News Clips – September 2 - 9, 2005

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STATE  
Ever-rising diesel prices force school districts to retool budgets / Decatur Herald & Review
Feds to lift ban on CPS tutoring struggling kids / Chicago Sun-Times
Students get chance to say `no' to military recruiters / Chicago Tribune
Students must pass test to attend school games / Chicago Tribune
Extracurricular Breathalyzer a step too far / Daily Herald
Students have something to teach parents, schools / Pantagraph
School-lunch smarts / Chicago Tribune
School's in ... the home / Chicago Sun-Times
Program puts music in students' hands / Pantagraph
Schools welcome survivors / Chicago Tribune
Show up at school, win cash and prizes / Chicago Tribune
SICA racism probe continuing / Daily Southtown
Board member chastised for use of pen name / The Star
Jury awards $1M for girl’s death / State Journal-Register

NATIONAL
School year in N.O., St. Bernard a wash / Times-Picayune (LA)
Across Nation, Storm Victims Crowd Schools / New York Times
Texas expecting up to 60,000 new students / Dallas Morning News
School only for Hawaiians challenged / Chicago Sun-Times
San Francisco schools chief resigns / CNN.com
Pa. schools mandate body-mass calculations / Boston Globe
Everyone is telling teachers what to teach / The Christian Science Monitor

NATIONAL - NCLB
Steer clear of NCLB lawsuit / The Sentinel (PA)
Back to School: NCLB and beyond / Journal News (NY)
More than 70 percent of high schools meet NCLB standards / Boston Globe
Your child's next tutor may be in India / AZ Central.com
Public Choices / National Review Online
State Could End Up Paying More Than Expected For NCLB Law / The Day (CT)
Conn. lawsuit over NCLB is nothing for Arizona to emulate / East Valley Tribune (AZ)
Dept. of Education Releases Report on Payola Controversy / Editor & Publisher
Letter: NCLB Is Working / Yankton Daily Press & Dakotan (SD)
Bush faces growing revolt over education policy / CNN.com

FROM “EDUCATION WEEK”
School Leaders Assess Damages, Plan Recovery Effort
States Pressed to Refashion Reading First Grant Designs
Defying Predictions, State Trends Prove Mixed on Schools Making NCLB Targets
Ed. Dept. Allows Chicago to Provide NCLB Tutoring
Some Dallas Principals Must Learn Spanish
Schools to Tackle a New Mandate: Teaching About U.S. Constitution
Fewer Phila. Teachers Hired on Seniority Basis
Suit Claims Anti-Religious Bias in Calif. System
Iowa Law Ends Use of Finger-Scan Technology
Calif. Special Education Students Could Get Exam Break

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STATE

Ever-rising diesel prices force school districts to retool budgets
Nathaniel West, Krista Lewin, Dave Fopay and Valerie Wells, Decatur Herald & Review
 
The increased cost of fueling fleets of yellow school buses has Central Illinois administrators seeing red.
 
"I'm going to call it a fuel price crisis," said Bob Verdun, superintendent of the Shelbyville School District.
 
His is among the area districts that have beefed up their transportation budget and ratcheted down other expenditures as the diesel fuel needed for their buses continues to match crude oil and gasoline price escalations step for step.
 
As a result, area students may not be going as far on field trips this year, bus routes may be consolidated and administrators may turn to unorthodox cost-cutting options such as biodiesel fuel made from soybeans.
 
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the Midwest average for diesel fuel as of Monday was $2.53 per gallon, a spike of about 69 cents from this time last year.
 
"Hopefully, it's going to level out here, because I'd hate to think what happens if it gets higher," said Russell Ragon, Cumberland School District superintendent.
 
Because his district draws from a "totally rural" area, he said all of the students are bused in, with the exception of those who can drive themselves. And even some of these older students are choosing to give up their keys and ride the bus because of the expensive gasoline, Ragon noted.
 
Cumberland fortified its fuel line item by about 10 percent, which is more than $15,000. That may not sound like much, but it's quite a blow to a small district that already has eliminated two full-time teaching positions because of declining enrollment.
 
"It's something (else) we will have to absorb," Ragon said. "It's a matter of tightening our budget and saying no to a few things."
 
In the Mattoon School District each year, Tom Sherman, assistant superintendent for business, looks at the cost of fuel from previous years and tries to plan for unexpected cost increases.
 
"From last year's budget, I've budgeted a 16 percent increase in diesel costs alone," he said.
 
Because the district has to approve its budget in September, Sherman is working on the financial plan several months in advance, which poses challenges in estimating the costs of fuel. "Nobody knows what the price of gas will be in December," he said.
 
The Mattoon district's new fleet of 33 buses can run on biodiesel fuel, which was one of the district's requirements during the bidding process, said Sherman.
 
"We are hoping that it will help save costs, but it remains to be seen how things will go with biodiesel," he said.
 
The Charleston district's bus contract with Laidlaw Education Services doesn't include any adjustment for rising fuel costs, something Manager Lynda Luksander said the company will just have to manage.
 
"I just hope it doesn't go up any more," Luksander said, adding she doesn't see approaching the school board for a contract adjustment as an option.
 
Laidlaw's contract also stipulates the company will provide fuel for the vehicles the school district owns.
 
The company and the district recently agreed to a two-year contract extension that covers this school year and the next and included a 2.5 percent increase each year.
 
According to information from the district, Laidlaw reported a 26 percent increase in its fuel costs from the 2002-03 school year to 2004-05, and the price it was paying for diesel fuel a year ago was $1.83 a gallon.
 
David Kuetemeyer, the Charleston district's financial consultant, said he doesn't think the district would be open to changing the agreement because of the recent jump in fuel prices.
 
"We negotiated very hard for this contract," Kuetemeyer said. "I think we will stay with it."
 
He and Luksander said Laidlaw expected fuel prices to increase during the term of the contract. Luksander said the company was willing to accept only a small increase to keep the contract with the district.
Kuetemeyer noted Laidlaw cannot cut bus routes to reduce fuel costs, as state law requires that students who live more than a mile and a half from their school receive bus service.
 
While fuel use may be less for smaller school districts, they may have to look at the bottom line even harder.
 
The Shelbyville school board inflated its fuel budget by 70 percent, or an extra $40,000.
 
"They're having the same effect that they do on your personal budget," Verdun said. "And it's anybody's guess what gas is going to be in January."
 
In the meantime, administrators are scrutinizing field trip requests. "We're taking a hard look at what we choose to schedule for extracurricular activities," Verdun said.
 
Additionally, all four school districts in Shelby County have merged the busing of special-needs students to Mattoon and Humboldt schools, Verdun said.
 
It's much the same in Sullivan, according to Superintendent Terry Pearcy. In an attempt to budget for this year's rise in fuel costs, Pearcy said he took the highest price paid for fuel during the last fiscal year and increased it by 20 percent.
 
Pearcy also fears the rising cost of fuel may prompt across-the-board increases in other budget areas, such as heating and lighting.
 
"We do have a computer-integrated management system through all our buildings so we can monitor things," Pearcy said.
 
"It is helpful, but there are still concerns, and it needs to be monitored closely."
 
In Decatur, with five magnet schools and Phoenix Enrichment Center drawing students from across the district, transportation costs already were high.
 
Durham School Services provides buses for the district. Its contract calls for the district to reimburse Durham for costs exceeding $1.50 a gallon, said Randy Dotson, director of purchasing for Decatur schools. With diesel prices at $2.79 or more a gallon locally and projected to keep rising thanks to Hurricane Katrina, it's going to get worse.
 
"Right now, those prices don't look attractive," Dotson said. "The transportation fund is heading into the red anyway. There's not a whole lot we can do."
 
Durham's contract with the district is in its last year. The company had a three-year contract with the district, with a two-year extension expiring this year. The company is required to solicit three competitive bids for fuel and take the lowest.
 
"I'm sure (costs) will cause the bids to go up," Dotson said. "They have to recover the cost."
 
