to measure student progress and predict success, but Brooks feels we're faltering where the other ingredient is concerned. We need to foster relationships, in his view through reforms like merit pay for teachers and school vouchers. Despite this, he is hopeful: President Obama "has broken with liberal orthodoxy on school reform more than any other policy. He's naturally inclined to be data driven. There's reason to think that this week's impressive speech will be followed by real and potentially historic action." Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/13/opinion/13brooks.html School foundations feel pinch of sagging economy As the shaky economy and tightening state aid have forced school districts to trim their budgets, private foundations have sprung up in the last decade to pay for a wide range of equipment, artists-in-residence, and amenities that are outside the districts' spending plans. Now they, too, are feeling the pinch, reports The Philadelphia Inquirer. If the trend continues, the foundations say, students may have to do without chamber music coaches, Arabic teachers, smartboards, and other educational goodies the foundations provide. "I don't know of a local education fund right now that is not either projecting a fiscal crisis down the line or is in the middle of one right now," said Arnold Fege, director of public engagement and advocacy at the Public Education Network, which represents 82 local education funds in low-income districts. Even deep-pocketed districts are feeling the strain. Radnor Township's education foundation stopped awarding teacher grants for the remainder of the school year after its annual gala, a casino night, raised 30 percent less than the year before. Read more: http://www.philly.com/inquirer/education/41300207.html Is it possible to satisfy teachers and reformers at the same time? In The New Republic, Andrew Rotherham and Richard Whitmire look at challenges facing American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten as she tries to burnish her reformist credentials while accommodating her constituency. How events play out in the fight over tenure and pay in D.C., the authors write, will have ramifications for reform in the rest of the country. On one side is D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, whose get-tough stance has won her praise, attention, and vilification. On the other side is the AFT-affiliate Washington Teacher Union (WTU). Weingarten has stepped in with a counter-offer to Rhee that has both reformers and union members ambivalent. On the one hand, it "[wraps] teachers even more tightly in tenure protections and [extends] the termination process"; on the other hand, its language signals to Rhee that Weingarten will move in Rhee's direction if she gets political cover. Rotherham and Whitmire propose that Weingarten should realize, as her legendary predecessor Al Shanker would have, that Rhee is not the enemy. "Rhee faces an array of independent charter schools that now educate more than a third of the District's public school students. If Rhee can't compete with charter operators who can fire incompetent teachers, the local teachers' union will become irrelevant, because there will be few unionized public schools left in the district." In other words, they say, Weingarten must save the UFT from itself. Read more: http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=82f9ab6f-32c0-46aa-8c27-37cb23e99acc Less politics required to spearhead successful education reform "If education reform is flush with ideas," asks Clay Risen in the spring 2009 issue of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, "why does so little get done?" The obstacle is not policy, he writes, but politics. He cites dismal statistics: The 2006 national graduation rate was 69 percent; 75 percent of high school graduates attend college, but 28 percent of freshman require remedial education; among the 30 most-industrialized countries, American students rank 15th in reading, 19th in math, and 14th in science. In Risen's view, education reform has two entrenched camps: "One holds that educational progress will only move forward after changes are made in inner-city students' family and extracurricular life; the other holds that reform must focus with laser-like intensity on teacher quality and accountability." The first camp supports more funding for existing programs and is centered around unions and teacher colleges; the second wants more choice for parents, including charter schools and vouchers, and centers around nonprofit institutions and "civilian" reformers. How will they reconcile? Risen seeks a politics that would "require all sides to recognize the validity of each other's thinking and appreciate the goals they are seeking to achieve," conceding certain policy principles in the process. Teachers are workers, parents, and taxpayers, Risen says, who can't be expected to sacrifice everything to student achievement. But neither are they just another class of workers who can "always make the same demands that, say, the Teamsters do." Read more: http://democracyjournal.org/article2.php?ID=6676&limit=1000&limit2=2000&page=2 Music instruction helps children read Children exposed to a multi-year program of music involving increasingly complex rhythmic, tonal, and practical skills display superior cognitive performance in reading skills compared with their non-musically trained peers, according to a study published in the Psychology of Music journal. According to authors Joseph M. Piro and Camilo Ortiz from Long Island University, data from this study will help to clarify the role of music study on cognition and shed light on the question of the potential of music to enhance school performance in language and literacy. Read more: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090316075843.htm Discussion groups help students make better choices At Audubon Technology & Communication Center High School in Milwaukee, writes The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, students who fight don't get suspensions, they get circles. Instead of missed school and parent-principal conferences, teenage "drama" is treated with something like an encounter session. "Maybe 10 people, mostly other ninth-graders, sit in a circle," The Journal-Sentinel explains, "with some object like an electric candle in the middle. You can't talk unless you're holding onto a ball or a little figure or something that that you have to pass around to each other. There's an icebreaker to start the conversation -- what's your favorite food, that kind of thing. Everything that is said is supposed to be confidential, and no one can speak without respecting everyone else." Then one kid leads the discussion, and each presents his or her side and describes the impact the problem had on them. A