NCTAF News Digest:

A Weekly Digest of News Articles & Reports

Thursday, June 5, 2008

In this Issue:

--NCLB Watch

--P-16 Councils Bring All Tiers of Education to the Table

--Teachers Endure Major Tests

--Young Minds, Fast Times: The Twenty-First-Century Digital Learner

--School District OKs Plan to Halt Social Promotion

--The Rise of 'Virtual Schools' Divides Education World

--Educators Told Schools Face a Dropout Crisis

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.

P-16 Councils Bring All Tiers of Education to the Table

-Education Week; June 5, 2008

"Is this the right vehicle?” It’s the question you might ask yourself at the truck-rental office right before a do-it-yourself cross-country move: You want something big enough to haul everything, but nimble enough to stay on twisty roads. The engine has to be powerful enough to make it up steep hills, but not so powerful as to burn up your budget. You know where you need to go; you just aren’t sure what you need to get there. Similar considerations are vexing education officials nationwide as they struggle to find the best design for a bandwagon that can carry precollegiate and higher education toward a common goal: a more seamless continuum that better prepares students for life, work, and further study. A favored vehicle in policy circles is the “P-16” or “P-20” council—state committees that bring together people from the various levels of education, ranging from preschool (hence the “P”) to college and beyond (years 16 to 20), and that often include representatives from state government, business, and the community.

Under the definition used by the Denver-based Education Commission of the States, there are now 40 such councils nationwide; 38 states have at least one—up from 25 councils in 2000. In addition, four states without councils have governance structures that serve functions similar to those of P-16 councils. Only eight states and the District of Columbia have neither a P-16 council nor a governance structure that mimics one.

The stakes for greater cross-sector cooperation are high: A growing proportion of U.S. jobs require at least some college. But mismatched curricula, stubbornly high remediation rates for incoming college students, and other sticking points keep K-12 students from going the distance.The question is whether P-16 councils represent a real solution to such problems, or are merely another paper-generating exercise. Like the states that spawned the P-16 and P-20 councils, no two councils are exactly alike. Some of the groups are chaired by governors, while others are led by education officials. Some have statutory authority and line-item budgets. Others get by on their leaders’ say-so and budget scraps. Some could squeeze into a minivan, while others would require a chartered bus—or two.

To view the full article, click here.

Teachers Endure Major Tests
-The Baltimore Sun; June 1, 2008

All those devoted to teaching deserve praise and respect, and none more than those who teach where all the school lunches are free, where expectations have been too low for too long, and where every hand goes up when the guest speaker asks: "How many of you know a family member who's in prison?" Ed Morman was there, in a classroom at Patapsco Elementary/Middle School in Baltimore's Cherry Hill, when a former prison warden asked that question. Every hand went up again when the kids were asked if they'd ever been inside a prison for a visit. Morman wasn't surprised. No one who pays attention to life in Baltimore should have been. "These are lovely kids," Morman says during a conversation about his brief experience as a math teacher. "And it breaks my heart." What breaks his heart: Too many of the kids behind the clock on academic achievement, too many from poverty, too many from homes where good grades have never been valued, and too many too noisy and unruly, making teaching them almost impossible. Morman wishes there were more moments like the one "when eighth-grader Alexis jumped up and whooped that she understood something her math teacher had explained." "There was at least one day a week when I felt like I was really accomplishing something," Morman says.

But that wasn't enough. Teachers who can handle the behavior issues and still inspire Baltimore's children to learn - those are special people, Morman says. He wasn't one of them, by his own estimation. A native New Yorker, he had been a librarian at medical institutions, including Johns Hopkins, for many years. Last spring, looking for a new job, he decided to give teaching a try and enrolled in the Baltimore City Teaching Residency, an attractive program for professionals who seek a career change and who wish to "positively impact the lives of the students who need them the most." By the time I knew Morman had stepped into teaching, he was stepping out of it. In April, he sent an e-mail to numerous friends announcing his resignation. He'd found another position - as librarian with the National Federation of the Blind. "The [teaching] job was the hardest I've had, by far," Morman wrote, "but the potential for job satisfaction was far greater than I'd ever felt before. I told the kids that I quit teaching because I needed to make more money. This isn't true. ... I quit because of the stress I felt. The main cause of the stress was the kids themselves. I could never rise above the feeling of humiliation that I felt each day when I tried to address 20 or 25 kids and might find none of them paying attention to me. I seethed when I asked a student to stop talking and heard the response, 'Get out of my face.' So often I stood in the classroom wishing I could be anywhere else."

To view the full article, click here.

Young Minds, Fast Times: The Twenty-First Century Digital Learner

-Edutopia; June 2008

I give presentations to educators at every level, all around the world. All of the teachers are earnestly trying to adapt their educational system to the twenty-first century. During my talks, however, I typically look out at oceans of white hair. Never -- I can't even say rarely -- is a kid in sight or invited to the party. It is a measure of the malaise of our educational system that these old folk -- smart and experienced as they may be -- think they can, by themselves and without the input of the people they're trying to teach, design the future of education. One of the strangest things in this age of young people's empowerment is how little input our students have into their own education and its future. Kids who out of school control large sums of money and have huge choices on how they spend it have almost no choices at all about how they are educated -- they are, for the most part, just herded into classrooms and told what to do and when to do it. Unlike in the corporate world, where businesses spend tens of millions researching what their consumers really want, when it comes to how we structure and organize our kids' education, we generally don't make the slightest attempt to listen to, or even care, what students think about how they are taught. This is unacceptable and untenable. It's also dangerous. We treat our students the way we treated women before suffrage -- their opinions have no weight.