Mark Hogan, Durham manager, said all the company can do at the moment is urge drivers to conserve as much fuel as possible, but they are feeling the pinch.
 
At present, the district has no plans to cut back on field trips or athletic events to trim transportation costs, Dotson said. Programs such as vocational and technical training and dual-credit classes at Richland Community College also require use of buses.
 
"The field trips are based on trying to help the kids with curriculum, so you hate to take that away," he said.
 
Sangamon Valley is a consolidated district consisting of Niantic-Harristown and Illiopolis schools, with many students riding buses. Rising costs will have an impact, Superintendent Wayne Honeycutt said, but it's hard to know where to cut on bus use without doing the students a disservice.
 
"If you eliminate routes, you increase the mileage the other buses have to run," Honeycutt said. "You have to add in the human factor, too. Those kids would have to be picked up earlier and taken home later."

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Feds to lift ban on CPS tutoring struggling kids
Ben Feller, Chicago Sun-Times
 
WASHINGTON -- The Education Department plans to allow Chicago Public Schools to provide tutoring to struggling students even though the district itself has not met academic standards -- a waiver of federal rules that could have national implications, officials said Tuesday.
 
Education Secretary Margaret Spellings will announce the change today in Chicago, according to two officials familiar with the policy.
 
It marks the second time in a week she has shown flexibility in how she enforces President Bush's No Child Left Behind law.
 
In the other case, four Virginia school districts have been allowed to offer tutoring before they are required to offer transfers to students in struggling schools, the first time the department has allowed that sequence to be reversed.
 
Depending upon how Spellings defines these pilot projects, other school districts may get the chance to apply for the same flexibility.
 
Under federal rules, school districts that fail to show enough yearly progress in reading and math for two straight years cannot provide tutoring. That restriction is designed to protect poor students from having to rely on the same schools that may not be serving them well when tapping into the law's promise of free tutoring.
 
But urban districts such as Chicago say the rule is unfair because their test scores in two subjects may have little to do with their ability to provide extra help. What's more, the large districts argue, the rule could keep children from getting help if other tutors aren't available.
 
Decision 'a positive step'
Federal officials had previously ordered Chicago and other Illinois districts to stop providing tutoring under the law or risk losing federal money.
 
Chicago Teachers Union President Marilyn Stewart said it was "ridiculous'' that Chicago public school teachers couldn't tutor their own students. If the federal decision had stood, thousands fewer kids would get tutoring this coming school year because CPS would have to pay private firms five times more to do the job CPS teachers had been doing.
 
The change of heart, Stewart said, is "a positive step. The teachers deserve to have this flexibility.''

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Students get chance to say `no' to military recruiters
Charles Sheehan, Chicago Tribune
 
Prodded by angry parents, Chicago school administrators will speak with every high school student this year about federal directives that require the release of information to military recruiters, school officials said.
 
The subject is now addressed in the Chicago Public Schools uniform discipline code, a booklet that administrators are required to go over with students, said Miguel Rodriguez, associate general counsel for the school district's law department.
 
Under federal law, schools must provide the names, addresses and phone numbers of all high school juniors and seniors--unless parents or students specifically request that their family information be blocked.
 
At first the new law, part of the No Child Left Behind Act that took effect in 2002, drew little attention. But in recent years, administrators in Chicago, the suburbs and around the nation have heard from a growing number of parents who don't want to share that information with the military.
 
The National PTA is lobbying to change the law so that students or parents would instead have to sign a form to have their information released to the military, said spokesman James Martinez.
 
Students in Chicago will also be sent home with a four-page packet addressing student privacy. Included in that packet is an opt-out form that allows students or parents to block personal information from military recruiters.
 
The law says military recruiters must have the same access to students as college recruiters and other groups, although it allows students to opt out. Some schools interpreted that to mean that the information could not be released to colleges unless it was also given to the military. Increasingly, schools are allowing parents and students to pick and choose.
 
Administrators in Chicago and elsewhere say that the war in Iraq and the unprecedented access given to military recruiters has led to a backlash.
 
Some principals in Chicago already had informed parents about the opt-out provision, but many parents said they never knew schools gave such information to the military until they were called at home by a recruiter.
 
"There was just a huge increase on the part of parents, and what was three or four phone calls turned into 100," said Anthony Pitruzzello, director of day support services in Chicago. "As the war ratchets up, parents' concerns are ratcheting up."
 
A number of irate calls were due to opt-out letters mistakenly sent to children in grade school, officials said, while many parents with high school students said they never saw them.
 
Chicago joins a number of school districts nationwide, from California to suburban Washington, D.C., that have responded to pressure from parents or community organizations.
 
In Rockville, Md., Montgomery County Public Schools responded to complaints that if students wanted to hide information from military recruiters, the same information would be hidden from colleges.
 
Montgomery County is using forms this year that allow students to choose who should not get personal information--colleges, the PTA or the military.
 
About 45 miles east in Anne Arundel County Public Schools, parents will present the school board with a resolution Wednesday asking that opt-out forms be given to every student in school, said John Schneider, who has two boys in high school.
 
"I became aware as I talked to other parents that nobody knew about this provision in No Child Left Behind," he said. "Most administrators didn't know of it."
 
The Los Angeles Unified School District already had an identity opt-out policy for the military but moved directly to block a provision in No Child Left Behind that requires schools to give up students' phone numbers, said Esther Wong, assistant superintendent of planning, assessment and research.
 
Though Los Angeles schools notify parents of the federal law in the student handbook and send a related letter home with students 17 and older in the fall, parents and teachers began a publicity campaign last year about the provisions of the law.
 
A similar campaign was begun in the 4J School District of Eugene, Ore., where 10 percent of students opted out of the military provision in the first year of No Child Left Behind, according to resident and organizer Carol Van Houten.
 
In 2003, that number reached 32 percent, and in 2004, it was 43 percent, she said.
 
We don't know what it's going to be this fall," Van Houten said.
 
Those in favor of such a policy say that in communities where the provision of the No Child Left Behind Act is widely publicized, more students opt out.
 
Evanston Township High School sent out a letter the year the law went into effect, and half of the eligible students or their parents opted out, said Marilyn Madden, director of people personnel services.
 
"I think a lot of people threw it out, thinking it was junk mail," she said.
 
In 2003, the school sent home military opt-out forms. Out of 1,600 juniors and seniors, only 22 did not sign and return it.
 
"A lot of parents were livid," Madden said. "A lot of people were up in arms when they found out that this existed."
Students have launched more than a dozen privacy campaigns, perhaps most notably in New Jersey's Montclair Public Schools, where two freshmen introduced a resolution that changed policy there.
 
The school board approved it unanimously in 2002.
 
Alissa Cherry and Elizabeth Lipshultz began handing out fliers in the cafeteria.
 
"We didn't know what we were doing, but we learned," Cherry said.
 
Students are now advised twice each year of the federal law, and it is mandatory that students sign a form to acknowledge that they have received the opt-out form.
 
In Chicago, community groups, peace activists and students will be distributing opt-out forms in front of about 20 schools Tuesday, the first day of school.
 
Jeff Pickert, a junior at Lincoln Park High School, will be among them.
 
"You don't have to think about it much to see what's wrong with that law," Pickert said. "If you want to talk to recruiters, that's fine, but I also think people should know that schools are being forced to give your number to the military, and they'll call you at home."
 
That is still the way many students and parents find out about the provision in the No Child Left Behind Act.
 
Making final preparations for his first year in college, Renier Soto, 18, says he was stunned by the phone call he received at his Northwest Side home.
 
A military recruiter told Soto that the U.S. Army would pay for college, and that he wouldn't have to go to Iraq, he said.
 
"It was weird, because it came out of nowhere," Soto said. "I thought it was the government that gave them my phone number, because they know everything, but I found out it was my school."

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Students must pass test to attend school games
Breathalyzer in use at Naperville Central
John Biemer, Tribune staff reporter. Freelance reporter Amy Fischer Roth contributed to this report
 
Naperville Central High School lost its Friday night contest against Lincoln-Way East. But Principal Jim Caudill still was able to use the game to make a statement.
 
