Test Scores Often Misused in Policy Decisions

This from the Huffington Post:

Education policies that affect millions of students have long been tied to test scores, but a new paper suggests those scores are regularly misinterpreted.
According to the new research out of Mathematica, a statistical research group, the comparisons sometimes used to judge school performance are more indicative of demographic change than actual learning.

For example: Last week's release of National Assessment of Educational Progress scores led to much finger-pointing about what's working and what isn't in education reform. But according to Mathematica, policy assessments based on raw test data is extremely misleading -- especially because year-to-year comparisons measure different groups of students.

"Every time the NAEP results come out, you see a whole slew of headlines that make you slap your forehead," said Steven Glazerman, an author of the paper and a senior fellow at Mathematica. "You draw all the wrong conclusions over whether some school or district was effective or ineffective based on comparisons that can't be indicators of those changes."

"We had a lot of big changes in DC in 2007," Glazerman continued. "People are trying to render judgments of Michelle Rhee based on the NAEP. That's comparing people who are in the eighth grade in 2010 vs. kids who were in the eighth grade a few years ago. The argument is that this tells you nothing about whether the DC Public Schools were more or less effective. It tells you about the demographic."
Those faulty comparisons, Glazerman said, were obvious to him back in 2001, when he originally wrote the paper. But Glazerman shelved it then because he thought the upcoming implementation of the federal No Child Left Behind act would make it obsolete.

That expectation turned out to be wrong. NCLB, the country's sweeping education law which has been up for authorization since 2007, mandated regular standardized testing in reading and math and punished schools based on those scores. As Glazerman and his coauthor Liz Potamites wrote, severe and correctable errors in the measurement of student performance are often used to make critical education policy decisions associated with the law.

"It made me realize somebody still needs to make these arguments against successive cohort indicators," Glazerman said, referring to the measurement of growth derived from changes in score averages or proficiency rates in the same grade over time. "That's what brought this about." So he picked up the paper again.

NCLB requires states to report on school status through a method known as "Adequate Yearly Progress." It is widely acknowledged that AYP is so ill-defined that it has depicted an overly broad swath of schools as "failing," making it difficult for states to distinguish truly underperforming schools. Glazerman's paper argues NCLB's methods for targeting failing schools are prone to error.

"Don't compare this year's fifth graders with last year's," Glazerman said. "Don't use the NAEP to measure short-term impacts of policies or schools."

The errors primarily stem from looking at the percentage of students proficient in a given subject from one year to the next -- but it measures different groups of students from year to year, leading to false impressions of growth or loss.

Hat tip to the Commish.

House Republicans Take On NCLB

This from Politics K-12:

A partisan ESEA bill in the House would be a big deal, because it would dim the chances that reauthorization would get done before the end of President Barack Obama's first term.

For one thing, further Senate action may depend on the House. U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, the chairman of the Senate education committee, which passed its own version of the ESEA renewal earlier this year with some Republican support, has said he won't seek to advance the bill until the House approves a bipartisan product.

In fact, here's what Harkin had to say about the House's inclination to do a GOP bill:

Given that the HELP Committee was able to come to bipartisan agreement on a strong bill to reauthorize ESEA, I sincerely hope Chairman Kline will reconsider his decision to not pursue a bipartisan bill. There is widespread agreement that No Child Left Behind needs to be fixed for the sake of our nation's children, and I hope we will not abandon the longstanding tradition of bipartisanship when it comes to the education of our kids. Without a bipartisan bill coming out of the House, I believe it would be difficult to find a path forward that will draw the support we need from both sides of the aisle to be able to send a final bill to the President that advances education for America's students.

For another thing, at least until after the election, the finished ESEA product will need to get through the Republican House, the Democratic Senate, and be signed by President Obama to become law.

If Congress can't get its act together, the administration's waivers will become the main vehicle for fixing the controversial law. And the waivers themselves have faced a lot of pushback on Capitol Hill...

Sig Eps Shut Down Following "rape survey"

This from USA TODAY:

A University of Vermont fraternity whose members are accused of circulating a survey that asked who they would like to rape has been closed indefinitely.

The national Sigma Phi Epsilon made the announcement Friday after an internal investigation and lengthy discussions with the university in Burlington.

"Without suggesting that every member had knowledge of this questionnaire, the questions asked in the document are deplorable and absolutely inconsistent with our values," said Brian Warren, executive director of the national fraternity organization based in Richmond, Va.

The national organization has said there's no indication the questionnaire was sanctioned by the fraternity or distributed to the more than 50 members of the Vermont chapter.

A student reported the questionnaire to university officials over the weekend, which led the school and the national organization to suspend the chapter temporarily, pending the investigation.

The school is investigating how widely the survey was circulated, and campus police are trying to determine if any crimes were committed.

Fraternity members say it was a select few individuals who came up with the question, not an act of the chapter as a whole, former Sigma Phi Epsilon member Wes Lewis says.

"We do not endorse that in any way," Lewis says. "We did not send it out to our members." ...

More Cheating Substantiated in NY

This from the NY Daily News:

Brooklyn's Metropolitan Diploma Plus High School investigated over test scores - NY Daily News http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/brooklyn-metropolitan-diploma-high-school-investigated-test-scores-article-1.993195

Mercer Co: Medieval Response to Autistic Child

9 year old tied inside large gym bag

Mom Upset Over Punishment

LEX18.com Mobile Friendly Website http://www.lex18.com/mobile/news/mercer-co-mother-upset-over-son-s-punishment?fb_comment_id=fbc_10150471052064725_20210396_10150472154564725

Hat tip to Susan

Policy Brief: The Evidence on Charter Schools and Test Scores

This from the Albert Shanker Institute:

Charter schools are among the most controversial issues in education today, with much of the debate focused on whether they produce better testing results than comparable regular public schools. Too often, these discussions either rely on a tiny handful of studies, or on raw, cross-sectional testing results, which are not valid measures of school effects.

This policy brief provides an accessible review of the research on charter schools’ testing effects, how their varying impacts might be explained and what this evidence suggests about the ongoing proliferation of these schools.

The public debate about the success and expansion of charter schools often seems to gravitate toward a tiny handful of empirical studies, when there is, in fact, a relatively well-developed literature focused on whether these schools generate larger testing gains among their students relative to their counterparts in comparable regular public schools. This brief reviews this body of evidence, with a focus on high-quality state- and district-level analyses that address, directly or indirectly, three questions:

• Do charter schools produce larger testing gains overall?
• What policies and practices seem to be associated with better performance?
• Can charter schools expand successfully within the same location?

The available research suggests that charter schools’ effects on test score gains vary by location, school/student characteristics and other factors. When there are differences, they tend to be modest. There is tentative evidence suggesting that high-performing charter schools share certain key features, especially private donations, large expansions of school time, tutoring programs and strong discipline policies. Finally, while there may be a role for state/local policies in ensuring quality as charters proliferate, scaling up proven approaches is constrained by the lack of adequate funding, and the few places where charter sectors as a whole have been shown to get very strong results seem to be those in which their presence is more limited. Overall, after more than 20 years of proliferation, charter schools face the same challenges as regular public schools in boosting student achievement, and future research should continue to focus on identifying the policies, practices and other characteristics that help explain the wide variation in their results.

