NCTAF News Digest:
Thursday, July 17, 2008

A Weekly Digest of News Articles & Reports

In this Issue:

--Building a 21st Century Education System

--NCLB Watch

--First-of-its Kind Tool Measures Community Support for Education

--Why Are Public Schools So Bad at Hiring Good Teachers?

--Leaders Put Education on the National Agenda

--Educators Assess 'Open Content' Movement

--Education Plays a Crucial Role in Economic Curriculum

Greetings,

This is the NCTAF News Digest, a timely news service provided to our partner states, commissioners, and the education policy community. This Digest is for the personal educational use of the recipient. At publication time, all links were active. Some publications may require free registration. You may wish to bookmark links for future reference.

First-of-its Kind Tool To Measure Community Support for Public Education, Now Available From Public Education Network

There is growing agreement that in order for all children to achieve at high levels, schools can't do their job alone. They need ‘community support’.  However, until now, there been no formal definition of community support, nor a way to formally assess whether that support exists in a particular community.

Now, a first-of-its-kind comprehensive on-line tool, designed to measure and improve community support for quality public education, is available from Public Education Network.  The tool, the Civic Index for Quality Public Education, identifies and measures the level of involvement across 10 sectors of the community.  The tool was developed based on six years of research, including public opinion polls, focus groups, and expertise in each of the 10 sectors.  

The 10 categories of community support the Index assesses are:

• Education leadership of local elected officials
• Commitment to the values of tolerance and inclusiveness
• Active parents
• Strong civic organizations (parent, philanthropic, civic/religious organizations)
• Utilization of school performance data to improve school quality
• Youth involvement
• Partnerships with higher education
• Knowledge of, and voting for, the school board
• An active business community
• Media coverage

These reflect 10 key conditions that must exist outside of schools—and complement those conditions we know from Standards Based Reform must be present inside of schools—to ensure students success.

The Civic Index contains extensive information, including background and history, key issues, and best practices and models, for each of the 10 categories.  It includes a public opinion poll communities can use to self-assess their community’s support for schools, as well as national poll baseline data from May 2008 against which to compare their results. 

The index also includes numerous resources and toolkits communities can use to ‘improve their score’ in any of the 10 categories, tools to engage the public and the media about their results, and more. 

This is key information that every community serious about improving its schools should know. We encourage everyone to examine the rich materials available on the web-site, and consider how conducting the assessment locally might benefit your community.  The Civic Index is available at:  www.civicindex4education.org.

Why Are Public Schools So Bad at Hiring Good Teachers?

-Slate; July 11, 2008

PS 49 in Queens used to be an average school in New York City's decidedly below-average school system. That was before Anthony Lombardi moved into the principal's office. When Lombardi took charge in 1997, 37 percent of fourth graders read at grade level, compared with nearly 90 percent today; there have also been double-digit improvements in math scores. By 2002, PS 49 made the state's list of most improved schools. If you ask Lombardi how it happened, he'll launch into a well-practiced monologue on the many changes that he brought to PS 49 (an arts program, a new curriculum from Columbia's Teachers College). But he keeps coming back to one highly controversial element of the school's turnaround: getting rid of incompetent teachers. Firing bad teachers may seem like a rather obvious solution, but it requires some gumption to take on a teachers union. And cleaning house isn't necessarily the only answer. There are three basic ways to improve a school's faculty: take greater care in selecting good teachers upfront, throw out the bad ones who are already teaching, and provide training to make current teachers better. In theory, the first two should have more or less the same effect, and it might seem preferable to focus on never hiring unpromising instructors—once entrenched, it's nearly impossible in most places to remove teachers from their union-protected jobs.

But that's assuming we're good at predicting who will teach well in the first place. It turns out we aren't. For instance, in 1997, Los Angeles tripled its hiring of elementary-school teachers following a state-mandated reduction in class size. If L.A. schools had been doing a good job of picking the best teachers among their applicants, then the average quality of new recruits should have gone down when they expanded their ranks—they were hiring from the same pool of applicants, but accepting candidates who would have been rejected in prior years. But as researchers Thomas Kane and Douglas Staiger found, the crop of new teachers didn't perform any worse than the teachers the school had hired in more selective years. This unexpected result is consistent with the findings from dozens of studies analyzing the predictors of teacher quality. Researchers have looked at just about every possible determinant of teaching success, and it seems there's nothing on a prospective teacher's résumé that indicates how he or she will do in the classroom.

To view the full article, click here.

Leaders Put Education on National Agenda
-Market Watch; July 16, 2008

As the issue of education reform is being discussed on the presidential campaign trail, officials from Strong American Schools, a national advocacy campaign, issued the following statement: "I am encouraged that both of the presidential candidates are making education reform a national issue by discussing their plans to strengthen America's schools," said Marc Lampkin, executive director of Strong American Schools. "Developing plans is progress, but it is only the beginning. It is up to America's leaders to enact policies that will pave the way for reform and provide the nation with solutions that every parent, educator and policy-maker can support. Real solutions result in real change. "The harsh reality is that America has slipped to the middle of the pack. A recent Associated Press poll shows that Americans do not appreciate how far the United States has fallen behind the rest of the industrialized world. Currently, American students are being left behind when compared to their international peers. Recent tests show that out of 30 industrialized nations, 24 countries outperformed American students in math and 20 outperformed American students in science.

