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May 11, 2011 |
Click here to read printable version |
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| Mainstreaming wisely |
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In a time of budget cuts, mainstreaming of special education (SPED) students is on the rise. On NPR's Talk of the Nation, correspondent Claudio Sanchez spoke of rising acceptance that kids with disabilities can learn and should be mainstreamed, but issues around funding "are huge." When Congress first authorized IDEA, it mandated 40 percent federal funding; it has never surpassed 18 percent. Strapped for cash, states and districts are mainstreaming kids without proper teacher training or responsive individual education plans. One parent caller recommended districts observe what's working in private settings, and that SPED teachers be trained not only in special education, "which has more to do with paperwork," but receive hands-on behavioral training and mentoring. Thomas Hehir of the Harvard Graduate School of Education said not all kids with disabilities require tens of thousands of dollars in resources; there is wide diversity in disabilities. His own research indicates most kids with disabilities do significantly better in inclusive settings, particularly if well supported. Schools that mainstreamed successfully devoted resources to improving their instructional program for all kids, rather than distinguishing between a regular ed, special ed, and bilingual budget. Principals and teachers in these schools also value disability, value the inclusion of children with disabilities, and provide supports in classrooms as well as opportunities for teachers and administrators to problem-solve around issues these children have.
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| They've got standards |
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In an article in The Atlantic Magazine, New York City Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott writes that preparing students simply to graduate from high school no longer suffices. An estimated 63 percent of New York State jobs will require post-secondary education by 2018, which is why, he explains, the city is raising the bar from mere high school graduation to college- and career-readiness. Central to this work is the integration of the Common Core standards, the full implementation of which New York City has set to occur in 2014-15. As the city began to introduce the new standards to all schools, Walcott relates that it worked closely with 1,000 teachers at 100 schools to explore implications for curriculum, assessment, and teaching. Teacher participants created instructional resources for an online Common Core Library, which to date has been accessed by more than 60,000 users from 50 states and 130 countries since its launch in March 2011. Walcott writes that all of the city's efforts around strengthening instruction through the Common Core are intended to develop the critical thinking students will need to compete in the global economy. It is our responsibility, he says, to focus the national discussion and the work of every teacher, principal, and school district in the country on how to prepare students for success in college and careers.
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| Not one and the same |
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In an article in USA TODAY, Richard Whitmire writes that data indicate we should stop lumping blacks and Hispanics together as "students of color," both in terms of how we measure progress and in terms of policy, since the groups have different education needs. Whitmire cites several sets of college-readiness data: Between 2002 and 2011, the percentage of black students taking the ACT who met all readiness benchmarks rose from 3 percent to 4 percent. Among Hispanic students, it rose from 8 percent to 11 percent. In 2010, black students made up 14.6 percent of high school graduates, but only 8.6 percent of AP test-takers. By contrast, Hispanics made up 17 percent of graduates and 16 percent of test-takers. This Hispanic-black separation can be seen within individual school districts; whether on state reading and math tests or district "exit" exams, Hispanic students have been making faster progress. Why? According to Amy Wilkins of the Education Trust, African-American students are more socially and economically isolated, less likely to get strong teachers, and less likely to go to better-funded majority-white schools. Recent research also shows that many successful all-black schools build school culture based on social justice, and employ highly structured curricula that emphasize verbal instruction. Successful Hispanic schools more often base school culture on connections to family, with an unstructured curriculum emphasizing visual instruction. For these and other reasons, Whitmire would dispense with the monolithic "students of color" category.
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| At a price |
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A frequent reform claim is that charter schools deliver higher performance at a lower cost. The performance side of this question has been addressed elsewhere, with mixed findings, but the cost side has received less attention. A new study from the National Education Policy Center compares per-pupil spending of district schools with charters operated by major charter management organizations in New York City, Texas, and Ohio. The researchers assembled three-year data sets including school-level spending per pupil, school size, grade ranges, and populations served for both charters and district schools. For charters, they used government reports of spending, and spending as reported on IRS non-profit filings, and compared spending with that of traditional schools of similar size, serving the same grade levels, and with similar populations. Overall, comparative spending between the two sectors is mixed, with many high-profile network charters outspending similar district schools in New York City and Texas, but other network charters spending less, particularly in Ohio. In New York City, KIPP, Achievement First, and Uncommon Schools outspend ($2,000 to $4,300 per pupil) similar district schools by 30 percent. In Ohio, charters across the board spend less than district schools in the same city. In Texas, some charter chains such as KIPP spend substantially more per pupil than district schools in the same city and serving similar populations, around 30 to 50 percent more based on state-reported expenditures, and 50 to 100 percent more based on IRS filings.