A superintendent calls school reformers’ bluff

This from John Kuhn, (the superintendent of a small public school district in Texas) The Answer Sheet:

As a public school administrator, I have been a steadfast critic of the legacy of No Child Left Behind. But I’ve recently figured out a way that school reformers can get me on their side. It’s very simple.

My concern has long been that the test-based focus of NCLB and the insistence on assigning labels to struggling schools has really been about convincing Americans that public schools are failing in order to justify privatizing the system — to the benefit, of course, of investors, not children. Why think anything else, when “higher standards” are accompanied by slashed education budgets, continuing inequities in school funding, and continued efforts to roll back public sector employee rights?

But reformers such as former Washington D.C. Schools chancellor Michelle Rhee and Sandy Kress — a lawyer who was a principal architect of the school accountability system in Texas (during the administration of then gov. George W. Bush) which served as the basis for NCLB — assure us that all their reforms are really about the children.

They repeatedly call on get teachers and administrators to quit making excuses and hold themselves accountable for the educational outcomes of poor and minority students. Who could be against that?

Well, I’m calling their bluff. Let’s see if it really is all about the children.

NCLB has done one important thing: By disaggregating data, it has forced teachers and administrators like me to agonize over the outcomes of our neediest students.

But after 10 years, it is clear that NCLB’s reforms haven’t spurred miracles, and it is time that the profound problem of inequality is addressed. The deck is stacked against kids who live in poverty not just because their schools are on average worse than others, but also because of the circumstances of their lives when they leave campus.

Itt’s time that we admit that it isn’t just teachers holding back poor and minority students back. The problems are societal.

So I’m calling on reformers — Kress and Rhee included — to lend support for a new kind of reform, one that steps outside the schoolhouse and shares the onus for achievement with more than just teachers.

I’m calling for data-driven equality, modeled on Kress’s work, expanding it to force greater societal changes that will help teachers bridge the achievement gap.

Let the 50 states disaggregate equality-related data by ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status, and let us rank the states and reward them for closing all the societal inequalities that are truly at the heart of our achievement gap. There should be an incentive for voters to elect lawmakers who will craft policies that minimize inequalities.

Let’s have national benchmarks for equality in incarceration, equality in college enrollment, equality in health coverage, equality in income levels, employment rates, rates of drug addiction and child abuse.

Let the states figure out how to close their gaps, but reward results. Citizens in states whose data shows progress toward equality benchmarks should be rewarded with a lower federal income tax rate.

Note that the states can figure out how to get there, so no one can accuse me of urging socialist fixes to inequality. I don’t care how you fix it, just fix it. As a teacher I am calling on society to do its part to save these kids! The kind of plan I am describing leaves mechanisms to the states — it merely incentivizes equality.

We should all insist that our leaders build a system that guarantees the demise of inequity on these shores. Let’s move together toward a broader social accountability, driven by data and gauged by progress toward statistical, measurable, social equality.

Here’s an incentive: As a state moves closer to demonstrable equality according to data, then Washington could reduce the federal income tax rates charged to citizens in that state. Let citizens who opt for equality in so doing opt for lower taxes and more individual liberties. Incentivize equality, and see if kids don’t do better in school.

Let’s publish the data in newspapers. Let’s label all 50 states once a year. Let the states stand on their records and compare their progress. Let’s ensure that no more American Dreams get deferred because of unequal opportunity.

Today some 22 percent of American children live in poverty. Are we going to pretend forever that it is acceptable to ignore the needs of children outside the schoolhouse and blame teachers and principals for everything that happens inside?

As soon as the data shows that the average black student has the same opportunity to live and learn and hope and dream in America as the average white student, and as soon as the data shows that the average poor kid drinks water just as clean and breathes air just as pure as the average rich kid, then educators like me will no longer cry foul when this society sends us children and says: Get them all over the same hurdle.

And so I as an educator now say to a nation exactly what it has said to me for years: No excuses! Just get results.

Disaggregating data forced me to pay attention to minority students. Let’s force society to agonize over equality like teachers now agonize over test scores!

Give me equal children, and I guarantee you that my fellow public school teachers and I will produce graduates who will create a brighter future for this nation than you or I ever dreamed possible.

A KSN&C Wordle

Thanks to Jennifer

The Facts on EKU Aviation

Recently a KSN&C commenter took on EKU's new aviation program suggesting that it was a bad idea and that we'd all be better off if we took those wasted dollars and bought more periodical subscriptions...or something like that. Why should a program of less than 100 flight students exist in the small backwater town of Richmond? What possible benefit does aviation provide such Kentucky towns?

Given the "facts" suggested by the writer, I began to wonder. Why indeed?

So I asked the folks on the fashionable north side of campus if they could provide KSN&C with a response to these allegations. Turns out, Professor Tim Ross, the Chair of Applied Engineering and Technology/Aviation, could do just that. He was reluctant at first, but ultimately decided that misinformation about the new program needed to be corrected. Good for him.

Ross told KSN&C, "EKU has over a dozen planes at the Madison County airport for their aviation program, freshly painted with EKU logo no less."

But it would seem our commenter was mistaken about...almost all of the rest of it.

Eastern Kentucky University does not own any aircraft; they are leased on a year-to-year basis,Ross said.

As per our contract requirements, the aircraft we receive are painted in EKU colors at NO additional cost to the program. Currently, we lease eight aircraft: a Cessna 150, five - Cessna 172’s, a Cessna 172RG and a Piper Seneca III. As the program continues to grow, we will acquire additional aircraft as needed to satisfy the demand. Based on recruitment activities and current trends, it is likely we will need 12 aircraft by July 2012.

So how can the EKU Aviation program be self-sustaining with barely 100 students?

The cost of the flight program is paid for by student flight fees. The Professional Flight program is a cost above and beyond tuition, residence hall, meal plans, etc. Students pay a flight fee for each rating, plus an additional fee for insurance.

So, how did EKU get money for a fleet of planes when the governor is selling the two planes the state owns? Ross, who just may know what he's talking about, corrects the record saying,

The State actually owned seven aircraft. The five that are still owned by the State are: a PA-31_350 Navajo Chieftain, Cessna 182, Cessna 172E, Bell 206L Long Ranger and a Bell 206 Jet Ranger. The Governor did sell two aircraft that were not being used. These aircraft had flown very few hours over the past couple of years and he made a wise decision to sell the aircraft while they still had value. The two aircraft sold by the State were a 1975 Piper Navajo and a single-engine 1967 Cessna Skyhawk.

Our commenter wondered, "how many scholarships, online periodical subscriptions, professional development opportunities this university could have afforded its community instead of paying for airplanes that spend most of their time sitting unused in some hanger at a rural airport which offers almost no navigation, communication, diverse traffic, environmental variance or other high level aviation interaction or experience?

Apparently the answer is none.