The Naperville students entered the stadium through a different gate than the rest of the crowd. They passed a dean who tossed them a few questions to check for signs of drunkenness before punching their tickets. Half-full cups from fast-food chains, soda cans and water bottles students tried to take to the game were collected. A police officer stood by, and if the signs were there, so was the Breathalyzer.
 
No kids were snared drinking on the first night the new checkpoint was employed. But Caudill said that was the point: to provide a deterrent and a wakeup call to students and parents, who he says are sometimes too lenient with their children.
 
"We're just trying to help our kids and our parents," Caudill said. "They're great people and we want to trust our kids, but wow, there's a lot of things happening out there."
 
A variety of indicators had emerged over the last year, Caudill said, that suggest drinking at the high school had gotten out of hand--a situation he compared to the drinking levels in the mid-1980s, when the school also cracked down.
 
First was a survey last year in which 34 percent of the school's 3,100 students said that they had drunk alcohol at least once over the last month. A handful of students also showed up drunk for school last year, and administrators have found photos posted on the Internet of students drinking--including five sophomore football players caught at a party who were forced to sit out their first game of the season.Then a half-dozen or so intoxicated students were caught at the Naperville Central home game on Aug. 26--the first of the season--and one girl was found vomiting in the bathroom.
 
"After last week's game, when we spent the last 2 1/2 quarters dealing with kids, we finally said enough is enough," Caudill said.
 
If a student had been caught drinking before a game, school officials planned to call the parents and arrange a ride home--and likely discipline him or her for violating school rules, which could mean a two-week suspension.
 
Students gave mixed reports Friday on the new tactic. Sophomore Paula Schmidt said she thought the testing made the games much safer and sophomore Colin Benline said he thought it was fair. But senior Joe Byers called it "a joke."
 
"I think it's very stereotypical to think if one person does it, (drinks) everyone will do it," he said.
 
"They'll probably have less kids coming to the game," said his friend Mike Dote. "People will just start drinking in their cars."
 
Drinking before games and other social events is not unique to Naperville Central, of course, and many other schools have been using Breathalyzers at big dances for years, said Ross Truemper, principal at Naperville North High School. Other schools, including Truemper's, deploy faculty to monitor the crowds for signs of drinking, but he applauded his counterpart for taking action as the incidents added up.
 
"If nothing else, [Caudill] has certainly gotten people to pay attention," Truemper said. "There's a problem out there and he's gotten everybody's attention, which is probably 90 percent of what you hope to do with it."
 
Caudill also is considering banning students from drinking bottled water on campus that was not bought at the school's vending machines. About 10 times last year, students brought bottles to school filled with booze--and ended up throwing up within the first couple hours of the school day.
 
Many Naperville Central students tote bottled water with them all day, sipping in hallways and even at classroom desks. Some parents have criticized the plan because it would force those kids to spend money on campus, buying water from vending machines.
 
Caudill said he wanted to float the idea of banning outside bottles to draw attention to the problem and possibly cut it out--not to raise funds for the school.
 
A number of parents thanked him Friday night for the new effort, he said.
 
"I graduated from this school in the 1970s, and it was a problem then," said Mary Nashert, who attended the game with her daughter and some friends. "It's not a new problem, but it's a bigger problem."

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Extracurricular Breathalyzer a step too far
Daily Herald Editorial
 
There seems little doubt that Naperville Central High School has a serious alcohol problem. Nine times, students have drunk so much in school they got sick. Sporting events find students vomiting under the stadium bleachers. Pictures of parties are posted online. If that isn’t enough evidence, how about the survey that indicated a third of the student body had drunk alcohol within the month of being surveyed?
 
School officials are obviously desperate to address the issue, and they should be. But forcing all students into a “guilty until proven innocent” line and making them take Breathalyzer tests on demand is a doubtful way to do it.
 
Naperville Central authorities used this system for the first time at Friday evening’s football game. Officials say the line moved quickly and, because no teens appeared to be intoxicated, the Breathalyzer never was used. Officials declared the process a success and a deterrent.
 
On one level, perhaps it was. But all too frequently, and particularly where it involves young people, the reaction to the misbehavior of a few is to make the whole pay. And that is a dubious lesson to be teaching in a free society.
 
Most schools haven’t responded like Central.
 
“All major high schools have dealt with that problem over time,” said Elgin High School Principal Dave Smiley. “But we don’t do anything to that extreme.”
 
“If your behavior is such during the game that leads one to suspect something, that’s when we do something,” said Wheaton Warrenville Unit District 200 Superintendent Gary Catalari.
 
That’s not to say these other schools look the other way. They don’t. Many in the Fox Valley, for example, require students to attend — with their parents — mandatory drug/alcohol sessions each year. If they or their parents don’t attend, they don’t participate.
 
Many schools have a police presence in place routinely. All have massive numbers of adults stationed throughout the stadiums. Any troublemaker is ousted quickly, sometimes never allowed to return. If these behaviors occur during school hours, they are disruptive. And disruptive students are suspended or expelled, and urged to get help.
 
Such disruptive students shouldn’t be allowed to ruin the experience for all the other participants in sporting events, dances or classes. The two-thirds of students who follow the rules shouldn’t be treated like criminals just because they happen to be the same age as the troublemakers.
 
Parents, too, must share some responsibility here. If that many kids are drinking, and drinking to such excess, somebody isn’t paying attention at home. Central Principal Jim Caudill says programs held to alert and educate parents about the alcohol problem have been sparsely attended.
 
That sounds a lot like denial of a problem. At least some of these kids already have an alcohol abuse problem that parents should be taking more seriously.
 
That said, though, school officials should remember the vast majority of students don’t come to extracurricular activities drunk and don’t drink in school. They deserve more respect than they are being accorded for making smart choices and responsible decisions.

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Students have something to teach parents, schools
Pantagraph Editorial
 
High school students are willing to work harder if their schools expect more of them. That may come as a surprise to those who listen to students complain about the demands of their class work.
 
However, that's the finding of a survey conducted by Peter D. Hart Research Associates for the nonprofit Horatio Alger Association. And it bodes well for the trend toward tougher graduation standards, such as the ones recently signed into law by Gov. Rod Blagojevich. Those requirements will force more Illinois districts to achieve the standards that Bloomington District 87 applies.
 
Nearly 90 percent of the more than 1,000 high school students polled by Hart said they would work harder if their schools "demanded more of students, set higher standards and raised expectations." But schools shouldn't stop at increasing the number of mandatory core courses.
 
The overwhelming majority of students said more opportunities for college-level courses while in high school and more real-world experiences such as internships would improve their schools. Those sentiments should be kept in mind as the United States looks for ways to improve education. The higher graduation standards Illinois is putting in place are a good start.
 
Many school districts in our area already meet nearly all of the newly enacted requirements: four years of English, three years of math, two years of science and two writing-intensive courses. This law will give school districts the push to go the rest of the way. Unit 5, for example, need only boost its math requirement to meet the standards.
 
In fact, most of the students would go further than the Illinois standards. Seventy-five percent supported requiring math and science all four years of high school.
 
Students need to be challenged so they will be more competitive in the world and to help them achieve to the best of their abilities. Judging from the survey results, students are smarter than we think and more willing to work. That's a good lesson for parents, teachers and school administrators to learn.

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School-lunch smarts
Creative approach will convince kids to give their meal a passing grade
Brian McCormick, Chicago Tribune, 9/7/05
 
It's the ultimate insult: A loving parent takes the time to prepare and pack a healthful school lunch for a child, only to see it come home virtually uneaten at the end of the day.
 
By taking a few creative steps, however, parents can send kids to school with nutritious lunches they actually enjoy. And they can do it without turning lunch preparation into another full-time job.
 
"Like every other working mother, I have 10 or 15 minutes to pull these lunches together as I get the kids ready for school," said Nava Atlas, author of "The Vegetarian Family Cookbook," who has been making school lunches for her two teenage sons for more than a decade.
 