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| Beyond questions of hiring and firing |
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For an article in The Harvard Educational Review, Anthony Bryk, Heather Harding, and Sharon Greenberg convened scholars and practitioners with a range of perspectives to explore questions about the emerging national narrative on effective teachers. The roundtable agreed on general aspects of effective teaching, which include teachers' belief in students' capabilities, personal commitments of time and effort to advance student learning, basic practices around organization and management of classroom activity, routines for promoting student engagement, and norms about classroom work. Specific knowledge and skill around subject matter and how to teach it (i.e., pedagogical content knowledge) were also considered critical to deepen practice. Differences arose around how teacher candidates are recruited, how new teachers are prepared, and what assignments they are asked to undertake. These have implications when considering ways to identify highly effective teachers for reassignment to turnaround schools, and whether they will be equally effective in a different community context. Participants agreed that improvement at scale is not a question of whom to hire or fire, but of developing everyone's capacity to be the most effective teacher possible. We currently have a "non-system" for preparing new teachers, mentoring them, and supporting them to continuously improve. Taken together, the roundtable observations suggest teacher development requires a blend of school-based, professional community and networked learning organized around subject matter, grade levels, and student learning needs. Focus must be directly on novice teachers, and separately on veteran teachers around enhancing knowledge and skill in specific subject matter and how best to teach it.
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| How the next Race is shaping up |
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While he found much to like in the not-yet-public draft guidelines for the intended $5 billion Project Respect federal competitive grant program, Stephen Lazar writes in The New York Times that he also found poorly conceived ideas. Lazar, a Brooklyn teacher, got a preview of the three-pronged reform of the teaching profession that envisions reorganized schools using technology and aides to put more effective teachers in front of more students, and longer school days to facilitate professional growth. To recruit more effective teachers, the draft calls for an expansion of entry points into the profession and a higher bar for tenure. It also calls for increased compensation for career teachers who both stay in the classroom and take on various teacher-leader roles. Lazar applauds establishing advanced teacher roles -- with appropriately high compensation -- as a vital move toward professionalizing teaching. However, he warns that the qualities that make a highly effective teacher aren't necessarily those that make an effective teacher-leader. For teacher-leaders to be effective, they will need significant training and support, he says, and must be able to step in and out of these roles without significant financial penalties, since teachers must replenish themselves through full-time teaching every few years to maintain long-term leadership.
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| Evaluating school leaders |
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The National Center for Comprehensive Teacher Quality has released a practical guide to designing principal evaluation systems, intended to assist states and districts in developing systems of principal evaluation and support, and informed by research on evaluation design and lessons learned through the experience of state/district evaluation designers. The guide has three sections: research and policy context; state accountability and district responsibility in principal-evaluation systems; and development and implementation. The guide discusses eight components critical to states' and districts' success in redesigning principal evaluations: specifying evaluation-system goals, defining principal effectiveness, and establishing standards; securing and sustaining stakeholder investment and cultivating a strategic communication plan; selecting measures; determining evaluation-system structure; selecting and training evaluators; ensuring data integrity and transparency; using evaluation results; and evaluating the system itself. Several assumptions about principal evaluations informed the guide. Evaluations should be as comprehensive as possible while also feasible to implement, as well as accurate, fair, and useful. Principals' work is more varied than that of teachers, and their influence on student achievement is indirect; therefore, evaluation systems should have multiple measures of performance and impact. Finally, principals' leadership can extend throughout and beyond school; therefore, evaluation-system designers should gather multiple stakeholder perspectives on principal performance.
See the guide | Back to top
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| About that pineapple... |
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In the recent furor over a poorly written standardized test question -- which led New York State to remove the question from its test -- much of the uproar was based on bad information, writes Andrew Rotherham in TIME Magazine. Rotherham finds plenty of blame to go around in "Pineapplegate," which he says illuminates bigger problems in education reform. In the first place, The New York Daily News reported on text taken from an anti-testing online message board. The passage was indeed "so poorly written it was inexcusable," but it wasn't the real passage -- it was a test taker's recollection, since questions are not public for security reasons. New York officials are to blame for removing the offending passage from the test, which amounted to guilt in the eyes of the public. The actual passage had been used since 2004 on tests in Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Illinois, New Mexico, and Florida, as well as in Chicago, Fort Worth, and Houston. The passage and questions "performed" as they were supposed to, both in New York and nationally, reliably measuring the ability of students to read the passage and make inferences, with a series of questions differentiating between higher-performing and lower-performing students. Rotherham says the inaccurate version of the reading-comprehension question was ridiculous, and should have aroused skepticism. Instead it was seized upon as proof of a larger point about testing.
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Support for student support
Officials with American Public University System have donated $26,000 to the
Education Alliance, which works to increase both high school graduation and the number of students in West Virginia who are "career-ready" by promoting awareness of education and career training options for students to pursue following high school.