But just as we now insist that women have an equal voice in politics, work, and other domains, we will, I predict, begin accepting and insisting that students have an equal voice in their own education. Or else our students will drop out (as they are doing), shoot at us (ditto), sue us, riot, or worse. So, whenever and wherever I speak, I do my best to bring my own students to the meetings. I ask my hosts to select a panel of a half-dozen or so kids of different grade levels, genders, and abilities to talk with me and the audience. I ask only that the students be articulate and willing to speak their minds in front of an audience of educators. Some groups embrace the idea enthusiastically; others are wary. A few tell me they "just can't find" kids -- and this, from teachers -- or cite some rule that prevents kids from being there. Nonetheless, I persist, both hoping for an effective panel and believing that the group will provide a model for integrating student input about their education into schooling and planning.

To view the full article, click here.

School District OKs Plan to Halt Social Promotion

-Union Tribune; May 31, 2008

The San Diego school district is once again preparing to crack down on social promotion, the practice of advancing students from grade to grade regardless of their academic achievement. Under the direction of Superintendent Terry Grier, the district is establishing interventions and summer school for struggling students in crucial grade levels.Students in first, third and eighth grades who are at risk of failing to meet grade-level standards will get extra help during the year, including after-hours tutoring. If they continue to miss expectations, they will repeat a grade unless they go to summer school.The interventions are similar to those implemented by former Superintendent Alan Bersin in his Blueprint for Student Success program. The new anti-retention plan, a $1.4 million policy, was approved by a divided school board Tuesday night – with trustees Luis Acle and Shelia Jackson voting no – and will begin next school year.Under the plan, teachers will assess students several times per year to determine who is at risk of retention. The goal is to begin helping struggling students early to avoid summer school and retention.

First-and third-graders who fail to meet grade-level standards in literacy and mathematics will go to summer school in an effort to join their peers in the fall. Those who leave summer school having met grade-level expectations in at least one subject will be “promoted with support,” meaning they will go on to the next grade in special classes and be required to attend after-school sessions. Those who complete summer school without reaching grade-level expectations in math and literacy will be retained and enrolled in accelerated classes.Students will not be held back more than twice. Eighth-graders with two or more F's in core subjects – English, math, history, social studies or science – will be required to attend summer school and go on to ninth-grade classes that come with extra support. Students who skip summer school will be retained unless they score high enough on standardized tests. Holding students back is almost always controversial. Parents can appeal student retentions, but the decisions will be overturned only if they are “determined to be a direct result of clerical or mechanical mistake, fraud, bad faith or incompetency.”

To view the full article, click here.

The Rise of 'Virtual Schools' Divides Education World

-MinnPost.com; June 2, 2008

High school junior Alexis Anderson lives on her family's 59-acre hobby farm in Lindstrom but goes to school in Spring Lake Park, some 30 miles away. Only, she doesn't leave home. When the orange school bus lumbers by, she turns to her kitchen computer and logs on to Spring Lake Park Online — a virtual high school — to study biology, world history, geometry and art. Like an estimated 1 million other Americans in kindergarten through 12th grade who take classes online, Anderson is having education her way. For Anderson and 4,500 other Minnesota kids, the computer screen is the classroom. Some say Anderson and her peers are harbingers of change in America's public schools and that computerized learning is about to transform public education both inside and outside the classroom. Others raise red flags, expressing concern that the for-profit sector is tapping on the public schoolhouse door. Because online school programs know no geographic boundaries, they create keen competition for students that could endanger some districts' finances and futures.
Yet, online and computerized learning programs appear to be leveling the playing field between rich and poor school districts and between rural and urban students. Supporters tout it as customized education, a way of making the world every student's classroom by catering to individual learning styles and answering the needs of kids who march to the beat of a different drummer.  For Anderson, 17, who says she is a B-student, online learning takes her away from "the gross stuff in public school, the smoking and sex'' her Jehovah's Witnesses parents feared she'd be exposed to. Although a small number of students are going to school online, the numbers are rapidly growing, raising this question: Will computers someday replace teachers?

To view the full article, click here.

Educators Told Schools Face a Dropout Crisis

-Anchorage Daily News; June 1, 2008

SEATTLE -- High school educators have been told in Seattle that dropout rates for minority students, especially Native Americans, are at crisis levels in Alaska and five other Northwest states. "Our success rate with Native children starts in kindergarten, or in preschool," said Sally Brownfield, the facilitator for the Center for the Improvement of Student Learning in Washington. The high school educators from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Alaska, Montana and Wyoming met at the University of Washington on Friday for a one-day conference. A panel of experts told the educators after years of talking about how students need to be properly prepared for school, it's time for schools to start preparing for students. Brownfield said that's when Native American children first come in contact with "foreign" cultures. The panelists, made up in part of representatives of the state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, advocated resources be redirected to help troubled students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

The "Civil Rights Project" conference, a national effort by UCLA, catered to educators serving Native American and Alaska Native students in the six states. Some districts fail to report missing students as dropouts. "The statistics school districts turn in aren't checked," said Gary Orfield, co-director of UCLA's Civil Rights Project. Poverty seems directly tied to graduation rates, according to data presented at the conference. High schools serving low-income areas have much lower "promoting power."

To view the full article, click here.