Her book is loaded with ideas for pulling nutritious meals together quickly, from easy-to-prepare recipes to lists of healthful store-bought foods and snacks that can be tossed directly into the lunchbox--items such as whole-grain graham crackers, low-fat fruit bars, baby carrots, bagel chips and sesame sticks.
 
To maximize the odds that a healthful packed lunch gets eaten, involve children in the process, experts insist.
 
"I encourage parents to bring kids along when they do the shopping, or to put them to work in the lunch-prep assembly line," said Susan Bellinson, marketing director for Whole Foods Market in Ann Arbor, Mich. In addition to teaching cooking classes at the store, Bellinson does segments on how to make healthful school lunches for a local television station.
 
Getting kids' feedback makes a parent's job easier, too, Atlas said. "I sit down with my sons every year before school starts and have them make a list of their 10 favorite lunch meals," she said. Rotating menus provide variety while simplifying her shopping.
 
Think ahead
 
Preparation is important in assuring that lunches can be made quickly. For instance, cutting up a week's worth of fresh vegetables on Sunday and storing them in a plastic container keeps nutritious snacks close at hand. And Bellinson said that by cooking up a big batch of grains--brown rice and quinoa are her kids' favorites--she has a week's worth of main dishes or side salads ready to go.
 
Whole grains, fresh fruit and vegetables may get snarfed by kids raised on a steady diet of such healthful choices, but what about children for whom fast foods and processed snacks have been staples?
 
Bellinson said that a transition to healthful eating is not as daunting as parents fear.
 
"You need to take it in steps," she said. For instance, high-sugar, processed fruit roll snacks can be replaced with natural "fruit leathers." Introduce new foods in stages. "Include hummus first as a dip for fresh veggies," she said. If that's a hit, use it next time as the "meat" in a sandwich or stuffed pita.
 
Atlas emphasized that parents have an obligation to make the effort. "The statistics on childhood obesity and the incidence of obesity-related disorders such as type 2 diabetes are staggering," she said. And the links between nutrition and school performance are clear.
 
"If children load up on sugary foods and sodas at lunch, their ability to concentrate is shot for the rest of the day," Atlas said.
 
Cafeteria choices
 
Altas contended that the nutritional value of a well-prepared lunch from home will almost always trump what students buy in a school cafeteria, but those who run school-lunch programs take issue with that.
 
"It's frustrating to read stories every year that insist homemade lunches are healthier when it's just not true," said Ruth Jonen, director of food services for Township High School District 211, which serves Palatine and Schaumburg. Schools that participate in the National School Lunch Program are required to meet federal dietary guidelines, which means that the proportion of calories from fat in a week's worth of menus can be no higher than 30 percent. And the economies of scale mean nutritious meals can be made at school for much less than at home.
 
Jonen pointed to pizza, often considered the ultimate unhealthful school cafeteria item, to prove her point.
 
"Schools are using reduced-fat cheese and turkey sausage to dramatically lower the fat content," said Jonen, who also serves as president of the national School Nutrition Association.
 
Atlas, who countered that the nutritional quality of school-cafeteria lunches varies widely from one district to another, said that a homemade lunch provides something beyond nutrition.
 
"It's a connection to home for kids in the middle of the school day, and a message that a parent is committed enough to them to make the effort," she said. "That provides an invaluable emotional benefit."
 
Lunchbox logic
 
In her book, "The Vegetarian Family Cookbook," author Nava Atlas offers suggestions to help parents who want to send kids to school with healthful, homemade lunches they might actually eat.
 
- Wrap it in a bow: Fresh fruit is more likely to be eaten if it is cut up and packed kebob-style on skewers (Stick a marshmallow or grape on the end to blunt the sharp end of the skewer). Including a dip or sauce will increase the odds of kids eating fresh vegetables or fruit. And for the younger crowd, a sandwich becomes more appealing when it is cut into whimsical shapes with a cookie cutter.
 
- Be prepared: Keep lunchmaking supplies together in one section of the refrigerator and one kitchen cupboard, to minimize the chaos of the morning lunchmaking rush.
 
- Variety is the spice of life: Just varying the kinds of breads used--bagels, rolls, pitas and tortillas can all be employed to break up the standard sandwich monotony--dramatically increases the odds of the meal being consumed.
 
- Cold foods cold: Dry-ice packs should be inserted into the base of a lunchbox any time perishable foods such as dairy products or egg dishes are included.

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School's in ... the home
Cheryl V. Jackson, Chicago Sun-Times, 9/7/05
 
Donald Stewart had a choice of six colleges, including Johns Hopkins University, Amherst College and Haverford College. He ultimately chose Dartmouth. The enviable list of schools wanting to admit him, he says, was the payoff of the education Stewart received -- in his Chicago home.
 
As Chicago students head back to the classroom this week, there are a growing number of children who won't. Many parents believe the benefits of homeschooling outweigh sending children to public schools, and even private ones -- and students like Stewart are an example of what colleges increasingly see in homeschooled kids: students who test better and generally are more mature than their traditionally schooled counterparts.
 
The number of students being taught at home increased by 29 percent from 1999 to 2003 (the most recent year for which figures are available), according to the U.S. Department of Education. Attitudes about homeschooling have changed as well: 41 percent of families -- many concerned about the quality of education available in public schools, and sometimes private -- considered homeschooling to be a good thing in 2001 compared to 16 percent in 1985, according to a study by Rose and Gallup.
 
Parents want to spend more time with their children and be in control of their instruction, proponents say, and be able to teach morality and religion without paying tuition to private schools.
 
Stewart, 21, was in the seventh grade when his dad was researching homeschooling as part of a doctorate degree program. Stewart convinced his father to homeschool him.
 
The switch from classroom to home gave the teen time to be a teaching assistant at a local elementary school, write plays as part of a project at Gallery 37 Center for the Arts and spend days at museums -- and, he believes, make him attractive to private colleges.
 
"It taught me in many ways if something's interesting to you to go out there and do it, and not wait for someone to give you instructions as to how and as to when," said Stewart, a musician who has his own record label.
 
Critics who worry about homeschooling are limited to teachers' unions: They are concerned parents aren't properly trained to instruct.
 
"Just as there is concern about having properly certified teachers in every classroom, that's also important for students being educated in the home," said David Comerford, spokesman for the Illinois Federation of Teachers union. "All schools should have the same set of requirements in terms of standards."
 
Yet advocates say such fears are unfounded: They cite research indicating kids educated at home score better on standardized tests than those from public schools. Home-educated students scored an average 80 points higher on SATs compared to their public school counterparts, and 70 points higher than those from private schools, according to the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Columbia University's Teachers College.
 
College officials in recent years have become more eager to recruit homeschooled students. Those students typically impressed Anna Ivey when she was dean of admissions at the University of Chicago Law School from 1999 to 2000.
 
"More often than not, they struck me as people who had approached college with a seriousness, maturity and intellectual vigor that was often lacking in conventionally schooled students, who often take longer to land on their feet when they start college," said Ivey, author of The Ivey Guide to Law School Admissions: Straight Advice on Essays, Resumes, Interviews, and More (Harcourt, $14).
 
In the 1980s, homeschooled students were mainly white and Christian. Now, African-American students account for the fastest growing segment, their parents dissatisfied with traditional schools, says Brian D. Ray, founder and president of the non-profit National Home Education Research Institute. The predominately black Midsouth Home Oriented Unique Schooling Experience support group in Hyde Park -- a group of parents who gather occasionally to trade ideas on lesson plans and activities -- now grows by three or four families a month, up from previous years, during which maybe one family joined per school year.
 
"Everything that happens in a school setting is not necessarily positive for children," said self-employed Chicago publisher Virginia Lathan, 55, an African-American woman who took her now 10-year-old daughter Angela out of Chicago Public Schools four years ago and began homeschooling her. "And homeschooling cuts down on some of the negative influences like the fighting, the cursing, children picking on each other, and saying you have to dress a certain way or you have to talk a certain way."
 