Read more: http://tinyurl.com/chkayrf
Website: www.educationalliance.org
Prepping leaders
The second class has graduated from the Principal Leadership Academy, where assistant principals spend the year learning from business mentors and education experts in preparation for running a school in the future. Launched in the summer of 2010, the Principal Leadership Academy is the result of a partnership between Hamilton County schools, the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce, the Public Education Foundation, and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
Read more: http://www.chattanoogan.com/2012/5/4/225359/Principal-Leadership-Academy-Graduates.aspx
Website: www.pefchattanooga.org
A boon to Northeast Florida
Business leaders and several nonprofit foundations have raised $15 million to benefit education in Northeast Florida, forming the Fund for Quality Education. The fund is being coordinated by the Community Fund, which will work with the Jacksonville Public Education Fund to deploy the funds to three key areas: human capital, or teachers and principals; the central office system; and policy reform.
Read more: http://www.bizjournals.com/jacksonville/news/2012/05/08/business-leaders-nonprofits-raise-15.html
Website: www.jaxpef.org |
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LIFO support
Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton has vetoed a bill that would have ended the "last in, first out" seniority-based system of layoffs governing Minnesota public school teachers.
http://www.startribune.com/politics/statelocal/150109845.html
Gauging core strength
Over the next few weeks, roughly 500,000 Kentucky students in grades three to 12 will take tests in reading, math, science, social studies, and writing based on the Common Core Standards.
http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20120505/NEWS01/304290101/kentucky-schools-testing
Turbulence ahead
Nearly 1 in 6 classroom teaching positions in Pittsburgh will be eliminated this year, and district officials want to consider teacher effectiveness in deciding whom to furlough, not just seniority and certification as mandated by the teacher contract.
http://tinyurl.com/bl93vz9
Lean times indeed
New data from the Minnesota Department of Education show that more than 37 percent of children in Minnesota public schools can't afford to pay for lunch.
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2012/05/07/minnesota-federal-school-lunch-program/
And their clothes fit better, too
A new report says that students with cardiovascular fitness may score up to 5 percent higher on standardized tests than children who are classified as unfit.
http://www.nola.com/education/index.ssf/2012/05/children_who_are_fit_tend_to_d.html
In a word
Asked whether he supported same-sex marriage, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan answered simply, "Yes."
http://tinyurl.com/cnyq7dk
Giving PISA a chance
More than 100 U.S. schools are participating in a new pilot project in which 15-year-olds take a 2½-hour test based on the Program for International Student Assessment.
http://tinyurl.com/c2tnpbx
Surfing on the edge
The U.S. Department of Education will keep Hawaii on "high risk" status for failing to carry out education reforms it promised in return for a $75 million grant from the federal government.
http://www.therepublic.com/view/story/001318ed75dd48a199725afd6f0cc213/HI--Race-to-the-Top/
Third time in three years
NYC teacher union leaders are suing to block personnel decisions related to what the city has been calling a "turnaround" plan at 24 schools.
http://tinyurl.com/bwxgupk |
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| NEW GRANT AND FUNDING INFORMATION |
Dollar General Literacy Foundation: Youth Literacy Grants
Dollar General Literacy Foundation Youth Literacy Grants provide funding to help students who are below grade level or experiencing difficulty reading. Grant funding is provided to assist in the following areas: implementing new or expanding existing literacy programs; purchasing new technology or equipment to support literacy initiatives; and purchasing books, materials or software for literacy programs. Maximum award: $4,000. Eligibility: schools, public libraries, and nonprofit organizations. Deadline: May 16, 2012.
http://www2.dollargeneral.com/dgliteracy/Pages/youth_grants.aspx
Mitsubishi Electric America Foundation: Grants for Youth with Disabilities
Mitsubishi Electric America Foundation Grants Program is dedicated to helping young Americans with disabilities maximize their potential and fully participate in society. The foundation supports organizations and projects within its mission that have broad scope and impact and demonstrate potential for replication at other sites. A major program emphasis is inclusion: enabling young people with disabilities to have full access to educational, vocational and recreational opportunities and to participate alongside their non-disabled peers. Maximum award: $90,000. Eligibility: 501(c)3 organizations. Deadline: June 01, 2012.
http://www.meaf.org/how-to-apply.php
P. Buckley Moss Foundation: Grants for Incorporation of the Arts
The P. Buckley Moss Foundation for Children's Education makes grants for new or evolving programs that integrate the arts into educational programming. The purpose is to aid and support teachers who wish to establish an effective learning tool using the arts in teaching children who learn differently. Maximum award: $1,000. Eligibility: programs for children K-12. Deadline: September 30, 2012.
http://www.mossfoundation.org/national-educators-awards-and-grants
For more grants, see http://www.publiceducation.org/newsblast_grants.asp
"Dear Mr. Sendak, how much does it cost to get to where the wild things are? If it is not expensive, my sister and I would like to spend the summer there."
– From a letter to Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are and other children's books, who died on May 8, 2012
http://tinyurl.com/bqt6aaa
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