The Aviation Professional Flight program has no effect on the number of scholarships, professional development opportunities or online periodical subscriptions. The program is paid for by student flight fees that are in ADDITION to tuition and other university costs and/or fees. As for the aircraft sitting in hangars, most EKU aircraft are tied-down on the ramp to allow local and transient aircraft to utilize the hangar facilities and to reduce the cost to students. The current fleet of aircraft fly approximately 4000 hours per year.

The Madison Airport serves as a crucial component to many local businesses by allowing out of town corporate personnel to visit their Madison County locations. Further, the airport serves as a gateway to future businesses allowing companies to visit and assess the local area. By virtue of this service to various local employers the Madison Airport supports and aids hundreds, if not thousands, of jobs in the Madison County area.

The airport provides pilots with two advanced GPS approaches and is home to 40 Aircraft including a corporate jet. Requests have been made to hangar additional corporate jets, but at this time, the facility is at full capacity. It maintains a monthly average of 30 transient aircraft operations as well as infinite local aviation operations.

To learn more about the Madison Airport facilities and level of technology, Ross suggests visiting the Madison Airport website, AirNav, or Flight Plan.

The commenter, obviously an EKU colleague of mine says, it "Makes you wonder why we are suppose to worry about turning off electronics during winter break when God only knows how much we are paying for airplane maintenance annuals, increased insurance and fuel.”

Well, happily, God is not the only one who knows. Ross did some digging and learned that,

Leaving a computer on overnight consumes approximately .20 cents of electricity per computer. With the number of computers on campus, turning them off over break saves thousands of dollars, not to mention the lights, copiers and other devices all over the EKU campus. In terms of the maintenance, insurance and fuel cost, it is all covered by the student flight fees.

Feeling a bit spunky, perhaps, Ross added that the commenter, "forgot to mention the Flight Instructor’s salary - which is also covered by the flight fees."

Visit the EKU Aviation program webpage to better understand the program operation and flight fees.

Thanks to the commenter for raising the issues, and to Tim Ross for his detailed response.

Why Are the Rich So Interested in Public-School Reform?

They want to remake America's students in their own high-achieving image, but they're overlooking socioeconomics

This from Judith Warner in Time:

It was perhaps inevitable that the political moment that has given birth to the Occupy movement, pitting Main Street against Wall Street and the 99% against the financial elite, would eventually succeed in making some chinks in the armor of the 1%’s favorite feel-good hobby: the school reform movement.

It’s been a good decade now that the direction of school reform has been greatly influenced by a number of highly effective Master (and Mistress) of the Universe types: men and women like Princeton grad Wendy Kopp, the founder of the Teach for America program, her husband, Harvard graduate Richard Barth, who heads up the charter school Knowledge Is Power Program, the hard-charging former D.C. schools chancellor (and Cornell and Harvard grad) Michelle Rhee and the many hedge fund founders who are now investing significant resources in the cause of expanding charter schools. Excoriating the state of America’s union-protected teaching profession and allegedly ossified education schools, they’ve prided themselves upon attracting “the best and the brightest” to the education reform cause, whether by luring recent top college graduates into challenging classrooms or by seducing Harvard Business School or McKinsey-trained numbers-crunchers away from Wall Street to newly lucrative executive positions in educationally themed social entrepreneurship.

The chief promise of their brand of reform — the results of which have been mixed, at best — seems to be that they can remake America’s students in their own high-achieving image. By evaluating all students according to the same sort of testable rubrics that, when aced, propelled the reformers into the Ivy League and beyond, society’s winners seem to believe they can inspire and guide society’s losers, inoculating them against failure with their own habits of success, and forever disproving the depressingly fatalistic ’70s-style liberal idea that things like poverty and poor health care and hunger and a chaotic family life can, indeed, condemn children to school failure.

And yet as schools scramble to keep up with these narrow demands, voices are emerging to suggest that perhaps the rubric-obsessed school reform game, as it’s been played in the Bush and Obama years and funded and dressed-up by the well-heeled Organization Kids, is itself perhaps due for a philosophical shake-up.

Earlier this year, S. Paul Reville, the Massachusetts Secretary of Education, blogged in Education Week that reformers need now to think beyond the numbers and “admit that closing achievement gaps is not as simple as adopting a set of standards, accountability and instructional improvement strategies.” In Massachusetts, he wrote, “We have set the nation’s highest standards, been tough on accountability and invested billions in building school capacity, yet we still see a very strong correlation between socioeconomic background and educational achievement and attainment. It is now clear that unless and until we make a more active effort to mitigate the impediments to learning that are commonly associated with poverty, we will still be faced with large numbers of children who are either unable to come to school or so distracted as not to be able to be attentive and supply effort when they get there.” Reville called for “wraparound services” that would allow schools to provide students with a “healthy platform” from which they could begin to work on learning...

Thousands of JCPS students' test scores go to wrong addresses

This from the Courier-Journal:

Test scores for thousands of Jefferson County Public Schools students were delivered to the wrong addresses and the district is urging parents who received an incorrect report in the mail to return it to the sender or destroy it.

The error involved the eighth-grade EXPLORE test, which was administered this fall to all of the district’s eighth graders, said Lauren Roberts, a JCPS spokeswoman.

The district learned about the error late Wednesday, when parents began calling the district to say they had received test scores for a child other than their own.

Roberts said 6,500 to 7,000 student scores may have been involved. “We regret the inconvenience this has caused to parents,” she said.

Bryan Station Middle School Principal, 2 Teachers, Out Over Student-related Incident

Fayette County Schools Superintendent Tom Shelton is investigating allegations made against Bryan Station Middle School Principal Fred Snodgrass and two teachers, according to WTVQ.

The allegations are reportedly of bullying-type "behavior toward a student."

Snodgrass and the teachers three were put on paid leave, but were not suspended.



Hat tip to Lance

Is Gingrich an Edu-Flip-Flopper?

This from Politics K-12:

The GOP's presidential frontrunner, Newt Gingrich, has one of the longest records on K-12 policy in the Republican field. His views on education have gotten a lot of attention lately. But they have been—and seem to still be—all over the map.

For instance, Gingrich said in a recent debate that he likes Race to the Top, the grant competition run by the feds that rewards states for embracing certain reform priorities, including the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

But he's also said he'd like to "shrink" the Education Department. And in 1995, as Speaker of the House, he backed an effort to scrap the department altogether.

Back in 2008, Gingrich, and then GOP presidential nominee Sen. John McCain of Arizona,endorsed the mission statement of the Education Equality Project, which calls for strong accountability at all levels, including the school and district level.

Gingrich even appeared with Rev. Al Sharpton—and then-incoming Secretary of Education Arne Duncan—at a school in Washington, D.C., during President Barack Obama's inauguration to push the Education Equality Project's mission...

...which frames education as a civil right, supports charter schools, promotes accountability and professional pay for teachers...

Signatories of the EEP's manifesto, including Gingrich must,

Insist that our elected officials confront and address head-on crucial issues that created this crisis: teachers' contracts and state policies that keep ineffective teachers in classrooms and too often make it nearly impossible to get our best teachers paired up with the students who most need them; school funding mechanisms that ignore the reality that students are supposed to be the primary focus of schools; and enrollment policies that consign poor, minority students to our lowest-performing schools.