Homeschooling parents say they routinely encounter questions regarding their children's ability to socialize.
 
"Socialization! That's like the biggest joke. When you're in school you really don't have the opportunity to socialize like at home," said Tameka Selders, 28, who along with husband Michael made the homeschooling decision after moving to Chicago from Louisiana four years ago. "When you're in school, you're not allowed to speak to the person to the right of you and on the left of you."
 
Homeschooling doesn't by any means require keeping the kids at home. Catching bugs in the backyard? Rogers Park mom Tiffany Ragland arms her sons with insect field guides and heads outdoors for "science class."
 
"If we were learning about the body and the heart, we jump into the car and head for a museum," says Selders, whose son, Jamari, is 9 and daughter, Hannah, is 3. "I think that you should live through your educational experience. It shouldn't be confined to the classroom and the blackboard and the textbooks."

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Program puts music in students' hands
Phyllis Coulter, Bloomington Pantagraph
 
NORMAL -- A new program wants to give the gift of music to more children -- whether they can afford an instrument or not.
 
Through "Music for All," fifth grade students who are part of the free lunch program can get free instruments to use as long as they are in band or orchestra.
 
"If the child continues past two years, the instrument is theirs to keep," said Becky Meadows, a music teacher at Normal Community High School.
 
Meadows recalled being in fifth grade when her mom, a divorced mother of four, was touched by her daughter's love of music. "She got a second job to pay for my $200 flute," Meadows said.
 
Meadows connected with The Music Shoppe, which is a drop-off point for people to donate musical instruments. The store will put the instruments in good working order, and get them into the hands of children.
 
Instrument donors will receive a receipt.
"A horn that has been sitting around will be put in the hands of a child who really wants to play it," said Randy Wood, president and co-owner of the Music Shoppe in Landmark Mall in Normal.
 
While Meadows' works for Unit 5 schools, the program will be available to all fifth grade students in the area who are on the free lunch programs, she said.
 
At a similar program started by music teacher Marty Abbott in Stanford-based Olympia Schools three years ago, about 30 instruments have been donated and are being used by students.
 
"We have an increasing number of children each year who are unable to afford to rent even a 'cheap' instrument, and are, therefore, unable to participate" in band, said Meadows, adding that being part of a the band helps keep some kids motivated in school.
 
Wood and Terry Houchin, also co-owner of the Music Shoppe, had been talking for a few years about how they could help local music. They participated three years ago in the VH1 "Save the Music" program but wanted to help students locally instead of sending instruments far away.
 
The store is involved with similar programs with its Champaign store.
 
"This should be a very good thing," Wood said.

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Schools welcome survivors
300 kids evacuated from hurricane zone hit books in Illinois
By Jamie Francisco and Ana Beatriz Cholo, Tribune staff reporters, 9/9/05

Newcomer Kynedii Kimble got a lot of attention Thursday from curious classmates at Bennett Elementary--and the 10-year-old from Kenner, La., was a bit embarrassed.

The 4th-grader and her family had fled the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, coming to Chicago to stay with family members on the South Side.

She's learned from watching hours of television that many of the people left behind in her home state are becoming sick from the contaminated floodwaters. That makes her wonder what classmates will think.

"[The kids] might think I have a disease or something," the girl said.

Kynedii and her cousin Angela Johnson, 12, are just two of at least 175 displaced students enrolled hastily this week in public and Catholic elementary schools throughout Chicago and the suburbs.

School officials say they're trying to ease the transition for Kynedii and other storm victims, offering counseling, medical attention and school supplies, among other things.

A Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago spokeswoman said tuition fees have been waived, and in one instance, a school hired an additional teacher to accommodate the new students.

Preliminary estimates suggest that as many as 300 students from hurricane-affected areas have enrolled statewide, said Rebecca Watts, a spokeswoman for the Illinois State Board of Education. The number is changing, but the board is creating an online system to provide updated figures, she said.

Students who have temporarily relocated to Illinois to escape the disaster will be classified as "homeless," and they will not need to show records or proof of residency that might have been lost in the disaster, according to the state board.

Flood evacuee Naeem Wakileh resumed his sophomore studies on Wednesday as he started classes at Wheeling High School.

He's said he's made a couple of new friends in biology, guys that remind him of his buddies from home in a suburb of New Orleans. The campus is twice the size of his old school, but people have been friendly and helped him get around, Naeem said.

"No more uniforms, that's a good thing," he said, smiling at the thought that he doesn't have to wear green polo shirts with khaki pants for a while, even though he arrived in the Chicago area with only one set of clothes. He and his family are staying at his uncle's home.

Elsewhere in the northwest suburbs, 20 students from kindergarten to 12th grade enrolled in Elgin-based Community Unit School District 46, said Deb Dempsey, homeless student advocate for the Kane County Regional Office of Education. Officials are providing psychologists and social workers to help them in the transition to new schools, Dempsey said.

"Normally, homeless students have enormous things to deal with, but these kids have to deal with losing everything, including family members who might have perished," Dempsey said. "I'm sure they'll never be the same."

In Evanston, three students have enrolled at Evanston Township High School with two more on the way, said Marilyn Madden, director of pupil personnel services. Madden gave a campus tour to one family of Hurricane Katrina survivors and assured one incoming student that he would be able to take photography classes, she said.

"They seemed pretty quiet, still trying to figure things out, also wondering if they could take courses they really enjoy," Madden said.

In Lake County, Lake Villa Community Consolidated District 41 has enrolled seven children who were displaced by the hurricane in various schools in the district, officials said.

B.J. Hooper Elementary School in Lindenhurst has five children from New Orleans, said Principal Pat Planic.

"They all have really supportive parents and they value education--their parents got them registered right away, making it their first priority," Planic said. "They're trying to establish as much normalcy as possible."

A family with two children stayed in a shelter in Shreveport to wait out the storm, fully expecting to return home, Planic said. When they discovered there was no home to go back to, they came to stay with family members in Lindenhurst. The other family evacuated before the storm hit, she said.

The school is hosting a cash donation drive through the Red Cross to help hurricane evacuees. There is also a private effort by some teachers and parents to collect clothing specifically for the two families, she said.

Six students have enrolled so far in Harvey School District 152, officials said. Six others have enrolled at Naperville-based School District 203.

For 15-year-old Naeem, his family plans to stay in the Chicago area at least a year until the New Orleans area recovers.

He hasn't mentioned to many people that he survived the hurricane, but the staff and students at Wheeling are eager to welcome him, said Principal Dorothy Sievert. The Wheeling High School Spokesman, the student newspaper, is planning a profile on him and six groups are collecting money for hurricane survivors at lunchtime.

"We know these students are coming in without their clothes or anything, so we want to do what we can," Sievert said.

Naeem scans AOL's instant messaging program at night, looking for a sign that his friends from home also survived. He has heard from three and hopes the others are safe.

His goals for the next year are simple. Finish 10th grade, he said, and "make friends."

Then he paused, "Maybe not. Then I won't want to go back."
 
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Show up at school, win cash and prizes
By Tracy Dell'Angela, Tribune staff reporter, 9/9/05

Chicago parents, want help with your rent and grocery bills, or maybe even a free vacation? Just send your kid to school.

Seeking to boost attendance numbers, Chicago Public Schools on Thursday unveiled a sweeping incentive plan that will reward schools and families for getting more children into school this fall. The incentives will cost the district about $500,000, which does not include donations from private sponsors.

The district wants children in class every day so they can succeed academically, but officials also want to recapture money they are losing in state funds when students don't attend. For every 1 percent increase in attendance, the district reaps an extra $18 million in state money.

Chicago Schools Chief Arne Duncan said he knows he will be criticized for a plan perceived as bribing families to do what should be expected of them. But he said the district must do all it can to reach its overall goal of 95 percent attendance systemwide. On the first day, Tuesday, about 393,180 students came to school, about 92 percent of the projected enrollment of 425,900.

