Morning Announcements: September 9, 2010

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation plans to invest up to $250 million over the next eight years to develop "next-generation instructional tools" that will help states and districts implement the common core state standards, the foundation said in its annual report.

Some charter schools are struggling to tap into the federal money provided by the Education Jobs Fund bill because their teachers are employees of a charter management organization or an educational management organization, not a school district according to Education Week.

According to the Sacramento Bee, California charter schools are growing in popularity.

When every teacher is rated 'great,' students suffer, according to the USA Today editorial board. Click here to read the opposing view by A.J. Duffy, president of United Teachers Los Angeles.

In today's Wall Street Journal, columnist William McGurn writes, "When it comes to shaking up the status quo, however, the most potent education reform may be the one that's too often considered a side issue: pension reform."

Morning Announcements: September 8, 2010

In an op-ed in the Providence Journal, Massachusetts secretary of education Paul Reville writes, “By adopting the Common Core, we’ve set a clearer, higher target for educational success. Now it’s time to see that all our children reach it.”

The Governor of Michigan would like lawmakers to require the school year to last more than 180 days.

The Columbus Dispatch editorial board asks “How can overall better performance go along with fewer kids graduating?”

Stateline.org takes a look at how states are grappling with a provision in the fine print of the Education Jobs Fund bill.

The New York Times profiles a teacher-led schools around the country.

Inside Higher Ed looks at why rural community colleges have done significantly better than their urban and suburban counterparts in the percentage increase of associate degrees awarded to women and minorities in science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines.

The New York Times magazine asks, "When Does Holding Teachers Accountable Go Too Far?"

The Washington Post writes about how D.C. schools might be affected if Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee decides to move on.

More than half of Hawaii's public school teachers leave within five years of being hired, according to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.

Race to the Top of the Tests

While the $3.5 billion Race to the Top program has captured the attention of much of the education world, a smaller grant program might have an equal if not greater impact on schools across the United States. On September 2, the U.S. Education Department awarded a total of $330 million to two consortia of states to develop new assessment systems. If these consortia fulfill their ambitious plans, states will soon transform the way they test students in dramatic ways.

And most of the country will be affected. The larger of the two consortia, the Smarter, Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC), led by Washington State, consists of 31 states; the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), led by Florida, consists of 26 states. (The total adds up to more than 50 because states at this point can serve as “advisory” states without committing to a consortium. Several states, including Alaska, Texas, and Virginia, are part of neither.)

In Principles for a Common Assessment System, a brief released in February, the Alliance for Excellent Education argued that current state testing systems place too much emphasis on a single measure, the end-of-year tests, and called for comprehensive systems that can better support instruction and learning. The two consortia’s plans are aligned with many of the principles outlined in that brief.

Friday Report Round-Up

Here is this week's report round-up:

• School Districts’ Perspectives on the Economic Stimulus Package: School Improvement Grants Present Uncertainty and Opportunity by the Center on Education Policy. This report highlights the extent to which school districts have experience with implementing the four federally-mandated school reform models intended to improve the nation’s lowest performing 5% of schools.
• Problems with the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers by the Economic Policy Institute. This briefing paper finds that although standardized test scores of students are one piece of information for school leaders to use to make judgments about teacher effectiveness, such scores should be only a part of an overall comprehensive evaluation.
• America’s Best (and Worst) Cities for School Reform: Attracting Entrepreneurs and Change Agents from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. This study finds that New Orleans, Washington, D.C. and New York are among the top cities that have cultivated a healthy environment for school reform to flourish.
• Stuck in the Middle by Education Next. According to this study of New York City students, kids who move from elementary school to middle school experience a bigger dip in math and language arts achievement than their K-8 counterparts do, and they tend to be absent more often.
• Next Generation Charter Schools: Meeting the Needs of Latino and English Language Learners from the Center for American Progress and the National Council of La Raza. According to this report, successful charter school practices for serving Latino and ELL students can serve as object lessons for school districts to improve academic achievement.
• Back to School Statistics from the National Center for Education Statistics. This fact sheet provides a quick snapshot of 2010 back to school statistics such as public school enrollment numbers, expenditures, employment figures, etc.
• State Tax Revenues Are Slowly Rebounding from The Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government at the University at Albany. According to this report, state tax revenues across the country are starting to rebound, with April-June of this year bringing a second consecutive quarter of growth.
• College Admission Tests as Measures of High School Accountability from the Indiana University Center for Evaluation and Education Policy. This study cautions that the growing trend of using college admission and placement exams in measuring high school student achievement may in some cases produce misleading and inappropriate results.
  
  
  

Morning Announcements: September 3, 2010

Washington Post columnist Jay Matthews discusses how students’ struggle to apply their AP or International Baccalaureate credits towards their college degrees.

At a new experimental school in Michigan, two teachers and an executive administrator will lead instead of a principal and assistant principal.

Michigan receives nearly $82.7 million in school improvement grants for twenty-eight of the lowest-performing schools in the state.

Read more about the federal aid money that is being awarded to two state coalitions for the development of new assessments in the New York Times, Miami Herald, and the Boston Globe.

Under a plan that the North Carolina Board of Education has been developing for months, most high school juniors will be required to take the ACT and the state will pay the students’ test registration fees.