That sounds like a tall order, particularly the part about confronting "state policies." It doesn't seem to be in line with where many Republicans on Capitol Hill are today when it comes to K-12. So, do these ideas square with a significantly slimmed-down Education Department? And does Gingrich's record on K-12 make him an education-flip-flopper...or someone with nuanced, evolving positions?

 

This from the Daily Koz:

A Snapshot of Republican Candidates' Positions on Education

Do the Republican presidential hopefuls have a plan that is likely to improve education in America, or are they dealing with irrelevant side issues that are not likely to make much impact at your child's school?

This from The Huffington Post:

On EDUCATION:

Bachmann: Abolish Education Department. Says federal government doesn't have a role in education; jurisdiction is with state and local governments.

Gingrich: Shrink Education Department. But supported Obama administration's $4 billion Race to the Top grant competition for states.

Huntsman: "No Child Left Behind hasn't worked for this country. It ought to be done away with." Favors more school choice.

Paul: Abolish the Education Department and end the federal role in education.

Perry: Turned down federal education aid to Texas worth up to $700 million because he saw it as imposing national standards on Texas schools. Opposed No Child Left Behind law.

Romney: Supported No Child Left Behind law. Once favored shutting Education Department, later saw its value in "holding down the interests of the teachers' unions."

Santorum: Voted for No Child Left Behind law. Wants "significantly" smaller Education Department but not its elimination.

NCLB Waiver Plans Offer Hodgepodge of Grading Systems

This from Education Week:

States seeking waivers under the No Child Left Behind Act are hoping to replace what is widely considered an outdated, but consistent, school accountability regime with a hodgepodge of complex school grading systems that are as diverse as the states themselves.

That’s the picture that emerged from an Education Week analysis of waiver proposals submitted last month to the U.S. Department of Education by 11 states, whose proposals offer insight into what the next generation of state-led accountability looks like.

 Interactive Map    

The applications for federal flexibility under the NCLB law, the current version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, show 11 states aiming for vastly different student-achievement goals, with a jumble of strategies to improve low-performing schools. Even the factors that make up a school’s rating will vary greatly by state, rendering it virtually impossible to compare student performance from one state to another.

But one area most of the 11 states seem to agree on: a hallmark of the law—the emphasis on traditional subgroups of at-risk students, such as minority children, those with special needs, and English-language learners—should be scaled back....

Outlines Detailed

Eleven states are seeking flexibility under the No Child Left Behind Act.

Details of each proposal are found here.

Read the Applications

Download the plans of the 11 states that applied for NCLB waivers (in PDF format).

• Colorado
• Florida
• Georgia
• Indiana
• Kentucky
• Massachusetts
• Minnesota
• New Jersey
• New Mexico
• Oklahoma
• Tennessee

Why Education Innovation Tends to Crash and Burn

Hess doesn't seem to mind privatizing public educational enterprises but his thoughts on the diffusion of innovation - what educators call scaling - are worth a look. He is trying to answer questions about "why it's so hard to scale promising programs, models, pilots, and notions."

This from Rick Hess at Straight Up:

There are...big sets of obstacles when it comes to "scaling" innovation. First, innovative models often rely on tough-to-replicate elements. Second, there are key structural conditions that impede efforts to grow even more replicable models.

First, seemingly successful pilots often depend more on the conditions that attend their adoption and execution than the model itself. Pilots tend to benefit from a number of advantages that disappear when these efforts start to "scale," namely:

• Philanthropic support- Dollars are often available to fund new initiatives. Such funding allows CTE or remedial programs to offer services and opportunities that prove unsustainable when the program expands to new sites that lack the extra resources.

• Expertise- Pilot efforts are, by design, promoted and supported by the experts who have conceived of the model (or intervention). They benefit from intense, sustained, loving attention by those who are most knowledgeable about and invested in the idea. Later sites have less access to that talent.

• Enthusiasm- Pilot efforts are inevitably launched where the leadership (and/or the faculty or instructors) are enthusiastic enough about the venture that they're willing to invest all the energy necessary to launch it. That passion and sense of ownership are enormously helpful in making early iterations successful.

• Accommodating policies- Pilot efforts are frequently launched where they are because the local leadership has the wherewithal to get the waivers, leeway, or support to launch the effort. So a new academic program benefits from special treatment when it comes to staffing rules or funding. When the same models are implemented in less accommodating settings, the models frequently fail to deliver the anticipated results.

Even promising models run afoul of several structural impediments, including:
• Reliance on entrenched institutions
• Lack of price competition
• Lack of outcome comparability
• Discomfort with for-profits

Hess recommends,

• Put a premium on innovations that scale easily- The most difficult innovations to scale are those that rely heavily on talent and complex implementation. The easiest to scale are those that leverage technology or other tools to provide services with few moving parts. For instance, Amazon.com or Facebook are remarkably easy to scale, because most of the quality of the experience is almost identical for thousands or even millions of users. Similarly, Tutor.com is easier to scale than is a program which depends on recruiting and training local tutors.

• Resist the notion that innovative models can readily be housed in existing institutions- Established institutions have established norms, cultures, policies, and routines. No matter how energetic and enthusiastic are those who would adopt innovative models, the difficulties of maneuvering around these realities makes innovation a bad bet. Innovations may be adopted successfully here or there when backed by committed leadership, but they can be quickly bent into unrecognizable forms when adopted by others that are less committed.

• Focus on cost and outcomes in allocating public dollars- Encouraging the successful scaling of innovative models is going to depend in large part on whether the larger environment supports such ventures. An environment dominated by formula funding, hefty subsidies, and few useful measures of quality is designed to accommodate the status quo. Changing that requires changing public policies at the federal, state, and local levels.

All of this helps to explain why "innovation" is a term of endearment in an Apple store, but more likely to sound like an epithet in the nearest teacher workroom or faculty lounge. Resolving this state of affairs will be hard, but probably no harder than watching waves of promising new ideas crash and burn.

Setting a Higher Standard for Teacher Entry While Paying Less

Iowa Foreshadows Kentucky's Plan

20%, including minority candidates, likely to be turned away

from Teacher Education Programs

In the not-too-distant future teacher education candidates in Kentucky will be required to have a 3.0 GPA for admission to teacher education programs. What is the potential impact on the teaching force? Will the field of education be able to attract the brightest and best when the competition for salaries is still being won by private industry?

As Nicholas Kristof argued in the New York Times earlier this year, the idea the teachers are overpaid is a "pernicious fallacy."

Until a few decades ago, employment discrimination perversely strengthened our teaching force. Brilliant women became elementary school teachers, because better jobs weren’t open to them. It was profoundly unfair, but the discrimination did benefit America’s children.

These days, brilliant women become surgeons and investment bankers — and 47 percent of America’s kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers come from the bottom one-third of their college classes (as measured by SAT scores). The figure is from a study by McKinsey & Company, “Closing the Talent Gap.”

Changes in relative pay have reinforced the problem. In 1970, in New York City, a newly minted teacher at a public school earned about $2,000 less in salary than a starting lawyer at a prominent law firm. These days the lawyer takes home, including bonus, $115,000 more than the teacher, the McKinsey study found.

