Afternoon Announcements: July 5, 2011

Today, the Boston Globe reports that more than half of the teachers pushed out of seven underperforming schools in Boston last year now work at other low-achieving schools across the city that are also under pressure to improve.

Tennessee schools eye waiver for No Child Left Behind, according to the Commercial Appeal in Memphis.

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that the National Education Association affirmed for the first time that evidence of student learning must be considered in the evaluations of schoolteachers around the country.

Getting Students Back on Track

There is one phrase that is among the most common to hear in a federal education policy conversation: the nation’s lowest-performing schools. In fact, I think I probably say it at least twice a day. There’s another phrase, though, that’s equally important yet far less common to hear: the nation’s most at-risk students.

Since the inception of No Child Left Behind, federal education has focused primarily on improving underperforming schools as its vehicle to boost the outcomes of struggling students. The most recent iteration of the federal School Improvement Grant program has only cemented this emphasis. Unfortunately, the school-centered focus has emerged without a parallel student-centered focus on those who are most at risk of dropping out of high school.

To be sure, both strategies are necessary—it’s important to improve struggling schools so as to prevent students from falling off track to graduation in the first place, but a student can fall off track at any high school, whether it is considered to be one of the nation’s worst or not.

In New York City, this point is not lost. As part of its nearly decade-long effort to transform its school system, the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) has balanced a dual emphasis on both its lowest performing schools and its most at risk students, or those who are off track to graduate from high school with their peers.

Morning Announcements: June 21, 2011

Education Week reports, “Right on the heels of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's announcement that it might be time to consider, maybe, possibly offering a package of waivers to states on aspects of the No Child Left Behind Act, 40 states and the District of Columbia have announced a new accountability road map.”

The Los Angeles Times covers a new College Board report finding that young black and Latino men lag behind their contemporaries in nearly every measure of educational attainment, with many failing to attend college or earn degrees and large numbers facing the prospect of unemployment or incarceration.

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

Straight A's: Reports on CR, FY 2012 Budget, Lowest-Performing High Schools, and Science NAEP

Here's a quick summary of the articles in the March 14 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/Volume11No5.pdf.

WAITING GAME CONTINUES FOR FY 2011 APPROPRIATIONS: Short-Term Spending Measure Averts Government Shutdown, Postpones Decisions on Larger Spending Cuts; Senate Likely to Hold Key Votes on March 8: Unable to come to an agreement on final Fiscal Year (FY) 2011 spending levels prior to the expiration of the short-term continuing resolution (CR) that was keeping the government funded until March 4, Congress passed another short-term CR that will cut $4 billion from the federal budget while buying time for House and Senate leaders to reach a compromise that would fund the government through the end of the fiscal year on September 30. 

Morning Announcements: March 4, 2011

In an op-ed in the Miami Herald, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan writes, “Turning around a struggling school is some of the toughest work in education. Experience shows that effective turnarounds require strong leadership and the flexibility to recruit staff with special skills and commitment. Not every teacher or principal wants or should be in this demanding environment. But extraordinary principals and teachers who choose to work in turnaround schools deserve our full support and commitment. The administration is supporting an array of bold options to help the children trapped in America’s lowest-performing schools. ‘More of the same’ is not one of them. “

The New York Times covers how the City University of New York is spending much of its energy and resources just teaching new students what they need to begin taking college-level courses.

Stateline reporter David Harrison reports on how virtual education is spreading across the country.

Gov. Bob Wise’s Statement on the Graduation Promise Act

Yesterday, U.S. Representative Rubén Hinojosa (D-TX) introduced the Graduation Promise Act, new legislation that would target federal resources to the nation’s lowest-performing high schools to reduce the dropout rate and increase student achievement. In response, Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia, made the following statement:

“Similar to how emergency medical personnel immediately deliver treatment to the most severely injured when they arrive on an accident scene, Representative Hinojosa’s Graduation Promise Act would focus attention on the lowest-performing schools with the largest percentage of ‘victims.’ That makes it a vital weapon in the fight to reduce the nation’s high school dropout rate and ensure that every student graduates from high school, prepared for college or careers.

“Cutting the budget deficit seems to be the number one action item on many policymakers’ to-do lists, but cutting the dropout rate is even more important because it can create a high-wage job-creation surge—and a deficit reduction package—that everyone can support. In fact, the nearly 1.3 million students who did not graduate from high school in 2010 will likely cost the nation over $337 billion in lost lifetime earnings. Were the nation to cut its high school dropout rate in half, those ‘new’ high school graduates would likely create 54,000 new jobs—and that’s just for one graduating class. As these numbers show, the best economic stimulus package is a high school diploma.

Morning Announcements: February 8, 2011

The U.S. Department of Education’s plan to transform the country’s lowest-performing schools by installing new principals has run into a small snag – there are not enough qualified principals to take over, the New York Times reports. The Times also reports that less than half of students in New York state are leaving high school prepared for college and well-paying careers.

Julia Steiny of the Providence Journal explains why fiction still holds real-life benefits for student learning.

Underscoring the deepening impact of the state's budget crisis, nearly 60 percent of California school districts have reduced the length of the school year, and 30 percent have shrunk it to 175 days, according to California Watch.

Report Round-up

Closing the Expectations Gap 2011 by Achieve. This report finds that in the six years since the National Governors Association and Achieve co-sponsored the National Education Summit on high schools, the goal of aligning the expectations for high school graduates with the demands of college and the workplace is the new norm across the United States.

Breaking New Ground: Building a National Workforce Skills Credentialing System from ACT. This report introduces the need and associated benefits for establishing a national workforce credentialing system and emphasizes the importance of getting a critical mass of state, national, and public and private workforce leaders to co-construct a foundational framework to address our national workforce challenges.

Turning Around the Nation’s Lowest-Performing Schools from the Center for American Progress.  This report focuses on five steps that low-performing school districts can take to improve their chances of success.

Keep the Train Running on ESEA Reauthorization

In this time of divided government and a highly partisan environment, the temptation is certainly there to try to pass small fixes to No Child Left Behind (NCLB) instead of taking up a comprehensive bill. And while a piecemeal approach might be easier in the short run, it will almost certainly complicate matters in the long run.

First, there are so many intertwined issues within education policy and within NCLB that it’s really hard to take on one issue without opening a can of worms around another.

Second, each time you peel off a popular issue from a comprehensive bill you lessen the incentive to take up an overall reauthorization. Think of it as a long railroad train. Each time you take a car off, the train gets shorter and people are less inclined to jump on. But if you can keep the whole train running everyone can jump on their particular car and you can get the whole bill finished. By keeping the whole bill intact, you can include the issues that are distasteful to some while also giving them something sweet to make voting for the bill a little easier.

I’m convinced that the comprehensive approach is the best way forward and I’m more and more convinced that the Congress can get it done in 2011.