"I'm a firm believer in rewarding hard work. We want to do everything we can to encourage families to do the right thing," Duncan said. "The reality of it is that not everyone has the mentality (that school is an obligation)."

Students can win prizes--from iPods and Macintosh computers, to concert tickets and movie passes--for improving their attendance or achieving perfect attendance. Parents whose children attend school every day from September to November will be entered in a contest sponsored by local radio station WGCI-FM, which is offering to pay the December rent or mortgage for 12 qualifying families chosen at random.

The radio station also will pay for a family vacation for the Chicago student with the most improved attendance.

Jewel-Osco will award 10 $500 gift cards to students with perfect attendance this fall.

Schools also stand to gain if they can attract more students to school. Schools that bring up attendance by 1 percent or more can win cash prizes ranging from $500 to $7,500. Celebrities will visit improving schools, and one high school will have its homecoming dance sponsored by a radio station. The three high schools that showed the best improvement in first-day attendance--including Best Practice High, which jumped from 50 to 70 percent attendance--will be visited Friday by three Indy 500 racecar drivers.

District spokeswoman Joi Mecks said the incentives are targeted in the fall months when the district's attendance is the highest because that's when state attendance numbers are counted. But she expects some incentives to carry into spring.

"Our goal is to get kids educated," she said. "But with the budget constraints, every dollar helps."
 
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SICA racism probe continuing
Attorney general's office collects more documents 
By Kati Phillips, Daily Southtown Staff writer, 9/9/05
 
Seven months into the investigation, the Illinois attorney general's office is amassing more documents from a Southland sports conference accused of segregating schools along racial lines.

Current and former members of the South Inter-Conference Association turned in 2005-06 activities and sports schedules at a superintendents' board of control meeting Thursday, and the documents will be passed on to investigators soon, president Kevin Burns said.

The collection follows a private meeting last week between SICA's attorney Burt Odelson and a few athletic directors at the attorney general's office. The group discussed how schedules are created without regard to race.

And it preceded discussion Thursday of whether a third new conference of SICA castaways is in the works, said Burns, superintendent of Community High School District 218.

"We did ask people point blank today ... but at this point in time, they denied even having anything on the table being discussed," Burns said. "I suspect in some measure they are waiting to see if anything comes of the attorney general's investigation before going forward."

Due in part to the racial controversy, SICA is disbanding as of June 30, 2006. Two new conferences have sprung up already in its wake.

The SouthWest Suburban Conference — which started competing this fall — consists of Andrew, Bolingbrook, Bradley-Bourbonnais, Homewood-Flossmoor, Joliet, Lincoln-Way Central, Lincoln-Way East, Lockport, Sandburg and Stagg high schools.

Next fall, the South Suburban Conference will debut with Argo, Bremen, Eisenhower, Evergreen Park, Hillcrest, Oak Forest, Oak Lawn, Reavis, Richards, Shepard and Tinley Park high schools.

That leaves 11 schools without a conference next school year: Bloom, Crete-Monee, Kankakee, Rich Central, Rich East, Rich South, Thornton Fractional North, Thornton Fractional South, Thornton, Thornridge, Thornwood.

The racial complaint originated with the superintendents of the Rich, Thornton Fractional and Thornton districts, which each have black-majority schools.
 
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Board member chastised for use of pen name
By Patrick Ferrell, The Star, 9/8/05

"Damage control" efforts may have backfired on a Bremen Community High School District 228 board member who tried to clear her name after it was revealed she uses pen names to write letters to the editor.

Use of the pen names by Verla Clevenger also led one Oak Forest resident to call on the board Tuesday to reprimand Clevenger. The board did not respond to the request at its regular meeting, but the issue came up briefly during an exchange between Clevenger and another board member.

The Star reported Aug. 28 that Clevenger apparently used the pen name of "Judy Dawson" to air a disagreement with her colleagues in a letter to the editor in The Star.

Responding to that article, Clevenger's daughter, Judy Dawson of Warsaw, Mo., wrote The Star's editor last week and hinted that she wrote the first letter herself.

"Will (the reporter) also write a story on the front paper of next Sunday's paper of how he found Judy Dawson? Who she is, why she wrote the letter and how he made a mistake?" the rebuttal letter asks.

It turns out, though, that Dawson has very little knowledge of the content of the first letter.

"So, were you at the last board of education meeting?" a reporter asked Dawson.

"No," Dawson said.

"Why then, does the first sentence of the first letter read 'I attended the 228 board meeting of Aug. 16?' " the reporter asked.

"If I said I was there, then I was there," Dawson said. "It was a long time ago."

The reporter then asked Dawson to name the district's superintendent.

"I don't know his name," Dawson responded. "I could look it up for you."

Supt. Rich Mitchell is mentioned by name in the first letter. The letter attacks the board majority — Clevenger's political enemies — for taking "programs away as fast as Dr. Mitchell puts them together."

The first letter went on to say Mitchell "has some great ideas, but this board won't work with him."

Dawson declined to answer further questions.

Following the original article, Clevenger asked that The Star not call her. Instead, she wanted The Star to contact her via e-mail. Clevenger did not respond to a list of questions sent via e-mail Friday.

At Tuesday's board of education meeting, Oak Forest resident Ruth Ensing chastised Clevenger for using the alias.

"By using an alias, Mrs. Clevenger seems to be attempting to manipulate the board by indicating public support that isn't there for her point of view," Ensing said. "Your behavior would not be permitted if you were a student in this district."

Ensing also questioned whether Clevenger violated the district's code of ethics and asked that the other board members reprimand her.

The board did not respond, but at one point during the meeting, after Clevenger made a comment about an unrelated issue, board member Cynthia Walker remarked: "Is that why you use an alias to write letters to the editor?"

Clevenger had no comment after the meeting.
 
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Jury awards $1M for girl’s death
School district, bus driver admitted they were negligent
By NANCY SLEPICKA, State Journal-Register Correspondent, 9/9/05

HILLSBORO - The family of a 14-year-old girl who died from injuries suffered in the Aug. 27, 2003, crash of a Vandalia school bus was awarded over a million dollars in damages by a Montgomery County jury Thursday.
 
Shawna Ward a seventh-grader from Fillmore, was pinned by the overturned bus after it went off Burg Road south of Fillmore and rolled down into a deep ravine.

After the bus was lifted by rescue workers, the injured girl was airlifted to Memorial Medical Center in Springfield, where she died two days later when life support was ceased.

Deborah Ward, 39, of Brownstown, as administrator of her daughter’s estate, was plaintiff in the lawsuit alleging negligence and wrongful death filed against Vandalia Community Unit School District and Eugene Rogers, driver of the school bus.

Prior to this week’s two-day jury trial, both the school district and Rogers had admitted negligence and agreed on the cost of medical services and burial expenses, $130,118.69.

It was the jury’s decision to determine dollar amounts to award for pain and suffering experienced by Shawna prior to her death (verdict, $75,000); for loss of benefits and services to next of kin (verdict, zero); and for loss of society, love and companionship (verdict, $800,000).

The plaintiff’s attorney, Bruce Cook of Belleville, called three witnesses.

Mike Sasse, 27, of Brownstown, a Fayette County Hospital paramedic, said Shawna was conscious and yelling about her pain when he arrived at the scene at 7:53 a.m. He said the girl’s lower body was under the bus, and her blood pressure was too low to administer any pain medication.

The bus was raised and Shawna was freed at about 8:20 a.m. Sasse testified that the girl became unresponsive as she was being lifted out of the ravine on a backboard and rushed to the medical evacuation helicopter.

Deborah Ward testified that Shawna did respond by shaking her head while she was in the hospital but was unable to speak due to the respiratory tube.

She and her husband, Danny Ward, told jurors their daughter was a free spirit, a happy girl who loved animals.

No witnesses were called by attorney Mark Bauman of Belleville, representing the school district, nor attorney Stephen Kaufmann of Edwardsville, representing Rogers.