Why Our Kids (and I) Are Still Full of Hope

As a teacher, I loved every single second with my seventh graders—even on those days that resembled an emotional roller coaster without seatbelts.  But I left teaching after three years because I had become so frustrated with the policies outside of my classroom such as poor teacher preparation, zero tolerance policies, crumbling facilities, and superficial evaluations that affected my students once they stepped outside my door.  At the time, the education system just didn’t seem to inspire hope in teachers and students.  I almost became cynical and just plain angry, but I knew that I didn’t want to become another burnt-out teacher. 

A perfect example of the education system not working correctly occurred a couple of years ago with a student named Uriel, who had the biggest grin and spikiest hair.  He was pulled out during the middle of high-stakes test because his brother, diagnosed with leukemia, was rushed to the hospital. He didn’t finish the test. Uriel didn’t have it very easy at home – he helped out by selling oranges at the local flea market and his mother was constantly under the threat of deportation.  The next year, he was put into the remedial reading class against my protests because of his incomplete, but low, test scores.  His remediation teacher ignored his needs and wrote his boredom off as defiance and misbehavior, leading to a lot of suspensions.  He’d been wronged.  Yet, in spite of his brother’s health troubles, the system failure, the insecurity, and the terrible school, he consoled me and told me that things will get better.  Students are more generous and forgiving with the failures around them, which made this situation all the sadder.   I had promised Uriel that things would be better in high school.  I didn’t know what else to say at the time, but I knew that I had to do something to make sure that I kept my promise—that things could be better for him and other students when they got to high school.

Morning Announcements: September 2, 2010

Today the U.S. Department of Education awarded two state coalitions a total of $330 million in federal aid for the design of new assessment systems aligned to the recently developed common-core standards.

A nonprofit group in Connecticut has developed a five-year plan to change cultural views toward math and science and get students to take personal responsibility for their own learning.

A new report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute identifies nine cities, including New Orleans, Washington, D.C. and New York, as having the most reform friendly  ecosystems in the country.

The Houston Chronicle reports that in an attempt to ensure that public school districts aren’t disguising high school dropouts, the Texas Education Agency is conducting an audit of students who withdrew under the auspice of home schooling.

Register for the Alliance's Sept. 8 Webinar on High School Graduation Rates and Graduation Rate Reporting

Fewer than ten years ago, the assumption based on official federal sources was that the national public high school graduation rate was roughly 85 percent. However, a number of nationally respected, politically diverse researchers began questioning the accuracy of that rate and developed alternative estimation methods. These experts all independently came to similar conclusions that more accurately placed the national graduation rate around 70 percent and the rate for historically disadvantaged minority students close to 50 percent.

Investments in statewide longitudinal data systems are making it possible to track individual students throughout their educational career. And, for the first time, states will be required to report exactly how many students graduate on time with a regular diploma at the end of the 2010-11 school year. For the 2011-12 school year, states will be required to set graduation rate goals and be held accountable for making improvements toward those goals.

To learn more about the new reporting requirements for high school graduation rates, as well as some of the policies that states have put into place, join Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia, for the latest of the Alliance's interactive webinars on what is happening in Washington, DC on education reform. 

Morning Announcements: September 1, 2010

The New York Times takes a look at value-added modeling, a method to calculate the value teachers add to their students' achievement, based on changes in test scores from year to year and how the students perform compared with others in their grade.

An article in Washington Monthly takes a look at College Dropout Factories. To read more about high school dropout factories, check out the Alliance's brief, Prioritizing the Nation's Lowest-Performing High Schools.

In Massachusetts the first virtual school in the state to serve students from kindergarten through high school opens on Thursday.

In North Dakota, the Commission on Education Improvement considers an alternative teacher compensation system that would be based on multiple factors, such as (but not limited to) pay for hard-to-staff positions, added knowledge or skills/professional development, student educational growth or added responsibilities like mentoring, coaching or instructional leadership.

The New York Education Department sent school districts a memo strongly recommending that they not ask for information that might reveal the immigration status of enrolling students.

The Obama administration announced a $1.8 billion agreement to help Louisiana's Recovery School District and Orleans Parish School Board to rebuild and rehabilitate buildings that were damaged by the floodwaters as a result of Hurricane Katrina.

Transforming Teaching and Learning

While 36 states plus the District of Columbia have moved to adopt the common core state standards, to fundamentally improve teacher and leader effectiveness, the federal government will need to provide support for their implementation.  Setting standards is only the first step in an improvement process; states must implement assessments that measure whether students are meeting the standards, develop or acquire curricular materials aligned to the standards, and, most importantly, must prepare teachers to teach to the new standards. The federal government can have an important role in improving teacher education by leveraging resources and creating incentives to enable states to develop systems consistent with expectations for student learning.  

Traditional licensure exams have come under attack for their lack of authenticity and ability to measure whether teachers will be effective in the classroom. On the other hand, studies show that that rigorous, validated, standards-based performance measures, such as those used by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, can be a powerful tool for capturing how teaching is enacted in a complex context and for providing feedback for continuous improvement. These measures use multiple elements such as direct observations and videotapes, analyses of student work, and measures of student learning. They can serve a number of policy purposes—to strengthen the quality of preparation and credentialing programs, induction systems, professional learning and licensure, and compensation and advancement. The federal government could support the development of robust teacher performance assessments that serve as a key component of evaluation systems along with the use of growth measures for student achievement.