This from State EdWatch:

Securing a place in the teaching profession will become a bit tougher in Iowa, if Gov. Terry Branstad and the state's school chief, Jason Glass, have their way.

Branstad, a Republican, has proposed requiring a minimum 3.0 grade-point average for admission to teacher-education colleges in the state, as part of a package of proposed changes to school policy unveiled earlier this year, many of which would require legislative approval.

He's also called for creating a more rigorous screening process for candidates for teacher education programs; establishing new teacher-education scholarships with the goal of luring more educators into high-need subjects; requiring teachers to take more subject-specific coursework and classes in core academic subjects; and placing more of an emphasis on in-class training for aspiring teachers, and giving them access to mentors, among other changes. Selective admissions requirements for aspiring educators—coupled with ongoing training and support—is a staple of some high-performing countries' systems, as Ed Week has reported.

The governor has also called for overhauling the compensation system for educators more broadly, and raising starting teacher pay—though he recently said he wants to hold off on trying to get that piece through the legislature, as he seeks to build support for the plan.

This week the Des Moines Register takes an interesting look at the implications of the minimum GPA requirement.

By the newspaper's analysis, one of five teachers would have been turned away last year at teachers' colleges in the state, had the requirement been in effect. The Register was able to obtain information on applicants from three public university programs, though the vast majority of private institutions refused to provide it.

Critics of Branstad's proposal say it would exclude teacher-candidates who may have struggled as undergraduates but could still be effective teachers; others wonder if it will exclude a higher number of minority candidates, the paper noted.

Kristof concludes,

Starting teacher pay, which now averages $39,000, would have to rise to $65,000 to fill most new teaching positions in high-needs schools with graduates from the top third of their classes, the McKinsey study found. That would be a bargain.

Indeed, it makes sense to cut corners elsewhere to boost teacher salaries. Research suggests that students would benefit from a tradeoff of better teachers but worse teacher-student ratios. Thus there are growing calls for a Japanese model of larger classes, but with outstanding, respected, well-paid teachers.

Teaching is unusual among the professions in that it pays poorly but has strong union protections and lockstep wage increases. It’s a factory model of compensation, and critics are right to fault it. But the bottom line is that we should pay teachers more, not less — and that politicians who falsely lambaste teachers as greedy are simply making it more difficult to attract the kind of above-average teachers our above-average children deserve.

Do Teachers Really Come From The "Bottom Third" Of College Graduates?

This from the Shanker Blog:

The conventional wisdom among many education commentators is that U.S. public school teachers “come from the bottom third” of their classes. Most recently, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg took this talking point a step further, and asserted at a press conference last week that teachers are drawn from the bottom 20 percent of graduates.

All of this is supposed to imply that the U.S. has a serious problem with the “quality” of applicants to the profession.

Despite the ubiquity of the “bottom third” and similar arguments (which are sometimes phrased as massive generalizations, with no reference to actual proportions), it’s unclear how many of those who offer them know what specifically they refer to (e.g., GPA, SAT/ACT, college rank, etc.). This is especially important since so many of these measurable characteristics are not associated with future test-based effectiveness in the classroom, while those that are are only modestly so.

Still, given how often it is used, as well as the fact that it is always useful to understand and examine the characteristics of the teacher labor supply, it’s worth taking a quick look at where the “bottom third” claim comes from and what it might or might not mean.

Most people who put forth this assertion cite one of two sources, both from the McKinsey & Company consulting organization. The first is an influential 2007 report, (based on Condition of Education” (CoE) report, (2002 edition) which simply notes that “we are now recruiting our teachers from the bottom third of high school students going to college.” The authors fail to specify how “bottom third” is defined, or whether their data refer to graduates who planned to teach versus those who actually got a job (the latter method is, of course, far preferable)...

The second standard source for the “bottom third” claims is more clear and well-documented. It is a subsequent McKinsey report (2010), one which doesn’t rely on questionable interpretations from indirect sources, but rather its own analysis (based on SAT/ACT scores, specifically those of 1999 graduates whose first job was teaching). That report claims, “The U.S. attracts most of its teachers from the bottom two-thirds of college classes, with nearly half coming from the bottom third.” ...

Why the differences? Because these studies are looking at different groups of teachers. In the CoE data, it’s 1993 graduates who had taught by 1997 (four years later), while the data used in the second McKinsey include 1999 graduates who, in 2001 (two years later), said their first job was (or is) teaching. In other words, each set of results is based on two different cohorts of college graduates, who are also identified in different ways, at different points after graduation.

Neither sample is necessarily representative of the teacher workforce as a whole, or of prior and subsequent cohorts.

Overall, then, the blanket assertion that teachers are coming from the “bottom third” of graduates is, at best, an incomplete picture. It’s certainly true that, when the terciles are defined in terms of SAT/ACT scores, there is consistent evidence that new teachers are disproportionately represented in this group (see here and here for examples from the academic literature). But the differences are not always as large as is sometimes suggested. They vary by year and sample identification, as well as by other variables, such as school-level characteristics (e.g., poorer schools) and teacher characteristics such as race and gender. (And, by the way, their relative standing as graduates is based on tests that most took in high school.)

Finally, it’s very important to note that the “bottom-“ and “top third” may not be a particularly good conceptualization of either the problem or the solution. The connection between SAT/ACT scores and future (test-based) effectiveness, though it’s among the only associations strong enough to be discerned statistically, is still a highly imprecise predictor of “quality.” There’s some useful information there, but it’s unclear whether it merits the high-profile attention it receives.**

There’s no question that we should try and get as many highly-qualified applicants as possible into the classroom (though, again, how to do so is an open question). But we should also be very careful about oversimplifying the issue of aggregate teacher quality – and making sweeping statements about their qualifications based on a limited body of evidence – for the sake of intuitive, easy-to-understand talking points.

How the Teacher Stole Christmas

This from the Huffington Post (video):

Elementary School Teacher, 

Tells Students Santa Isn't Real

It wasn't the Grinch who stole Christmas for a class of second graders at George W. Miller Elementary School in Nanuet, N.Y. Instead, it was their teacher, who allegedly told students there was no Santa Claus during a geography lesson about the North Pole.

"It's outrageous that a teacher would strip a child of their innocence and try and demystify something," Margaret Fernandez, 59, told the New York Post as she picked up her grandchild from kindergarten.

On Saturday, the Post reported that the teacher, 58-year-old Leatrice Ann Eng, had since apologized to the parents of each student in the class in a string of phone calls to the students' homes.

As for any other action that might be taken in response to the incident, district Superintendent Mark McNeill said discussions were ongoing, though he had little else to say.

"This matter is being discussed internally and it would be inappropriate for me to comment further," McNeill told the Journal News.

Last week, the Christmas spirit took another blow when Fox News Chicago anchor Robin Robinson denied the existence of Santa Claus to her cohost, Bob Sirott.

"Stop trying to convince your kids that Santa is Santa," Robinson said on live television. "That's why they have these high expectations. They know you can't afford it, so what do they do? Just ask some man in a red suit. There is no Santa."