Attorney Barbara Adams of Hillsboro was co-plaintiff’s counsel, and Judge Mark Joy presided.
 
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NATIONAL

School year in N.O., St. Bernard a wash
La. schools chief offers grim outlook
Laura Maggi, Times-Picayune Staff Writer, 9/7/05

BATON ROUGE -- Students likely will not be able to attend public school in Orleans or St. Bernard parishes for the rest of the school year, state schools Superintendent Cecil Picard said Tuesday.

Other school districts, such as those in Jefferson, Plaquemines, St. Charles and St. Tammany parishes and the city of Bogalusa, can be up and running in either weeks or months, he said at a briefing at the state Office of Emergency Preparedness.

About 135,000 public school students in four parishes - Orleans, Jefferson, St. Bernard and Plaquemines - were displaced by Hurricane Katrina, along with 52,000 private and parochial school students, according to the state Department of Education. These students willbe required to attend school, for at least part of the year, outside of their home districts.

"We're going to have to really take a hard look at complete reconstruction of the Orleans Parish school system," Picard said.

But Interim Superintendent Ora Watson said earlier in the day that she hopes that at least a few schools in Algiers could be opened this school year to accommodate families that might return to the area, which has not been flooded.

"When they bring children back to the West Bank, they will need schools," she said at a meeting with other Orleans Parish officials. Watson noted that some parts of Uptown also are dry and that families returning there will need schools for their children.

Picard said that there are about eight schools in Algiers that were not substantially damaged by the storm, but added that he did not expect even those schools would be ready by year's end. If people return to the West Bank, a small school district of maybe 7,000 or 8,000 students could be set up to accommodate those children sometime after January, he said.

Even getting to that point will depend on how quickly the area can be made habitable, Picard said. He noted that the state must deem the area safe - including ensuring that there is no environmental contamination from the floodwaters - and basic amenities like electricity and water must be available.

While Picard's department can funnel state education dollars for students in Orleans, without residents to pay property taxes there will not be enough local money to cover the cost of the children's education, he said.

Districts in Louisiana that will be taking in storm-displaced students and those outside the state are being asked to enroll them as quickly as possible, Picard said.

In some places, that will mean setting up special schools specifically for children who have been evacuated, such as at the Lamar Dixon Exposition Center in Gonzales, Picard said.

In the town of Zachary in East Baton Rouge Parish, which has a separate school district, Picard said he has authorized the superintendent to rent a former retail building that can be used to accommodate the relocated children.

The state still is pondering whether displaced students will have to comply with the state's standardized tests requirements, such as passing the LEAP exam, or other requirements imposed by federal law. Picard said that he expects to get waivers of certain federal requirements for students who are not being educated in their home parishes.
 
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Across Nation, Storm Victims Crowd Schools
By SAM DILLON, New York Times, 9/7/05

School districts from Maine to Washington State were enrolling thousands of students from New Orleans and other devastated Gulf Coast districts yesterday in what experts said could become the largest student resettlement in the nation's history.
 
Schools welcoming the displaced students must not only provide classrooms, teachers and textbooks, but under the terms of President Bush's education law must also almost immediately begin to raise their scholastic achievement unless some provisions of that law are waived.

Historians said that those twin challenges surpassed anything that public education had experienced since its creation after the Civil War, including disasters that devastated whole school districts, like the San Francisco earthquake and the Chicago fire.

"In terms of school systems absorbing kids whose lives and homes have been shattered, what we're going to watch over the next weeks is unprecedented in American education," said Jeffrey Mirel, a professor of history and education at the University of Michigan.

The vast resettlement was already under way last week, with schools in Baton Rouge, La., Houston and other cities near the Gulf Coast enrolling some students. Yesterday, officials in cities including San Antonio; Phoenix; Olympia, Wash.; Freeport, Me.; Memphis; Washington; Las Vegas; Salt Lake City; Chicago; Detroit; and Philadelphia reported enrolling students or preparing for their arrival.

The total number of displaced students is not yet known, but it appears to be well above 200,000. In Louisiana, 135,000 public school students and 52,000 private school students have been displaced from Orleans, Jefferson, St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes.

President Bush, speaking with reporters at the White House yesterday, thanked the nation's educators "for reaching out and doing their duty," and he said that Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings was working on a plan to help states absorb the educational costs but gave no hint of what kind of assistance might be provided. The Department of Education set up a Web site to coordinate private donations to schools enrolling displaced students.

"They said we could brace for about 500 kids," said Sue Steele, coordinator of homeless student programs for the public schools in Wichita, where buses carrying 1,800 storm victims were expected to arrive yesterday, part of some 7,000 headed for Kansas.

Many students were concentrated in districts along an arc from the Florida Panhandle west through Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas.

The Santa Rosa County School District in the Florida Panhandle has enrolled 137 students, said Carol Calfee, a district official.

"And we still have folks coming in," she said. "They're walking through the door and some of them just have nothing, so it's really hard." The local United Way has said it will try to buy school supplies for every displaced student, she said.

The crisis poses new challenges for Ms. Spellings, including financial. The Department of Education's budget this year for homeless student programs is about $61 million, which she said was insufficient.

Ms. Spellings, who has spent her first months in office fighting a backlash by local educators and state lawmakers against the federal law known as No Child Left Behind, is also hearing calls from advocacy groups that she take emergency measures that could be controversial.

The National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers union, asked her on Friday to waive the accountability provisions of the law for schools in the hurricane's path as well as in Texas and other states receiving large numbers of students, a move Ms. Spellings said she was reluctant to take.

Private companies that operate online courses or charter schools are urging her to use emergency powers to authorize them to enroll displaced students at the Houston Astrodome and other shelters across the nation.

Ms. Spellings has invited 40 education groups, including the P.T.A. and teachers unions, to meet at the Department of Education today to discuss disaster recovery efforts. Reg Weaver, president of the N.E.A., which has challenged No Child Left Behind in federal court, said he immediately accepted the invitation.

But in a separate letter, he also asked Ms. Spellings to use her powers to waive provisions of the law, which requires school districts to raise student scores on standardized tests each year by a percentage set by each state, a goal known as making adequate yearly progress.

"Until these children, their teachers, districts and families gain their footing under these extremely difficult circumstances, I encourage you to implement the provisions in N.C.L.B. that deal with the impact of natural disasters on testing and adequate yearly progress," Mr. Weaver's letter said.

Ms. Spellings is consulting with state school superintendents as she considers whether to waive the law's accountability provisions in some cases, said her spokeswoman, Susan Aspey. One consideration is how many displaced students that individual schools or districts enroll; those with higher concentrations may be more likely to receive waivers, Ms. Aspey said.

"There is no one-size-fits-all approach," she said.

Even before the storm, hundreds of schools that had failed to meet the federal law's proficiency requirements for several years, most of which educate the urban poor or non-English speaking immigrants, were facing sanctions that include school closings and the firing of staff. Thousands of others were expected to be placed on academic probation or labeled as low-performing.

Theodore R. Sizer, a visiting professor of history at Harvard, said that unless the law's accountability provisions were waived during the emergency, they would add tensions to the resettlement crisis.

"Imagine you're the principal of a big high school in city X, and your scores are above the state minimums, so you're doing fine with the law, and suddenly you have 300 displaced kids," Mr. Sizer said. "That not only brings crowding but also means that on the next exams your scores could plummet and the federal law will say you run a terrible school."

The Bush administration must also make decisions about another hotly debated issue in public education: charter schools. The National Council of Education Providers, which represents the nation's largest commercial school management companies, has asked the Department of Education to authorize it to enroll students housed at emergency shelters in Internet-based courses offered by its companies.

The National Council's Web site yesterday highlighted its request to the department to establish a "national virtual charter school" that would "serve evacuees wherever they are."

"Once students have access to computers and connectivity - borrowed, donated or shared - companies are standing by to waive state restrictions and log these students on," the Web site said. The restrictions in question include enrollment caps in state laws that apply to charter schools. The National Council wants the federal government to waive those laws during the emergency.