discussion follows about what needs to be done to get to a point of trust and respect. Most times, disputing parties work things out. This "restorative justice" process is part of an $8.5 million, four-year federal grant called the Safe Schools/Healthy Student Initiative. Across the Milwaukee Public Schools, suspensions are down more than 20 percent, according to recent data. Read more: http://www.jsonline.com/news/education/41350367.html Better education vital to economy Working with Miami-Dade Public Schools and The Education Fund (a local education fund), the Citi Foundation will spend $600,000 for programs that increase low-income, public-school-student enrollment in post-secondary education, reports The Miami Herald. The program, which will be matched by local donations, will span five years. According to Daria Sheehan, senior program officer at the foundation, the problem they hope to address is acute. Among developed nations, the U.S. has fallen from first to 14th in percentage of students who pursue college. Education Fund president Linda Lecht says that just 44 percent of high school students in Miami-Dade graduate and go on to more coursework. Citi Foundation hopes to coordinate its efforts with organizations already working toward college readiness in South Florida, such as AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) and The Children's Trust. District-wide, the program's emphasis will fall on both academic preparation and on helping students to understand the requirements of applying for and financing college. The Education Fund is calling on area business leaders to put up matching funds to work around projected state revenue shortfalls, the better to educate prospective employees. Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/business/story/950830.html To reform schools: think systemically, act individually Writing from a business and managerial perspective, the Gallup Management Journal interviews Robert Hughes, president of New York City's local education fund, New Visions for Public Schools. Hughes explains that given the endemic problems facing the city's sprawling education system, New Visions has aimed from the outset to work intensively with the district "at arm's length," understanding that it's harder to diagnose a system's problems when you are implicated in it. "New Visions is a place that helps schools think through endemic problems and create new systematic structures and strategies to address those problems," says Hughes. The LEF functions as a place that can absorb risks that come with innovation, "so people with direct responsibility for the system don't always have to take that risk." This encourages experimentation and challenges the sense of inevitability that often develops in the public sector. Hughes describes the metric developed by New Visions that lets high schools track student progress and aggregate these data to class and school level, in service to the goal of graduating 80 percent of New York City kids from high school, college-ready. To realize these kinds of goals, Hughes explains, reformers need to straddle the macro and the micro simultaneously: "One of the challenges in implementing any education reform is figuring out how to ensure that the reform itself empowers teachers to be effective with individual students and that it does so systemically. It shouldn't require heroics -- it should be part and parcel of doing business on a daily basis." Read more: http://gmj.gallup.com/content/116353/Lesssons-Solving-Big-Problems.aspx#2 Systematically analyzing the impacts of charters A new study by the RAND Corporation looks at charter schools in Chicago, San Diego, Philadelphia, Denver, Milwaukee, and the states of Ohio, Texas, and Florida, using longitudinal, student-level data across multiple communities and varied charter laws. The study finds scant evidence that charters produce achievement substantially different than those of traditional public schools. It cautions, however, that the evidence is incomplete: Elementary schools -- a substantial proportion of all charters -- aren't easily assessed. Two groups of charters, those in the first year of operation and those serving students remotely through technology, prompt concern over low performance. The most promising results from charters are long-term outcomes of high school graduation and college entry. In the two locations with available data on attainment outcomes (Chicago and Florida), charter high schools appear to increase the probability of graduating by 7 to 15 percentage points, and increase the probability of enrolling in college by 8 to 10 percentage points. The study refutes the idea that charters are "skimming the cream" of the student population: Students entering charter schools have prior achievement levels comparable to their peers in traditional public schools. Nor do charters produce effects that substantially help or harm student achievement in nearby traditional public schools. Read more: http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2009/RAND_MG869.sum.pdf See the report: http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/2009/RAND_MG869.pdf Cumulative effects of poverty and the struggle for low-income achievement A new policy brief from Arizona State University, funded by the Great Lakes Center, details the poverty-induced physical, sociological, and psychological effects on students that limit what schools alone can accomplish. This counters a prevailing trend, of which NCLB is a part, of relying on schools as a key site for narrowing the achievement gap between low-income and middle-class students, and between racial and ethnic groups. The brief lists six negative out-of-school-factors (OSFs) that inhibit student achievement: low birth-weight and non-genetic prenatal influences; inadequate medical, dental, and vision care; food insecurity; environmental pollutants; family relations and family stress; and neighborhood characteristics. "Because America's schools are so highly segregated by income, race, and ethnicity, problems related to poverty occur simultaneously, with greater frequency, and act cumulatively in schools serving disadvantaged communities," the report says. High-poverty schools, already under-funded, face significantly greater challenges than schools that serve wealthier students. Efforts to drive change through test-based accountability are therefore unlikely to succeed unless accompanied by more comprehensive social policies. The brief names a seventh positive factor that can mitigate some effects of the first six, the opportunity for extended learning. See the report: http://greatlakescenter.org/docs/Policy_Briefs/Berliner_NonSchool.pdf 'Vivid Laboratory' sheds light on immigrant education In an extended article that profiles one suburban high school in Virginia, The New