"The same poll also reveals that Americans understand the powerful link between educational achievement and economic growth. Almost 90 percent of respondents think a country's education system has a large impact on its overall economic prosperity and it seems as though America's leaders are taking notice. "I am pleased America's leaders are beginning to address the nation's uncertain economic footing by laying out their plans to fix the country's schools. They understand the world is flat and that future generations need the skills to ensure they can compete in the global economy. Each child in America deserves a first-class education, including rigorous standards, more time in school and effective teachers. The time to fix our schools is now."

To view the full article, click here.

Educators Assess 'Open Content' Movement

-Education Week; July 16, 2008

Leaving their textbooks to gather dust, Houston middle school teacher Ardith A. Stewart and her students studied science this spring by assembling much of their curriculum on a class “wiki.” The materials included students’ written postings on class topics, and projects, grading rubrics, and discussion questions that Ms. Stewart prepared or obtained from teachers in other parts of Texas and the United States. The students at the 1,200-student Burbank Middle School were able to pursue the state’s learning goals at least as well as if they had read the decade-old textbook, in which “Pluto is still listed as a planet,” Ms. Stewart said. The Texas teacher is part of a small but growing movement of K-12 educators that is latching on to educational resources that are “open,” or free for others to use, change, and republish on Web sites that promote sharing. The open-content movement is fueled partly by digital creation tools that make it easy to create “mash-ups,” or digital medleys of content of various types. Educators and education-oriented groups advocating open content say it saves schools money by spreading the time and expense of developing curricular resources over many contributors.

It also passes on the value that teachers add, when they adapt works originated by others, so other educators can benefit from it. Many adaptions give schools more ways of differentiating instruction, by adding language translations, shifting grade level, and adjusting for reading ability, a special geographic or cultural focus, and other tailorings from the standard curriculum. Ms. Stewart, who is still new to using open content, told other teachers about her experiences at a poster session at the National Educational Computing Conference, held June 29 to July 2, in San Antonio. A colleague at her school, an English teacher, had gone even further in using open content, she said, by incorporating short videos on punctuation into a class-created wiki, a Web site that allows users to add, remove, and sometimes edit the content, for student content and peer grading. “Getting students to [assemble their own educational resources] creates a kind of buy-in,” Ms. Stewart said. “It can’t just be teacher-created, because the kids are going to be bored.”

To view the full article, click here.

Education Plays a Crucial Role in Economic Curriculum

-Kansas City Business Journal; July 17, 2008

Bob Marcusse calls the link between education and economic development a virtuous circle -- good educational programs attract new business, which leads to more financing for schools, which attract more people to an area to work at those companies.  "We and (educators) clearly understand the symbiotic relationship between education and economic development," said Marcusse, CEO of the Kansas City Area Development Council.  Educational resources act as an economic driver in numerous ways. Schools are obviously responsible for producing the work force in any given area, but they also help recruit businesses and residents, foster research that can generate money and spawn new business, and directly funnel money back into the economy through building projects and tourism dollars.  "Education drives everything," said Bob Regnier, president of Bank of Blue Valley. "Pretty much every level of education has an impact. It's not unfair to say Johnson County developed the way it did and was successful because it had an unwavering support for K-12 education." Measuring a region can be done in many ways -- its size, demographics or work force. But the measurement that interests most potential new businesses is the quality of education.

"Companies understand that work force is closely tied to the ability of school systems to produce young people ready to go to work," Marcusse said. When companies are winnowing prospective locales, Marcusse said they want to know statistics such as the percentage of high school graduates, what local SAT scores are, how many college graduates are turned out and what kind of degrees they are receiving.  The statistics requested vary greatly depending on the kind of business asking, said Keith Gary, director of program development for the Kansas City Area Life Sciences Institute Inc. Larger organizations tend to look for bachelor's-level statistics, whereas smaller and newer companies still have a need for research and development and so tend to want master's and doctorate recipients. Other companies look for specific degrees. Alicia Stephens, executive director of the Partnership for Community Growth and Development in Liberty, said companies trying to reduce labor costs know they need to keep turnover low. Most businesses directly connect education with the quality and stability of an area's work force. Because Stephens' organization knows the importance of education in recruiting new companies, it keeps educational information on its Web site, providing a direct link to the Liberty Public School District and William Jewell College. Stephens said it behooves those in education to have a finger on the pulse of local business and to tailor at least some of their offerings accordingly. "If you look at what real estate taxes are on residential property, compared to property taxes business pays, (businesses) pay a lot more in comparison," she said. "Business really does carry a large part of the financial load for school districts, and I think that's why education realizes being involved is a must."

To view the full article, click here.