After viewers flooded the station with angry emails and phone calls, the anchor later issued an apology during the station's opinion segment, "The Talker."

"It was careless and callous to say ... what I said, in what could've been mixed company," Robinson said. "So many kids don't get to be children, that for those who do get to live the wonder and magic of Christmas, I would never spoil it intentionally. So I sincerely apologize. We have certainly heard how you feel about my mistake, and since The Talker is about opinions: here we go."

Too Little, Too Late?

This from Sara Mead in The New Republic:

Obama’s Education Legacy For America’s Youngest Kids:

Too Little, Too Late

IN THE SPRING of 2011, after years of disappointments, early childhood education advocates became hopeful that the Obama administration was finally ready to adopt a more aggressive federal role in promoting early learning. Of the $700 million included in the 2011 federal budget for Race to the Top (RTT), the administration chose to use the majority—$500 million—to fund a new early childhood-focused RTT competition called Early Learning Challenge. Taking a page from RTT, Early Learning Challenge was designed to award funds on a competitive basis to states with the best plans to measurably improve children’s readiness for school. Some early childhood advocates were moved to euphoria. The First Five Years Fund, a national early childhood advocacy group, called the new grant program “an unprecedented opportunity to make dramatic progress” in improving early learning. White House Education Advisor Roberto Rodriguez told reporters that “We believe this [iteration of] Race to the Top can have the same kind of impact” as the original.

Even before new grant program got out the gate, however, it quickly became clear that its rollout was poorly timed. The administration’s prior RTT program achieved its greatest successes by spurring state legislatures to enact major policy changes—adopting federal standards, raising charter school caps, establishing new teacher evaluation systems—in order to better position themselves to win large pots of grant money. More than 20 states passed legislation to improve their RTT chances.

Early Learning Challenge, by contrast, has spurred only one state, Florida, to take legislative action. That’s because state legislatures weren’t made aware of the program’s details until it was too late. Because congressional budget negotiations dragged on until April, the administration didn’t announce the ELC program until late May and details of the program emerged only in July, after most state legislatures had adjourned. Moreover, the relatively modest amount of money in play (up to $100 million for the largest states) simply wasn’t enough to entice legislatures back into session.

The program has also been marred by a half-hearted public relations campaign. With state legislatures failing take up the issue, and Obama not finding much time to talk about it either, Early Learning Challenge has failed to spark the kind of national debate around early childhood education that Race to the Top did for school reform...

If We Tested School Board Members...

Over the years, finding a Kentucky school board member (or Trustee) who wasn't very smart was a fairly simple task. Well-educated Trustees were apparently the exception. But things have changed over the decades, and today's school board members are generally among the better educated citizens in most communities.

But what would happen if they had to be tested the same way students are - say, by taking the 10th grade exams? Well, that's never going to happen, right?

In Florida, it did.

This from Marion Brady in the Answer Sheet and here:

When an adult took standardized tests forced on kids

A longtime friend on the school board of one of the largest school systems in America did something that few public servants are willing to do. He took versions of his state’s high-stakes standardized math and reading tests for 10th graders, and said he’d make his scores public.

By any reasonable measure, my friend is a success. His now-grown kids are well-educated. He has a big house in a good part of town. Paid-for condo in the Caribbean. Influential friends. Lots of frequent flyer miles. Enough time of his own to give serious attention to his school board responsibilities. The margins of his electoral wins and his good relationships with administrators and teachers testify to his openness to dialogue and willingness to listen.

He called me the morning he took the test to say he was sure he hadn’t done well, but had to wait for the results.

Turns out the board member was quite a fella.

The man in question is Rick Roach, who is in his fourth four-year term representing District 3 on the Board of Education in Orange County, Fl., a public school system with 180,000 students. Roach took a version of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, commonly known as the FCAT, earlier this year...

Roach, the father of five children and grandfather of two, was a teacher, counselor and coach in Orange County for 14 years. He was first elected to the board in 1998 and has been reelected three times. A resident of Orange County for three decades, he has a bachelor of science degree in education and two masters degrees: in education and educational psychology. He has trained over 18,000 educators in classroom management and course delivery skills in six eastern states over the last 25 years....

Now in his 13th year on the board, he had considered taking the test for a while as he began to increasingly question whether the results really reflected a student’s ability. He was finally pushed to do it earlier this year, he said, after a board meeting at which the chairman listed five goals, and one of them caught his attention for being so unremarkable.

Roach said: ‘He [the chairman] said that by 2013 or 2014, he wanted 50 percent of the 10th graders reading at grade level....I’m thinking, ‘That’s horrible.’ Right now it’s 39 percent of our kids reading at grade level in 10th grade. I have to tell you that I’ve never believed that that many kids can’t read at that level. Never ever believed it. I have five kids of my own. None of them were superstars at school but they could read well, and these kids today can read too.

“So I was thinking, ‘What are they taking that tells them they can’t read? What is this test? Our kids do okay on the eighth grade test and on the fifth grade test and then they get stupid in the 10th grade?”...

Here's his take on the experience.

“I won’t beat around the bush. The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system, that’s a ‘D,’ and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction.

“It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate. I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities....

“It might be argued that I’ve been out of school too long, that if I’d actuall y been in the 10th grade prior to taking the test, the material would have been fresh. But doesn’t that miss the point? A test that can determine a student’s future life chances should surely relate in some practical way to the requirements of life. I can’t see how that could possibly be true of the test I took.”

Lu Went Too

Updated:

A parent's group in Maryland joined those who have complained about the Pearson Company's sponsorship of trips for school administrators to exotic lands.

This from the Parents' Coalition of Montgomery County, Maryland:

In July of 2010, Superintendent Jerry Weast, Fairfax Superintendent Jack Dale, Loudon Superintendent Edgar Hatrick, and Alleghany Superintendent David Cox took a trip to Australia...

A video on The Pearson Foundation's YouTube site shows the attendees on the Australia trip, along with the fabulous locations and sites that they were treated to during this 12 day junket...

But the star of the show was from Kentucky.


When the New York Times first raised the issue of whether Pearson-funded "junkets" to international locations constituted a conflict of interest for Kentucky Education Commissioner Terry Holliday, the Commissioner was quick to point out that he had no role in the subsequent selection of Pearson as Kentucky's vendor for the new testing system. Well-established testing company CTB/McGraw Hill had submitted the lowest bid to run Kentucky’s testing program, but educational publisher Pearson, whose bid was $2 million higher, was selected anyway.

According to a report by PBS's Frontline there are four major players in the American testing industry - which has grown by more than 3,000 percent in recent decades with a big boost from the Obama administration's infusion of $400 million to help states develop and administer tests. The big four include three test makers and one test scorer.

• Harcourt Educational Measurement [40% market share in test design includes the SAT-9]: Parent company also owns Lexis-Nexis, Variety, and Holt, Rinehart Winston.
• CTB McGraw-Hill [40% market share in test design includes Terra Nova (CTBS)] Parent company also owns Standard & Poor's, Business Week magazine, and four TV stations.
• Riverside Publishing [20% market share in test design includes the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS)]: Parent company also owns Houghton Mifflin, Motown Records and Universal Pictures.
  
• NCS Pearson [Leading scorer of standardized tests] Parent company also owns Madame Tussaud's wax museum, The Economist, The Financial Times, the Penguin Book Company, and the Family Education Network. Minnesota-based NCS was founded in 1962 and was acquired by Pearson in September 2000 for $2.5 billion. Pearson reported $629.5 million in sales in 2000, and assessments and testing services accounted for $202.4 million of that, or 32 percent.

Lisa Gross told the Times the state’s decision “was based on best value and not simply a low bid.” She said a committee of local and state officials ran the selection process.

To whatever extent Pearson saw the trips as a business strategy - it apparently worked like a charm in Kentucky.

So what does it mean that Young was on the committee that recommended the higher bidder?

She was just one of a group of 13 people who reviewed the proposals, and her rankings/scores of each vendor had no greater or lesser weight than anyone else’s. But if it would have been a problem for the Commissioner to accept a trip, had he been making the recommendation to the state board of education, is it a problem that Young participated and recommended?

Gross told KSN&C, "...we don't believe there’s a conflict."

Members of the review team were:

• Artavia Acklin – Shelby County (Instructional Coach)
• Brad Darnall – Calloway County (Teacher)
• Barry Goley – Logan County (English as a Second Language/Limited English Proficiency)
• Tonya Hayre – Laurel County (Teacher)
• Kevin Hill – Kentucky Department of Education
• Tim Huddleston – Paducah Independent (Principal)
• Carla Manning – Mason County (Assistant Principal)
• LaMesa Marks Johns – Jefferson County (Principal)
• Shauna Patton – Johnson County (District Assessment Coordinator)
• Michele Reynolds – Fayette County (District Assessment Coordinator)
• Joe Tinius – Bowling Green Independent (Superintendent)
• Bill Twyman – Kentucky Board of Education
• Lu Young – Jessamine County (Superintendent)

Lu Young's Aussie Tweets

Had a great afternoon by the pool with Andi and Donna - what a beautiful day! I leave for Australia one week from today - can't wait!
30 Jun 10

6 days before leaving for Australia and counting!
1 Jul 10

5 more days 'til Australia. Am redundant yet?
2 Jul 10

Packing for Australia. I'm out of here tomorrow!
6 Jul 10

Have arrived safely in Melbourne - kudos to Qantas for a great flight experience. A real class act!
8 Jul 10

Spent a wonderful evening on a restaurant tram seeing the sights of Melbourne - the Aussies are delightful. No worries, mates!
9 Jul 10

We have 1 more free day in Melbourne before real works starts tomorrow - a beautiful winter day down under. Saw a kookaburra yesterday.
10 Jul 10

Today's our last day in Melbourne, off to Canberra tomorrow and Sydney on Wednesday for the remainder of the trip. Learning LOTS - gidday!
11 Jul 10

Fascinating meetings today with Australian education leaders about natl standards and assessment.
11 Jul 10

Had lunch at Australian Parliament in Canberra and saw at least a dozen kangaroos. Also ended up as "Lu with 'roo poo on shoe!"
13 Jul 10

It is REALLY winter in Canberra today. Fortunately, we're off to Sydney this pm. Met with federal ed officials today.
13 Jul 10

Had an awe-inspiring tour of Sydney this a.m. The Opera House is spectacular - a must-see!
14 Jul 10

Leaving Australia today - what an amazing country! Thanks to all the hospitable Aussies we've met along the way!
17 Jul 10

Seattle High School Student Walkout and March Against Budget Cuts

This from Seattle Education:

After the arrest of Jesse Hagopian, a teacher at Garfield High School, on Monday, November 28th, the students at Garfield organized a march to Seattle City Hall in response to their teacher’s arrest and to his demands to fully fund education in the state of Washington...

The students of Garfield High School issued a statement on their Facebook page. It goes as follows:

We are Washington State Public Schools students tired of the constant cuts to our education. We are the people who have been affected most by these cuts, and we are showing that we care. For too long, this stat…e’s budget has been balanced on the backs of its students. Apparently, our representatives in Olympia have forgotten that the Washington Constitution says that funding education is this state’s “paramount duty”. This is a student voice reminding our legislature of that fact. And also of this one: We are this country’s future. We will vote. And we will hold them accountable.

We will walk out of school on Wednesday the 30th of November at 12:30 PM to march to City Hall and tell the world that we are fed up with this lack of funding for education. Although we acknowledge the irony of missing a free education in order to protest, we realize that sometimes unorthodox methods must be utilized in order to gain attention. To all Garfield students and students from any other Seattle schools, public and private, we hope you will join us tomorrow as we stand up against a constant barrage of cuts and mistreatment, and converge upon City Hall to make our voices heard.

We have two primary goals we hope to accomplish:

-We want to stop the constant cuts to education that have hurt our school and other schools in the state.

-We want to insert a student voice into the political discourse in issues regarding education.

Following are our grievances, things that have already happened as a result of past cuts:

-Students who want full schedules have been denied them due to a lack of teachers. Many seniors were denied a science class due to a complete lack of state science funding.

-Other academic courses, such as advanced math classes, have been repeatedly cut from our school.

-The removal of summer school and night school has removed resources that allowed many students to graduate on time, therefore effectively increasing the amount the state must spend on those students.

The King County Superior Court ruled that Washington State is already failing to fulfill its constitutional obligations to fully fund public education. As Will Rogers said: “when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”

Cuts to the State’s education budget haven’t helped in the past, and they can only hurt for the future.

Quick Hits

Should arts-based learning be part of STEM education?:  Support appears to be growing for efforts to incorporate the arts into science, technology, engineering and math teaching, transforming STEM into STEAM. The concept is being considered at both the federal and local levels, with some advocates saying art and design can help drive innovation in STEM fields. "We believe there is a powerful opportunity here to use the arts and arts-based learning to spark transformational change in science education," said Harvey Seifter, director of the Art of Science Learning. (Education Week)

Turnaround efforts are paying off for once-failing N.C. school:  The once-struggling Cochrane Middle School in North Carolina has been transformed over the past five years through an intense turnaround process that has included a new focus on professional development for teachers and a commitment to higher standards for students. Teachers at the school crafted 10 classroom techniques, now known as the Cochrane Non-Negotiables, and a partnership with Texas Instruments has led to increased math scores among students. (David Markus' blog)

 

Relationships matter: In the never-ending discussion around school improvement and reform, the role of relationships rarely gets a mention. However the role relationships play -- as research shows us and children tell us -- is key. Whether it be inside the classroom, outside the school, between peers, teachers or families, relationships are key to student success and growth. Relationships matter. They matter not only for grades, but for engagement. They matter not only for understanding but for providing meaning and context. They matter not only for reducing risk-taking behavior but for connectedness and belonging. They matter not only for attendance but for reducing dropout. They matter not only for minority students but for all students. They matter not only for students but for staff. They matter not only for schools but for communities. Relationships matter and the sooner we appreciate it the better off our children, schools and communities will be. Relationships matter. (Huffington Post)

More schools are teaching students about digital citizenship:  More schools in the U.S. are incorporating digital citizenship and Internet safety into classroom lessons as students' use of technology continues to grow. Among other things, schools now are teaching students about the importance of their digital footprint. "All of the drama, all of the growing up, all of the growing pains, all of the things we know happen in high school now also happen digitally," said principal Chris Lehmann of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. (USA TODAY)

Majority of school districts have students enrolled in distance learning:  Roughly 55% of public-school districts in the U.S. report having students enrolled in some form of distance-learning courses, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. However, about 75% of respondents said the distance-learning programs in use were organized by outside groups, independent of the districts themselves, the NCES report found. (T.H.E. Journal)

Do common core standards focus too little on social sciences?:  Some experts believe the Common Core State Standards being implemented in many states do not give enough priority to social, economic and behavioral-science subjects. Increasing focus on math and language arts as part of No Child Left Behind and, now, as part of the standards leaves little time for such subjects as anthropology, sociology, geography and civics. Some argue these types of social sciences can help students connect lessons in subjects, such as math and reading, to real-life applications. (Education Week)

Caught Between Common Standards and Assessments: When it comes to common standards, we are pretty much past Adoption Season. (Remember? That was a period of about a year and half in which all but four states adopted the standards.) Now we're in Implementation Season. But if states' and districts' next step is putting the standards into practice, that work isn't exactly flowing across the nation in a rolling wave. To be clear, there is some very aggressive work going on out there to implement the new standards. But we're also seeing a good number of questions, hesitations, dilemmas, and delays about implementation. A recent case in point was a study by the Center on Education Policy, which found roughly half of school districts reporting that they aren't really moving ahead in key areas—for a variety of reasons—when it comes to common-standards implementation. (Curriculum Matters)

Report finds lower teacher salaries in poor schools:  Teacher salaries are lower in thousands of high-poverty U.S. schools, compared with those in more affluent districts, according to a new report from the U.S. Education Department. "Low-income students need extra support and resources to succeed, but in far too many places, policies for assigning teachers and allocating resources are perpetuating the problem rather than solving it," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said. (The New York Times) 

Middle-school interventions may reduce sexual harassment, violence:  A new study funded by the Justice Department suggests a number of low-cost education programs that may help reduce dating violence and peer-to-peer sexual harassment in middle schools. The most effective methods included a combination of classroom-based and building-wide interventions, from student discussions about personal boundaries to poster campaigns throughout the school. "The importance of this work is that we have scientific evidence that early intervention lessens later violence," the study's co-author Bruce Taylor said. (Harvard Education Letter)

Teacher involvement remains important, even in virtual schools: Tennessee online teacher Kevin Dockery teaches Advanced Placement government and U.S. history from a laptop computer at his home. Though he no longer deals with school fights or the logistics of the school copy machine, Dockery still logs time tracking students' progress and helping students stay on course. "Just like it's not for every student, it's not for every teacher," virtual-school coordinator Barbra Thoeming said. "They have to have a high level of involvement -- which may sound odd because you don't see your students that often." (The Tennessean)

Public, school libraries embrace noise, technology:  A new breed of public and school libraries aims to engage teens by using the latest technology tools, from game consoles to multimedia music- and video-production software. Amid budget cuts, the new, cacophonous spaces seek to keep libraries relevant for students and, in the school setting, teach them to use digital media to better understand academic topics. "People are uncomfortable because it's a 'big C' change, but I don't think there's any stopping it," said school librarian Jennifer Hubert Swan. (The Hechinger Report), (Education Week)

What's next as Kansas City, Mo., schools prepare to lose accreditation:  The long-struggling Kansas City, Mo., school district is set to lose its state accreditation on Jan. 1, with many surrounding school districts poised to possibly manage an influx of new students who leave their former schools. Meanwhile, the question of how soon students will be permitted to transfer into other districts -- and whether the Kansas City schools will be responsible for their tuition costs -- is being considered by the courts. (Education Week)

Hundreds of N.Y. principals oppose use of test scores in evaluations:  In New York, at least 658 principals have signed a letter opposing the state's use of students' standardized test scores to evaluate teachers and principals. Part of New York's successful bid for Race to the Top funding involved new evaluations, of which 20% to 40% is based on state tests. Principals and others argue that the evaluations were rushed and state testing data is unreliable. (The New York Times)

Why some principals signed the petition against the N.Y. evaluation system: New York principals offer their reasons for signing a petition against using student test scores in teacher and principal evaluations. Many question the adoption of an approach they argue has not been tested adequately or proven to be an effective way to ensure accountability. "Test scores are not the true identity of a student nor should they be used to determine the ability of a teacher," writes Neil Connolly, principal at Carle Place Middle/High School. (SchoolBook blog)

Teach for America establishes roots in New Orleans:  Former Teach for America personnel hold many important education positions in New Orleans, this article details. They hold not only positions in teaching, but also in administration and policy-making. Most TFA alumni do not have formal education training, and some in Louisiana question whether schools rely too heavily on the organization. (The Times-Picayune)

Education system in Finland shows where America lags:  Finland mixes student-teacher collaboration and rigorous evaluation for an education system regarded as a global model, and the U.S. can learn from it, according to this article. Finnish students consistently score high on international exams, with a small achievement gap, despite spending less money per student. The U.S. also could learn from Finland's teacher recruitment and retention policies, the article notes. (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

Silberman Goes One to One

"I think we're going to get to a point

where we have to say 'enough is enough'

on the reductions for our kids...

We have to figure out new revenue streams

...just to bring us back to where we were.

-- Stu Silberman

New Prichard Committee honcho Stu Silberman sat down with Bill Goodman on KET last week. Among other topics, he took on funding.

Silberman is the former superintendent of Daviess County and Fayette County Public Schools, and has recently been named the executive director of the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence. He grew up
in Long Island, NY attended college at U T Chattanooga and taught chemistry and physics in Chattanooga before becoming the Daviess Co Supt for 9 years. He became Fayette's County's 5th Superintendent in a 3 year period and completed 7 years of a ten year commitment before retiring. He brought with him what he called his mantra, "It's about Kids."He shares his views on Kentucky education and what would he like to accomplish in his new post.

Snippets:


"We wouldn't be where we are today ...if it wasn't for the Prichard Committee"


"the umbrella of poverty covers the achievement gap"

"We have to figure out a way to support teachers in [closing the achievement gap]"

Funding is definitely an issue.

"As much as our governor and our legislators have tried to protect[schools] in the reductions, schools have been hit hard." The base has stayed the same but the supports around our teachers and our kids ...are eroding away."

We're going to pay the price for lack of funding in preschool.

Kentucky has had no textbooks money for 3 years.


"At some point in the near future, we're going to have to take another look at the SEEK Formula. The SEEK Formula really did its job to bring some equity to funding across our state, and its gotten to a point where we are going to have to revisit that.  However, I think the bigger issue is the adequacy issue."

"The SEEK Formula does a pretty good job of assuring there's equity, but if there's no money to go around the places that don't have a local tax base really get hurt the hardest."