The Newspaper of the Future

If we're lucky, it will look something like

the newspaper of the past.

As newspaper circulation cartwheels into the abyss and print advertisers defect to the Web, publishers keep profit margins high by snipping, shearing, and slicing costs. The large-wingspan Wall Street Journal recently shrank its page size to the industry standard to save an estimated $18 million annually, and the New York Times will soon follow.

Dollar-pinching publishers are now paying experienced reporters and editors to leave their jobs. Buyouts will soon reduce the Los Angeles Times to 850 journalists, about three-quarters of its peak. The San Francisco Chronicle has announced plans to cut the newsroom from 400 to 300. The San Jose Mercury News employed 400 journalists seven years ago and will soon have only 200 crashing the keyboards. Similar stories can be told about the Dallas Morning News, the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Baltimore Sun, and other newspapers. Foreign bureaus are being shuttered, and full-time arts slots at newspapers in Atlanta, Minneapolis, Chicago, and elsewhere have been eliminated or downgraded.

How many journalists can a newspaper jettison before its hair falls out and its ribs start showing?

This from Slate.

A Pop Quiz for the Education Secretary

Poor Margaret Spellings!

The secretary of education was ready to talk student loans, No Child Left Behind, blah, blah, blah, when she came into The Post for an interview with editors and reporters last week.

So maybe she was taken aback when a reporter (not us, we swear!) asked why she turned down Karl Rove when he asked her out back in the early '80s. (Rove later joked it took his ego "decades to recover.")

Spellings paused, reports our colleague Amit Paley, then said: "Have you met Karl Rove?"

"He was so inept and so inartful," she added. "I mean, I couldn't even understand."

We should note that our mean old co-workers brought up the Rove thing only to change the subject after they had inadvertently made Spellings cry.

When asked to describe a side of President Bush the public doesn't know, the secretary started telling an old story about how then-Gov. Bush consoled a Texas official who had broken down while eulogizing a colleague. "Oh, I'm going to cry just telling you the story," she said, removing her glasses and dabbing her eyes with a napkin. "Y'all, I can't believe you did this to me!"

She left the interview still a little weepy and mulling the potential impact of crying in front of the press. "Now you'll take sympathy on me," she said. "Maybe."

This from Reliable Source at the Washington Post.

Racial Slur Offends, No Matter the Context

Montgomery County (MD) educators are replacing a lesson that called for students to read about and discuss a racial epithet against African Americans as a precursor to reading "To Kill a Mockingbird" in ninth-grade English classes.

The lesson, called "Questionable Words," focused on two reading selections, an essay and a poem, each dealing with the epithet and how the author was hurt by its use. Curriculum officials reexamined the lesson after an African American student told the school board in the fall that the class had upset her.

"What we heard from enough community members and some teachers is that it's sensitive, it's emotionally charged," said Betsy Brown, curriculum director for Montgomery schools. "And if we have a lesson that could be misused and cause real hurt to a few or to a whole classroom of kids, then maybe we need to change it."

The complaint from Maya Jean-Baptiste, a 15-year-old at Quince Orchard High School in Gaithersburg, marks a departure from the usual protest of racially insensitive language in classroom literature. Most often, someone seeks to ban a book; Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is a perennial target. In this case, the student objected to an introductory lesson whose purpose was to prepare her for the racist language in the book...

This from the Washington Post.

From Facebook To a Yearbook, Teens Get a Jolt

Students at Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda opened their yearbooks last month and found pictures they had already seen -- on Facebook, the Internet social-networking site.

In addition to the usual images of blurry hallway traffic, lockers and teens slumped at desks, this year's Walter Johnson Windup included scenes of student life clearly not intended for the yearbook: impromptu snapshots at house parties and random weekend gatherings; portraits taken at arm's length on cellphones; and at least one image of students at what looks like a tailgate party, drinking from telltale red plastic cups.

One student, venting in the school newspaper, said seeing her Facebook pictures in the yearbook was "kind of stalker-y."

Desperate and crunched for time, yearbook staffers resorted to filling pages with photographs downloaded from student Facebook pages. They did it largely without the permission of students and without crediting photographers.

"All the students were like, 'Whoa, that's my picture. I took that,' " said Amanda Horowitz, 15, a rising junior on the yearbook staff who concedes that she, too, published a few pictures from Facebook. "I was rushing, it was last-minute, I thought it was all right."

The episode illustrates how complacent the denizens of Internet vanity sites have become about sharing the artifacts of their private lives, and how, with the click of a mouse, their lives can become very public...

"We grew up with the idea that you can share anything you want with your friends through the Internet," said Amy Hemmati, 16, a rising Walter Johnson junior. "I think we're very trusting in the online community, as opposed to adults, who are on the outside looking in..."

This from the Washington Post.

Autism in Court

A special U.S. court hears the first case about the disorder and vaccines.

VERY LITTLE is known about autism, what causes it and exactly what it means biologically or neurologically. The disorder, characterized by impaired social, emotional and communications skills, is still diagnosed by clinical observations rather than physiological tests. The observable symptoms of autism usually appear around age 2 or 3 -- the same age when children often receive vaccines. This week a special court began hearing the first of nine test cases claiming that such timing is not a coincidence, and the litigation could spell trouble for children nationwide.

The nine cases may have implications for 4,800 similar pending cases, most of which were filed by family members who attribute their children's autism to a mercury-containing vaccine preservative called thimerosal, to the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine (MMR, which does not contain thimerosal) or to a combination of thimerosal and MMR. To date, no major studies have shown any connection between vaccines and autism, and the Institute of Medicine has rejected any causal relationship.

Still, some activists have claimed that autism rates have skyrocketed since many of these vaccines were mandated for young children. They say that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's recent (and alarming) finding that one in 150 8-year-old children nationwide has an autistic spectrum disorder -- up from one in several thousand diagnosed in previous decades -- represents an autism "epidemic."

But over the past decade, the accepted definition and symptoms of autism have expanded to include much milder cases and cases that would previously have been given different diagnoses, and researchers have sought out children for diagnosis whose autism probably would not otherwise have been detected. What's more, since 2001, no vaccines (except some flu vaccines) routinely recommended for children under age 6 have contained thimerosal, and autism rates do not appear to be dropping.

This from the Washington Post.

Student Loan Overhaul Advances: Votes Expected By House, Senate

Democrats in Congress are pushing to overhaul the nation's student loan system with legislation that would cut federal subsidies to lending companies by as much as $19 billion, channel most of those savings to student aid and ease repayment rules for borrowers.

The Senate education committee overwhelmingly approved its version of the legislation yesterday, one week after the House education panel took similar action. Senior Democrats predicted that the bills would come to a vote by the end of next month and would be reconciled without significant difficulty.

Momentum for the legislation has grown this year as the $85 billion-a-year industry has come under intense scrutiny. Federal and state investigations have found conflicts of interest among lenders, universities and government regulators. In addition, the Democratic takeover of Congress this year has allowed the party to drive its agenda on student loans for the first time in more than a decade.

This from the Washington Post.

Virginia School's No-Contact Rule Is a Touchy Subject

Fairfax County middle school student Hal Beaulieu hopped up from his lunch table one day a few months ago, sat next to his girlfriend and slipped his arm around her shoulder. That landed him a trip to the school office.

Among his crimes: hugging.

All touching -- not only fighting or inappropriate touching -- is against the rules at Kilmer Middle School in Vienna. Hand-holding, handshakes and high-fives? Banned. The rule has been conveyed to students this way: "NO PHYSICAL CONTACT!!!!!"

School officials say the rule helps keep crowded hallways and lunchrooms safe and orderly, and ensures that all students are comfortable. But Hal, 13, and his parents think the school's hands-off approach goes too far, and they are lobbying for a change.

...Deborah Hernandez, Kilmer's principal, said the rule makes sense in a school that was built for 850 students but houses 1,100. She said that students should have their personal space protected and that many lack the maturity to understand what is acceptable or welcome.

"You get into shades of gray," Hernandez said. "The kids say, 'If he can high-five, then I can do this.'"


This from the Washington Post.

The Regrets of a School Dropout

Half of Black Males Fail to Graduate With Their Class

...Statistics show that more than 50 percent of black male students fail to graduate with their class each year. In some urban jurisdictions such as New York and Chicago, upwards of two-thirds of them leave high school before graduation, according to a study by the Schott Foundation for Public Education.

In Maryland, 46 percent of black male teenagers dropped out during the 2003-04 school year, compared with 22 percent of white males. In Virginia, 47 percent dropped out, compared with 27 percent of white male students, and in the District, the dropout rate for black males was 51 percent, compared with 5 percent of white males, the report said.

Experts said the implications are stark: Dropouts struggle to find good jobs; they become teen fathers, get arrested and abuse drugs and alcohol at a much higher rate than that of their counterparts who graduate from high school.

Alvin Thornton, a Howard University administrator and author of the study that led Maryland to pump more than a billion additional dollars into its schools, blames a number of factors, among them the lack of early learning opportunities, absent parenting and a shortage of programs to engage these students in school.

"I think if we ever had any other community that found its male children suffering as they are in our community -- they would institute programs and demand that others, like government, help to address the problem," Thornton said.

Many dropouts, he said, experience problems as early as the elementary years. "It's called the fourth-grade syndrome, and it's the time when schools move away from them and they become lost and alienated."

This from the Washington Post.

Giving Proper Credit To Home-Schooled

With Applications From Nontraditional

Students Rising, More Universities Are

Revamping Evaluation Methods
~

In the pursuit of a homemade high school education, Jay Voris played drums in Guinea, Colin Roof restored a 134-year-old sailboat in Ireland, and Rebecca Goldstein wrote a 600-page fantasy novel and took calculus at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

The independent-minded Maryland students and two dozen others gathered at a Unitarian Universalist Church in Annapolis one afternoon this month for an alternative graduation ceremony that is becoming more common across the country as home schooling expands. Now the movement is gaining ground in a crucial arena: college admissions.

Goldstein, 18, of Ellicott City will be a full-time student at UMBC in the fall. Alan Goldstein said his daughter's idiosyncratic education distinguished her from "cookie cutter" applicants from conventional schools and helped her gain entrance into honors programs and win a full scholarship. Others at the June 2 commencement are bound for St. John's College, Hampshire College, the University of Rochester and other liberal arts schools.

Admissions officers accustomed to evaluating class rankings, transcripts and recommendations from professional teachers have long faced challenges in evaluating home-schooled applicants. How much weight should be given to student performance in a class of one or two? Or credits assigned for horseback riding or hiking the Appalachian Trail? Or glowing recommendations from Mom?


This from the Washington Post, Photo by Linda Davidson.

Can D.C. Schools Be Fixed?

On some level, the schools in the District of Columbia are a problem - for all of us. The mind-boggling politics, waste and mismanagement paired with lousy results skew the debate about what constitutes adequate funding in the states. This district has high per pupil expenditures - a little to show for it.

~
After decades of reforms, three out of four students

fall below math standards.

More money is spent running the schools than on teaching.

And urgent repair jobs take more than a year . . .

Kelly Miller Middle School opened its doors in a struggling Northeast Washington neighborhood in 2004, a $35 million showcase for the District's public schools, every classroom equipped with a whiteboard and computers. A particular source of pride was a media production room, where students could broadcast announcements and produce programs to be viewed on TVs wired in each classroom.

Three years later, there have been no broadcasts. The room still needs a last, critical piece of equipment, which fell into a bureaucratic chasm. Until a few days ago, the principal had never been told what the part was or when it was coming. For now, the $150,000 production room is a storage closet for unused books and furniture.

...The District spends $12,979 per pupil each year, ranking it third-highest among the 100 largest districts in the nation. But most of that money does not get to the classroom. D.C. schools rank first in the share of the budget spent on administration, last in spending on teachers and instruction.

Principals reporting dangerous conditions or urgently needed repairs in their buildings wait, on average, 379 days -- a year and two weeks -- for the problems to be fixed...

...Many students and teachers spend their days in an environment hostile to learning. Just over half of teenage students attend schools that meet the District's definition of "persistently dangerous" because of the number of violent crimes, according to an analysis of school reports.

...Eleven city school districts were tested in 2005, including New York, Boston, Atlanta, Cleveland, Miami and Chicago, as well as the District. The Washington Post's analysis of the data shows that D.C. students ranked last or were tied for last on every measure. That is true even when poor children in the District are compared only with poor children in, say, Atlanta.

This from the Washington Post.

High School Core Classes Not Enough, Report Warns

A new study, "Rigor at Risk: Reaffirming Quality in the High School Core Curriculum," by the Iowa City-based testing company ACT Inc. "Students today do not have a reasonable chance of becoming ready for college unless they take a number of additional higher-level" courses beyond the minimum, the report said. Even those who do, it concluded, "are not always likely to be ready for college either."

Using research on the college success of students who took the ACT college entrance test, and comparing their test scores to their high school records, ACT researchers found that many core courses were not carefully constructed or monitored and that students often received good grades in the core courses even if they didn't learn much.

This from the Washington Post.

This Week in ... Reading First

Alexander Russo's collection of quotes from the Reading First hearings.

“This hearing made it pretty clear that there was a very incestuous relationship among a small group of people in the Education Department and among contractors. They were very clearly using this program … for profit.”

"That sounds like a criminal enterprise to me," said Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House education committee, which held a five-hour investigative hearing. "You don't get to override the law," he angrily told a panel of Reading First officials. "But the fact of the matter is that you did."

"I'm very disappointed and saddened by the information that was provided at the hearing today," said former Bush reading advisor G. Reid Lyon, who had been a strong defender of Reading First. "The issues appear much more serious than I had been led to understand."

From This Week in Education.

And this from the Washington Post.

Reading First Paying Off, Education Dept. Says

At some point folks ought to realize that there was nothing magical about the particular programs foisted on the Reading First program by unethical bureaucrats. The "magic" comes from giving teachers the resources they need to raise achievement, which Reading First did. These were BIG grants. Had a balanced literacy approach been advocated, I have no doubt the results would have been as great - or greater.
~
This from Amit R. Paley, Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 19, 2007; Page A19

Students in the Bush administration's embattled $1 billion-a-year reading program have improved an average of about 15 percent on tests measuring fluency over the past five years, according to an analysis of data by the Education Department.

The Reading First program, a central part of the No Child Left Behind law, has been criticized by congressional Democrats who say it has been riddled with conflicts of interests and mismanagement. The House education committee is holding an oversight hearing on the matter Friday.

The data, scheduled to be released today, indicate that students have benefited from the program, which provides grants to improve reading in kindergarten through third grade.

"That's the irony," said John F. Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy. "The program was poorly -- even unethically -- administered at the federal level, yet it seems to be having a positive effect in schools."

Defiant Virginia officials say federal directives for testing students with limited English will only set up students for failure

Meeting Brings No Headway in 'No Child' Stalemate

U.S. education officials and several Virginia school superintendents met yesterday to discuss tests for students with limited English skills under the No Child Left Behind law but made no progress toward solving a standoff over what the local educators call an unacceptable federal mandate.

This from the Washington Post.

National 'Education Standards' Are Not the Answer

A growing bipartisan chorus is singing the praises of national education standards. Former officials of the Reagan, Clinton and George W. Bush administrations have joined the choir, as have both of the major teachers' unions.

But Cato Institute's Andrew Coulson disagrees in the Washington Post.

McLean Students Sue Anti-Cheating Service

Plaintiffs Say Company's Database of Term Papers,

Essays Violates Copyright Laws

Two [Fairfax, Virginia] High School students have launched a court challenge against a California company hired by their school to catch cheaters, claiming the anti-plagiarism service violates copyright laws.

The lawsuit, filed this week in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, seeks $900,000 in damages from the for-profit service known as Turnitin. The service seeks to root out cheaters by comparing student term papers and essays against a database of more than 22 million student papers as well as online sources and electronic archives of journals. In the process, the student papers are added to the database.

This from the Washington Post.

Beware of DIBELS "research-based" claims

This from the Washington Post:

In Montgomery County public schools, the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills test, or DIBELS, is used as a screening tool for kindergarten through second grade students, said Ann Bedford, K-12 curriculum development director.

In Anne Arundel County public schools, DIBELS is used from kindergarten through second grade "as a predictor and as a benchmark to see how kids are doing," said Kim Callison, coordinator for elementary reading and language arts. Teachers use it "for instructional decision-making."

The different purposes point to a heated debate among testing experts about the validity of DIBELS, which is given annually to about 2 million schoolchildren in the United States -- sometimes as often as three times a semester.

The test was created at the University of Oregon and has become prominent in the era of President Bush's Reading First program, which seeks to ensure that every child is able to read well by the third grade.

DIBELS has been championed as "scientifically valid" by administration officials seeking to advance the teaching of reading through an emphasis on phonics.

According to the DIBELS Web site ( http://dibels.uoregon.edu/), the test is a set of standardized, individually administered measures of early literacy development. They are designed to be one-minute "fluency measures used to regularly monitor the development of pre-reading and early reading skills."

Early childhood expert Samuel J. Meisels, president of the Chicago-based Erikson Institute, a graduate school in child development, said DIBELS has "very, very weak validity," and numerous other critics have gone further.

"It is an absurd set of silly little one-minute tests that never get close to measuring what reading is really about -- making sense of print," wrote Kenneth S. Goodman, a professor at the University of Arizona who is a past president of the International Reading Association, in his book "The Truth About DIBELS."

Goodman and others say the mini quizzes focus on only a few specific skills that do not encompass everything needed for comprehensive reading instruction. The emphasis on speed, they say, is misplaced in reading development.

The quizzes include one in which students are supposed to read made-up words as fast as they can, called the Nonsense Word Fluency measure. Another asks students to read short passages out loud as fast as they can.

Critics also say DIBELS is being used as a curriculum guide in many classrooms where teachers, whose jobs may depend on student test scores, are eager to improve their charges' DIBELS scores.

Tests are supposed to have one purpose, but Goodman, Meisels and others say the fact that different classes are using it for different things means many of the results are invalid.

Acing the final...but falling short of graduation

The Washington Post reports: ...colleges that excel in the top tier of basketball — Division I — have dismal graduation rates overall, not just for their players. There are also profound gaps between their graduation rates for white and black students.

Three of the Sweet 16 schools fail to graduate even half of their overall student populations. Fourteen schools have overall black-white male graduation rate gaps of more than 10 percentage points.

At schools in this year's Sweet 16, only 38.5 percent of men's basketball players have left with a diploma in hand. Superstars such as Roy Hibbert and Greg Oden, who can head for greener NBA pastures before completing college, are only a small part of this phenomenon. Even schools with high overall graduation rates fail to graduate many of their players. Georgetown University, for example, graduates 93 percent of its undergraduates but only 47 percent of its men's basketball team. Georgetown also reports a huge gap in the overall graduation rates of white and black men — a 20.4 percentage-point difference.

Butler and Vanderbilt have the best basketball team graduation rates of the Sweet 16. Anyone have a Butler-Vandy final in their office pool? We didn't either

SOURCE: Graduation rates are based on the most recent NCAA data, drawn from players who entered college between 1996 and 1999 and graduated within six years of initial enrollment. See the brackets_GRAPHIC: By Tobey, The Washington Post.

No Retreat on School Reform

This OpEd from Senator Edward Kennedy ran in today's Washington Post. Kennedy, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, was a lead author of the NCLB.

(Emphasis added)

Five years ago, Congress and President Bush made a bold and historic promise. We pledged in the No Child Left Behind Act that the federal government would do all in its power to guarantee every child in America, regardless of race, economic background, language or disability, the opportunity to get a world-class education.

We have made progress toward fulfilling that commitment. Before the act was passed, most states lacked ways to track student progress and teacher effectiveness. Many state accountability requirements had no commitment to improving education for every child. Only four states had approved assessments that tracked and reported the achievement of every group of students in their schools.

Today, all 50 states have standards, assessments and accountability procedures that enable us to track the achievement of every group of students. Every school measures performance, based not on overall student population but on progress in closing achievement gaps and getting all students to meet high standards. Schools across the country are using assessments under the No Child law to identify weaknesses in instruction and areas of need for their students.

These are significant reforms, and we can't simply ignore them. But to fulfill our promise, much more remains to be done.

The No Child Left Behind Act is up for reauthorization. Some in Congress feel the challenge is too great and want to turn back the clock on reform. One Republican proposal would even let states avoid accountability requirements and still receive federal funds.

Most of us in Congress know that a retreat to mediocrity is wrong. To meet the demands of the 21st century, we have to expand opportunity for all and keep our commitment to leaving no child behind.

We know the law has flaws, but we also know that with common-sense changes and adequate resources, we can improve it by building on what we've learned. We owe it to America's children, parents and teachers to reinforce our commitment, not abandon it.

We need to strengthen our academic standards and assessment methods to ensure that students have the knowledge and skills necessary for today's knowledge-based global economy.

We can improve accountability by helping states modernize their curriculums from prekindergarten through high school so that all students graduate with the education they need to pursue a college or technical degree, participate in the workforce or serve in the armed forces. We should also help states develop better assessments to track the progress and growth of all students, including students for whom English is a second language and students with special needs.

We must expand and fortify the teacher workforce. Researchers agree that teacher quality is the most important factor affecting student achievement. Good teachers can make all the difference in closing achievement gaps for low-income and minority students. The same research also shows, however, that our most at-risk students are often taught by the least prepared, least experienced and least qualified teachers. The No Child Left Behind Act made a commitment that every child would be taught by a highly qualified teacher. To reach that goal, a greater federal investment is needed.

Finally, we can't just label schools inadequate. We must help them improve. States and localities need to initiate and support school improvement. Part of the act's promise was that greater accountability would be accompanied by greater support. We knew that federal resources would be critical to achieving the goals. When the law was adopted in 2002, Congress delivered $22 billion to support public education -- an increase of 20 percent over the previous year. This was an unprecedented federal investment. The law promised increased funding levels over the life of its provisions, in step with the increase in targets for student performance. Yet year after year, the federal government has failed to provide the resources that states and school districts need to improve struggling schools. Assessment and accountability without the funding needed to implement change is a recipe for failure.

In the weeks ahead, those opposed to doing what it takes to leave no child behind will do everything in their power to impede our progress. Don't let their rhetoric fool you. Local control means nothing without the resources for improvement. Increasing flexibility without preserving accountability is fiscally irresponsible and educationally unwise.

No Child Left Behind is not just a slogan. It's a national commitment, inspired by our fundamental values and aspirations. It's a promise to do all we can so that every American child receives the high-quality education he or she needs and deserves. We may never achieve that lofty goal, but if we hope to keep America strong and just, prosperous and free, we can never stop trying.

In Fairfax's 'No Child' Fight, A Refusal to Leave Children Behind

Jack Dale is no anti-testing zealot, shielding the little ones from the reality of a competitive world. He's not out there with the activists who believe the No Child Left Behind revolution in American schools has turned education into a grim, mechanistic culture.

But the superintendent of Fairfax County schools, who presides over one of the highest-achieving systems in the land, has taken a stand at the schoolhouse door: "The last thing I'm going to do is subject some third-grader to tears because someone's standing over them saying, 'You must complete [this standardized test], you must complete.' That's not happening. Let them fire me for it."

This from Marc Fisher of the Washington Post.