Jeanne Allen, a paid consultant to the National Council who is also president of the Center for Education Reform, a nonprofit organization, said she delivered a draft "Emergency Public Charter School Act" to members of Congress yesterday.

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Texas expecting up to 60,000 new students / Dallas Morning News
By HERB BOOTH, The Dallas Morning News, 9/6/05

More than 6,100 students fleeing Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath have enrolled in Texas public schools so far – including about 2,000 in North Texas – and state education officials promise to release money immediately to help affected districts cope.

Officials expect 50,000 to 60,000 new students to enroll in Texas schools.

And the federal government is doing its part, sending $250,000 apiece to six Texas regional education service centers, including Dallas' Region 10.

Dallas Independent School District spokesman Donald Claxton said it's still too early to tell how many students displaced by the killer hurricane would enroll.

"We had 255 kids report for classes today," Mr. Claxton said Tuesday. "But we expect that number to rise. There were a number of parents who held on to their kids today to see what FEMA assistance they might get to rebuild."

Normally, it takes a year for districts to begin receiving money for students on its rolls. But Mr. Claxton said DISD has begun to receive funds for its new pupils.

"We started collecting average daily attendance money on these students right away," Mr. Claxton said. "For us, it's not an immediate impact. It's still too early to see how it will affect the classroom."

Suzanne Marchman, spokeswoman for the Texas Education Agency, said the entity urged districts to maintain records for Title 1 and FEMA reimbursement detailing how much money is spent on evacuee students.

But the state is contributing funding as well.

"If more than 50 students enroll in a district or a smaller district is impacted, the district should contact our financial office to begin receiving additional funding as soon as possible," Ms. Marchman said. "We anticipate hearing from Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and others soon. We want to create some normalcy for these kids as soon as possible."

Some educators wondered about where these new students might be in their education.

John Rose, principal at Irving's Crockett Middle School, said there are no records to tell administrators how the students did on tests or in certain subjects.

Waiting to enroll

Some parents had mixed feelings on when to send their children to school, and many opted to wait.

"We're really trying to find housing before we get them into school," said Rosalind Armour, a New Orleans resident who took shelter at Reunion Arena and has two school-age children. "The goal is to get settled first."

But Willie Williams wasn't having any delay in his child's education. On Friday, he anticipated starting her in school as soon as possible.

"I didn't want her to miss any school," Mr. Williams said of his daughter Brittany, 9.

About 140 displaced students had joined the Frisco school system by yesterday afternoon, according to Shana McKay-Wortham, the district's communications director.

With the majority of them staying at the homes of family and friends, it's difficult for officials to tell how long many of them will remain in the district.

"When they're enrolling, we're figuring they are going to be with us for a while," Ms. McKay-Wortham said.

DeSoto has enrolled about 170 Hurricane Katrina evacuees. "The community has been amazing with the outreach," Superintendent Alton Frailey said. "We're providing vouchers for uniforms. There are funds for school supplies. So many people have made donations. The feeling I get is that for a number of these people, the move might be permanent. They appreciate the reception they've gotten in DeSoto."

Relocating for good?

So much so, that some of them will make the Dallas area their permanent home.

Sharon Price, DeSoto school district's assistant superintendent for administration and operations, said many of the parents are picking up job applications as they enroll their children.

"They've applied for all types of jobs, from clerical to professional to construction to secretarial," Ms. Price said.

But it isn't just parents and students who are coming to North Texas for the long haul. Some Louisiana teachers are coming here, too.

One, Clifford Hawkins, has relocated for good from the New Orleans area and has landed a job at Arlington's South Davis Elementary School as a fifth-grade teacher.

"We got out in time. So did all our family," said Mr. Hawkins, who has taught for more than 26 years. "I'm not going back. I might go just to visit, but this is my home now. A visit might do more harm than good"

Like thousands of others who fled New Orleans, Mr. Hawkins said his home and Parkview Academy, a New Orleans elementary school, sat in areas of town that were inundated with water and severe storm damage.

Mr. Hawkins, 50, said that his son lives in Arlington and that the school district impressed him whenever he visited.

Veronica Sopher, Arlington school district spokeswoman, said Mr. Hawkins showed up with a suitcase, a laptop and a memory stick. She said district officials were able to verify Mr. Hawkins' teaching certification and are glad to get him.

"He had the foresight to know life wasn't going to be what it was for a while," Ms. Sopher said.
 
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School only for Hawaiians challenged
Alexandre Da Silva, AP, Chicago Sun-Times
 
HONOLULU -- Sitting atop a lush green hillside with a panoramic view of Honolulu and the Pacific beyond, the prestigious Hawaiians-only Kamehameha Schools is much beloved by its students and alumni. But the private school envisioned by a Hawaiian princess may soon be changing.
 
A non-Hawaiian teenager is suing the school over its exclusive admissions policy requiring that applicants prove Hawaiian bloodlines.
 
The boy was rejected for admission in 2003, and his lawsuit led to a ruling earlier this month from a panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which said the race-based policy violates federal anti-discrimination laws. The school is asking the full court to reconsider.
 
15,000 people demonstrated
 
Michael Chun, headmaster of the school, said the Hawaiians-only policy follows the 1883 will of a princess who was concerned Hawaiians would suffer disadvantages. Ten years after her death, the Hawaiian monarchy was overthrown by a group of U.S. businessmen and sugar planters.
 
"Their culture was shredded, their spirit was broken, and their sense of sovereignty and independence was taken away," Chun said. "She saw as one of the ways to help her people survive was through education."
 
Since the appeals court's ruling, alumni and other Native Hawaiians have risen to the school's defense. On Aug. 20, some 400 marched in San Francisco to petition the full appeals court to review the admissions case. On Aug. 6, more than 15,000 demonstrated across the islands to protest what they see as an assault on their culture.
 
Since its humble start with a couple of dozen boys, Kamehameha has expanded to campuses on other islands, becoming the largest and richest independent private elementary and secondary school in the nation.
 
About 5,100 Hawaiian and part-Hawaiian students from kindergarten through 12th grade attend classes on the schools' three campuses.
 
Funded by a $6.2 billion trust, it is also Hawaii's largest private landowner, with 365,000 acres, including resort, commercial and residential holdings.
 
Former student Joshua Irvine said textbooks could never teach him what he learned when he transferred to the Oahu campus from a public school in a poor neighborhood.
 
Poverty was no longer an issue, said Irvine, whose new friends wore collared blue and white uniforms and spoke "proper English," instead of the pidgin English spoken among many local people. Irvine played flute in the school band and explored his passion for science in "top-notch" laboratories.
 
Subsidizes tuition
 
Jim Slagel, who has taught advanced placement English at Kamehameha for 16 years, said his students are no different from those he taught at public schools in the mainland.
 
"It's not a typical private school," Slagel said. "We are still dealing with the lower social and economic students."
 
The school's powerful economic assets allow it to subsidize tuition costs for 60 percent of its students, making admissions highly prized and extremely competitive. Only one in eight applicants is admitted.
 
Kamehameha's $2,686 annual tuition falls well below other Hawaiian private schools, including highly rated Punahou School's $12,885 and Iolani School's $12,200, neither of which is race restrictive.

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San Francisco schools chief resigns
AP, 9/7/05
 
SAN FRANCISCO, California -- School Superintendent Arlene Ackerman, who has had difficulty working with a splintered Board of Education, announced Tuesday that she will resign at the end of the school year.

Ackerman, 59, whose contract as chief of San Francisco's public schools was to run through 2008, revealed her plans during a news conference held just before the school board was scheduled to review her job agreement.

"After heartfelt deliberation, I submitted with regret my resignation," said Ackerman, who fought back tears as she read a two-page statement listing her achievements.

Ackerman did not mention the simmering tensions between her and three of the seven members of the school board. But several of her supporters, including Mayor Gavin Newsom, pointed to that as a key to her decision.

"I am disappointed but I confess I'm not particularly surprised," Newsom said.

During her five-year tenure in San Francisco, