Afternoon Announcements: October 26, 2011

In a special report to The Hill, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan writes, “Over the past two weeks, the Senate has held two votes on President Obama’s American Jobs Act. Both times, every Senate Republican voted to block a bill that would put more money in the pockets of middle-class families and keep hundreds of thousands of teachers in the classroom, instead of in unemployment lines. Our nation’s schools are facing the toughest fiscal pressures in our lifetime. … The path to prosperity, the way to win the future, is to invest wisely in schools, remembering that children get only one chance at an education.” Read the full special report.

WRAL.com reports that the number of students attending secondary school around the world is increasing dramatically and governments are struggling to meet the rising demand, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, according to a U.N. report released Tuesday.

A U.S. News & World Report blog post discusses the use of cell phones by teachers in the classroom.

The Wall Street Journal covers a new report that finds nearly two-thirds of states have overhauled policies in the last two years to tighten oversight of teachers, using techniques including tying teacher evaluations to student test scores, linking their pay to performance or making it tougher to earn tenure.

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Afternoon Announcements: October 13, 2011

Education Week reports that the sprawling Elementary and Secondary Education Act reauthorization bill put forward yesterday by the chairman of the Senate education committee envisions major programs both for literacy and STEM education. “This is an important provision, and we are pleased to see it included in the draft bill,” said Phillip Lovell, vice president for federal advocacy at the Alliance for Excellent Education. “This proposal takes a comprehensive approach to strengthening literacy by recognizing that students need literacy support and instruction throughout their education.”

Today, the Washington Post highlights education historian Diane Ravitch’s recent blog post “Why Finland’s schools are great (by doing what we don’t).”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution writes about the Alliance’s recently released report on improving teacher quality by improving the induction of teachers, citing “In 1987–88, the most common experience level of teachers was 15 years. Twenty years later, it was one year.”

Louisiana leads the nation in high school dropouts, as according to the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana, one of every six students in the state fails to make it to graduation. “In Louisiana, which has one of the highest poverty rates in the country, the financial impact of the dropout rate is significant. The Alliance for Excellent Education … estimates that dropouts from Louisiana’s class of 2008 could cost the state roughly $6.9 billion in lost wages over their lifetimes,” says the report. (via WWLTV.com in Louisiana)

According to the Huffington Post, YouTube has a Teacher’s Channel that provides teachers with instructions on how to make and upload videos and how to incorporate existing videos in their classroom instruction.

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What Lessons Can Finland Teach?

Ever since Finland first ranked at the top of all nations on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the Scandinavian country has attracted a great deal of attention from educators around the world, including in the United States. And, inevitably, this attention has sparked a backlash: Finland is too small, too homogeneous, too affluent to say anything to the U.S., where schools are large, diverse, and populated with large numbers of students in poverty. All true (except that Finland is more diverse than many Americans believe). Yet the detractors cannot deny the results. So what lessons can Finland teach?

Pasi Sahlberg, the director general of the Centre for International Mobility and Cooperation in Helsinki, provides the details in an article in the summer 2011 issue of American Educator (Sahlberg’s article was excerpted from Teacher and Leader Effectiveness: Lessons Learned from High-Performing Education Systems, a report published in March by the Alliance for Excellent Education and the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education). His article makes clear that Finland’s success is based on the same idea that is motivating much of the reform effort in the United States today: great teaching matters.

Finland’s example, along with those of other high-performing systems such as Ontario and Singapore, suggests five lessons that could help shape the debate in this country:

It takes a system. Finland’s policy makers do not look at policies affecting teacher effectiveness as discrete practices; they are intended to build on one another and form a system to recruit, prepare, develop, and reward teachers throughout their careers.

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Report Round-up

Affirming the Goal: Is College and Career Readiness an Internationally-Competitive Standard? by ACT Inc. According to this study, the implementation of Common Core State Standards in English/language arts and math could potentially propel the U.S. toward becoming one of the top ten countries in reading and math performance as well as help all students succeed in life after high school.

Children, Media, and Race: Media Use Among White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian American Children from the Center on Media and Human Development School of Communication Northwestern University. This report explores the health and educational implications of racial and ethnic differences in young people's media usage.

Restructuring Resources for High-Performing Schools A Primer for State Policymakers—Summary from Education Resource Strategies. This report examines four areas in which state policymakers can make a big difference: how schools organize personnel and time, how districts and schools spend special education dollars, how districts allocate resources to schools and students, and what information districts gather on resources and spending.

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Straight As: Highlights Deeper Learning, Education Spending, International Benchmarking, and more

Here's a quick summary of the articles in the May 31 issue of Straight A's, the Alliance's biweekly newsletter.

Click on a title below to access the complete article or download a printer-friendly version of the entire newsletter at: http://www.all4ed.org/files/Volume11No11.pdf.

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Straight A's: Reviews House Spending Bill, President's Budget, AP Report to the Nation, and State of the States

Here's a quick summary of the articles in the February 22 issue of Straight A's, the Alliance's biweekly newsletter.

Click on a title below to access the complete article or download a printer-friendly version of the entire newsletter at: http://www.all4ed.org/files/Volume11No4.pdf.

HOUSE PASSES FY 2011 SPENDING BILL: Bill Cuts U.S. Department of Education Funding by $5 Billion; Title I, School Improvement Grants, Striving Readers, and Other Programs Facing Funding Cuts: At 4:40 a.m. on February 19, after days of contentious debate and hundreds of amendments, the House of Representatives passed a comprehensive spending bill that would keep the government running through Fiscal Year (FY) 2011, which ends September 30. The bill makes more than $60 billion in cuts, including a $5 billion cut to the U.S. Department of Education. The bill passed on a party-line vote of 235–189, with three Republicans joining 186 Democrats who voted unanimously against the bill.

OBAMA RELEASES FY 2012 BUDGET: U.S. Department of Education Slated to Receive 4.6 Percent Increase in Funding: Released on February 14, President Obama’s Fiscal Year (FY) 2012 budget proposes spending $48.8 billion in discretionary funds for the U.S. Department of Education, a 4.6 percent increase over FY 2010.

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The 2009 PISA Results Are In - Learn More During Today's Webinar

Released this morning, the results of the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) show that American fifteen-year-olds rank 14th in reading, 17th in science, and 25th in mathematics among the 34 countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Today, from 2:00–4:00 p.m., EST, the Alliance for Excellent Education, Asia Society, Committee for Economic Development, Council of Chief State School Officers, and National Governors Association Center for Best Practices are cohosting a live webcast featuring Andreas Schleicher, head of the indicators and analysis division for OECD's Directorate of Education. During the webcast, Mr. Schleicher will review the 2009 PISA results in reading, math, and science. Following Mr. Schleicher’s presentation, a panel of business, state, and national education leaders will examine the implications for state and federal education policy and what the U.S. can do to develop a world-class education system for all of its students. Register and submit questions for the December 7 webcast online.

The results were widely covered in the media with The New York Times focusing on Shanghai’s impressive results, writing “With China’s debut in international standardized testing, students in Shanghai have surprised experts by outscoring their counterparts in dozens of other countries, in reading as well as in math and science.” This graph, also from the Times illustrates just how well Shanghai students performed and how far students in other industrialized nations have to go. Education Week concentrated on US student performance and quoted U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan as saying, “The PISA results, to be brutally honest, show that a host of developed nations are outeducating us. Americans need to wake up to this educational reality.” With regard to the gains in science, he said: “I don’t think that’s much to celebrate. ... Being average in science is a mantle of mediocrity.” And the Wall Street Journal provided some examples of the types of questions asked on the assessment. Take this one from the 2006 PISA science section:

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Stats That Stick: November 10, 2010

In Illinois, the percentage of kids with a college-educated parent who are highly skilled at math is lower than the percentage of such kids among all students in Iceland, France, Estonia, and Sweden. -The Atlantic Monthly

83.78 percent of U.S. Students and 85.28 percent of all Americans are “Covered” by Common Standards. -Alliance for Excellent Education

Metro areas with highly educated populations experienced more modest declines in employment during the recession than other metro areas. Among the 20 metro areas with the highest rates of bachelor’s degree attainment, only four registered declines in their overall employment-to-population ratio from 2007 to 2009 that exceeded the national average. -Brookings Institution

For this fall’s freshman class, Stanford received a record 32,022 applications from students it called “simply amazing,” and accepted 7 percent of them. -New York Times

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Report Round-Up

Competitive Grant Making and Education Reform: Assessing Race to the Top's Current Impact and Future Prospects by the American Enterprise Institute. This report argues that federal policymakers could learn from Race to the Top’s strengths and weaknesses before diving into new competitive grant programs in the future.

International Benchmarking: State Education Performance Standards from the American Institutes for Research. This report uses international benchmarking to examine the expectations gap between what students are expected to learn in some states and what students are expected to learn in others.

Student Learning Expectations Gap Can Be Twice the Size of National Black-White Achievement Gap from the American Institutes for Research. This report finds that the gap in what students are expected to know in each state varies so greatly that the difference in student expectations between the states with the most rigorous assessments and those with the least stringent is twice the size of the national black-white achievement gap.

Degree Completion Beyond Institutional Borders: Responding to the New Reality of Mobile and Nontraditional Learners from the Center for American Progress. This report describes the avenues that colleges, states, and other organizations take to recognize prior learning and transfer credit, and it points out the flaws in these policies that block students from efficiently garnering credit as they move through and among higher education institutions.

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The Individual and Collective Incentives for Improving Science and Math Education

An editorial in yesterday’s New York Times paints a grim picture of our international standing in math and science education. According to the piece, the National Academies finds that the United States ranks 27th out of 29 wealthy countries in the proportion of college students with degrees in science in engineering and the World Economic Forum ranks the United States 48th out of 133 developed and developing nations in quality of math and science instruction. The editorial board concludes by calling for Congress to expand funding for programs that support high-caliber math and science students in college in return for their commitment to teach in needy districts.

The Wall Street Journal also reported Monday that the starting pay of liberal arts majors generally clocks in well below that of graduates in math and science fields. As the chart to the right (courtesy of the Wall Street Journal and PayScale.com) shows the average pay for engineering majors’ first full time job is $56,000 while the average pay for English majors’ first full-time job is $34,000 – the difference of $22,000 a year is certainly nothing to sneeze at.

So not only is there a need for more science and math majors in order for the United States to stay economically competitive but there is also a financial incentive for individuals to pursue these career paths. President Obama has recognized the importance of attracting and educating children in these fields, most recently last Monday at the White House Science fair.  At the event, Obama spoke to students, teachers and business leaders about the importance of improving education in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). See below for an excerpt from his speech:

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