York Times weighs the pros and cons of contemporary methods for educating immigrants in America. Hylton High is distinguished by high test scores and graduation rates, but these come "at considerable cost" to its English language learners, who are separated from other students and given intensive support in what amounts to modern-day segregation. The last decade has seen a huge influx of immigrants, legal and illegal, leading to the greatest expansion in public schools since the baby boom. According to officials, one in 10 of all public school students are now English language learners, a 60 percent increase from 1995 to 2005. This places schools on the "front lines of America's battles over whether and how to assimilate the newcomers and their children," The Times writes. Schools are required to enroll students regardless of immigration status, and are prohibited from even asking about it. The extra attention these students need has strained budgets and resources, and prompted resentment. At the same time, to meet rising academic standards, English language learners at Hylton are "relentlessly drilled and tutored on material that appears on state tests, but get rare exposure to the kinds of courses, demands or experiences that might better prepare them to move up in American society." The issue, according to teacher Peter B. Bedford, who supports Hylton's program, boils down to a pragmatic choice: "Are you going to focus on educating [these students]," he asks, "or socially integrating them?" Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/us/15immig.html?_r=1 BRIEFLY NOTED Critiquing and defending academic BS This sassy article challenges academics and professors to explain their work in ways the lay reader can understand. http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/03/17/bs School security goes to the dogs A Kentucky school district recently added a canine search team to its security services. (See page 8 of the PDF.) http://www.cgcs.org/UE/March_09.pdf Gay-Straight club gets the go-ahead A federal judge has ruled that students at a North Florida high school may form a Gay-Straight Alliance. http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6643654.html In Pontiac, Mich., schools, everyone gets a pink slip Teetering on what Gov. Jennifer Granholm termed a "financial emergency," one gritty suburb is laying off every employee. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102057651 North Carolina considers more comprehensive sex ed State legislators may allow districts to move beyond curricula that are strictly abstinence-based. http://www2.journalnow.com/content/2009/mar/12/panel-oks-new-sex-education-plan-for-schools/news-ncpolitics/ NEW GRANT & FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES Fund for Teachers: Grants for Travel and Growth The Fund for Teachers makes direct grants to teachers for summer learning opportunities of their own design. Maximum award: $5,000. Eligibility: teachers K-12 with a minimum of three years teaching experience; teachers must be full-time and spend at least 50 percent of the time in the classroom when grants are approved and made. Deadline: varies by state. http://www.fundforteachers.org/apply.html Institute for Global Environmental Strategies: 2009 Thacher Scholars Awards The IGES 2009 Thacher Scholars Awards are given to secondary school students who demonstrate the best use of geospatial technologies or data to study Earth. Eligible geospatial tools and data include satellite remote sensing, aerial photography, geographic information systems, and global positioning systems (GPS). The main focus of the project must be the application of the geospatial tool(s) or data to study a problem related to Earth's environment. Maximum award: $2,000. Eligibility: students grades 9-12 in public, private, parochial, Native American reservation, or home school in the United States or U.S. territories; or U.S. citizens grades 9-12 attending a Department of Defense Dependents' Overseas School, an accredited overseas American or International School, a foreign school as an exchange student, or a foreign school because his/her parent(s) are temporarily working and living abroad. Deadline: April 6, 2009. http://www.strategies.org/education/index.aspx?sub=education&sub2=scholars&sub3=scholars2009 Music Is Revolution: Mini-grants The Music Is Revolution Foundation makes mini-grants for activities designed by teachers to implement, support, and/or improve their ability to provide quality music education for their students. Funds may be used for supplies, materials, equipment, transportation for a field trip, and/or to bring a performer or musical group to the school. Maximum award: $500. Eligibility: public school teachers of children in grades K-12. Deadline: April 15, 2009. http://www.musicisrevolution.org/ Target: Early Childhood Reading Grants Target Early Childhood Reading Grants support programs like weekend book clubs and after-school reading programs that foster a love of reading and encourage children, from birth through age nine, to read together with their families. Maximum award: $3,000. Eligibility: schools, libraries, and nonprofit organizations. Deadline: May 31, 2009. http://sites.target.com/site/en/company/page.jsp?contentId=WCMP04-031821 Freedom Alliance Scholarships for Children of Servicemen and -women Freedom Alliance Scholarships give financial assistance to sons and daughters of soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and Guardsmen who have been killed or permanently disabled (100 percent VA disability rating) in the line of duty, or who are currently classified as a Prisoner of War or Missing in Action. Maximum award: one-year scholarships to undergraduates. Eligibility: high school seniors, high school graduates, or registered undergraduate students at an accredited college or post high school vocational/technical institution who are dependent sons or daughters of a soldier, sailor, airman, Marine, or Guardsman who was killed or permanently disabled in the line of duty or currently classified as a POW or MIA. Deadline: July 31, 2009. http://www.freedomalliance.org/scholarship.htm#guidelines QUOTE OF THE WEEK "The single most important [in-school] determinant of a student's success in the classroom is the teacher, yet the ways in which we compensate teachers -- years of experience and degrees held -- are not strongly correlated with student achievement gains.... That's driving some advocates [of compensation changes] to say there must be a better way." -Matthew Springer, director of the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0318/p01s02-ussc.html 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. 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. Public Education Network |
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