Morning Announcements April 2, 2012

Welcome to a new work week, hopefully you’ve made it back to the office safely and happily after an abundance of April Fools embarrassments. If you’re the culprit of the pranks and still trying to hideout from angry coworkers, find a corner and catch up on the latest education headlines below.

Older generations of Americans remember this school-day staple: the bookmobile. During recess or just when it was available, students could seek refuge and escape reality by delving into the action of a good book provided by this library on wheels. But as National Public Radio reports, due to advances in technology, those rolling reading rooms are becoming scarce. The bookmobile in one New England town just broke down, and residents are wondering if it's time to shelve it in the history section. NPR explores whether this may be the final chapter for the elementary pastime.

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Morning Announcements: October 3, 2011

Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced the department’s proposed reforms to improve teacher preparation programs and better prepare educators for classroom success, according to Ed.gov. “America’s teachers and America’s children deserve world-class preparation programs that prepare teachers for today’s classrooms and students for today’s information age,” he said.

According to US News & World Report, most high school districts offer some sort of dropout prevention program. A new report released last week by the National Center for Education Statistics shows a majority of high schools (approximately 8 in 10) offer services such as tutoring and remediation classes for students who have fallen behind, but less than half of school districts offer an after-school program for high school students at risk of not graduating.

The New York Times report if no deal is reached by Friday, 716 of New York City’s lowest-paid workers — school aides, parent coordinators and other members of school support staffs — will lose their jobs, the latest victims of budget cuts to the public schools. Nearly 350 schools will be affected, in a scattered pattern, according to a list of layoffs by school, which was obtained and analyzed by The New York Times. The newspaper found the poorest and most struggling schools will be hit the hardest.

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Gov. Wise Announces Creation of the Center for Secondary School Digital Learning & Policy

In the video below, Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia, announces the creation of the Center for Secondary School Digital Learning & Policy.

As Gov. Wise explains, the Center will focus on how digital learning can bring quality college and career ready education to secondary schools with a focus on improving outcomes for low-income students and low-performing schools. The Center's work in digital learning will be integrated into all of the Alliance's many policy areas-including school transformation, college and career ready standards, adolescent literacy, international comparisons, and various federal and national policies-in an effort to improve student learning.

Click on the image below to watch the complete video:

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Afternoon Announcements: July 28, 2011

News outlets all over the nation are talking about states bracing for plummeting high school graduation rates as districts nationwide dump flawed measurement formulas that often undercounted dropouts and produced inflated results. According to CBS News, “experts hope the changes will draw attention to the dropout issue and lead to resources being focused on the problem. … 'We’re going to take an honest look in the mirror and see how real our graduation rate is and where we need to cut the dropout rate,' said former West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, which has extensively studied the nation’s hodgepodge system of graduation rates. 'You’ve got to know how deep the hole is in order to develop a strategy for getting out of it.'”

NPR finishes out its five-part series “School’s Out: America’s Dropout Crisis” with this story:

Part 5: A High School Dropout’s Midlife Hardships
Today, the people who seem to be hurting the most in our sputtering economy are dropouts in their 30s, 40s and 50s.

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Morning Announcements: July 14, 2011

Education Week reports that the list of delays states are encountering in implementing their Race to the Top plans keeps getting longer; every state but Georgia has now amended its Race to the Top plan in some way, usually to push back a timeline or scale back an initiative.

Yesterday, the House Education and the Workforce Committee approved the State and Local Funding Flexibility Act , which would provide states and school districts with maximum flexibility to shift federal dollars now aimed at particular populations—such as children in poverty—to other programs. Education Week reports that Republicans say the measure, part of a move to begin reauthorizing the ESEA piecemeal, would make it easier for districts and states to direct federal money to where it is needed most, while Democrats argue that the Republicans are proposing too much leeway, and that it would allow districts and states to ignore the students most at risk—poor and minority kids—and trample on students’ civil rights.

 

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Stats That Stick: June 15, 2011

In 2008, more than two of five (42 percent) first-year college students were living at, near, or below poverty—a 4 percentage point increase from 2000. Most startling is the fact that among non-White females in their first year of college, more than half, including seven of 10 Black females, were from a poverty background. –Institute for Higher Educational Policy (IHEP)

Education has overtaken other hot-button topics including immigration and the economy as the top issue facing Texas, according to an independent poll released Tuesday. –Austin American-Statesman

Just 13 percent of high school seniors who took the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress, called the Nation's Report Card, showed a solid grasp of U.S. History. Results released Tuesday showed the two other grades didn't perform much better, with just 22 percent of fourth-grade students and 18 percent of eighth-graders demonstrating proficiency. –National Assessment of Educational Progress

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Alliance Releases New Report on Deeper Learning

Today the Alliance released a new policy brief calling for policy and practice at the local, state, and national levels to support the concepts of “deeper learning” to help all students meet higher expectations and be prepared for college and career. The brief argues that deeper learning provides students with the deep content knowledge they need to succeed after high school and the critical thinking, collaboration, and communication skills that today’s jobs demand.

“The term ‘deeper learning’ may be new, but its basic concepts are not,” said Alliance President Bob Wise. “Deeper learning is what highly effective educators have always provided: the delivery of rich core content to students in innovative ways that allow them to learn and then apply what they have learned.” To hear more from Gov. Wise, watch the video to the right.

The brief, “A Time for Deeper Learning: Preparing Students for a Changing World,” notes that American schools tend to offer a two-tiered curriculum in which some students—primarily white and relatively affluent—have had opportunities for deeper learning, while others—primarily low-income and students of color—have focused almost exclusively on basic skills and knowledge. It finds that the nation’s prosperity in the near future will depend more than ever on students from underserved groups.

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Report Round-Up

Education and the Economy: Boosting the Nation’s Economy by Improving High School Graduation Rates Among Students of Color and Native Students from the Alliance for Excellent Education. This report demonstrate the economic benefits that the nation as a whole would likely see by improving the high school graduation rates of students of color and Native students.

The rise of K-12 blended learning: Profiles of emerging models from the Innosight Institute. This white paper seeks to provide a working definition of blended learning, along with a framework for mapping and defining blended-learning models.

2010 Distance Education Survey Results – Trends in eLearning: Tracking the Impact of eLearning at Community Colleges from the Instructional Technology Council. This survey finds that community colleges reported a 9% increase in their distance education enrollments from 2009 to 2010. The increase was found to be higher than the 8% increase in overall student enrollment at two-year institutions.

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Stats That Stick: May 11, 2011

Two seminal studies with large sample sizes from the late 1990s showed that low income kids who participated in arts education were 4 more times likely to have high academic achievement and 3 times more likely to have high attendance than those who didn’t, and that these students were more likely to be elected to class office and participate in a math or science fair. -Presidential Committee on the Arts and the Humanities

Colorado participation in the AP program has increased more than seven-fold since 1973, with 270 schools and more than 32,000 students signing on last year. More than 21 percent of 2010 seniors had passed an AP exam — well above the national average of 16.9 percent. –Denver Post

In Minnesota, 57 percent of 6th, 9th and 12th graders said they had bullied someone or been bullied. Bullies and those bullied were more likely to report coming from abusive or unsafe homes, having mental and physical problems, and getting lower grades. - Minnesota Student Survey

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Stats That Stick: March 23, 2011

Nationwide, an estimated 1.3 million students dropped out from the Class of 2010 without earning a diploma. Cutting this number in half would yield 650,000 “new” high school graduates who would likely make additional contributions to the nation’s economy by supporting 54,000 jobs and increasing the gross domestic product by as much as $9.6 billion by the time they reach the midpoint of their careers. -Alliance for Excellent Education

Six in ten teachers (61%) say they are able to differentiate instruction a great deal to address the different learning needs of students within a class. -MetLife

The number of U.S. schools with such poor graduation rates that they are known as "dropout factories" fell by 6.4 percent between 2008 and 2009. -Johns Hopkins University Everyone Graduates Center, America's Promise Alliance, and Civic Enterprises

U.S. children are more likely to have access to digital media -- such as television and the Internet -- compared with trends a decade ago. But low-income, Hispanic, and black children consume more media than their middle-class and white peers and it is less likely to be educational. -Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop

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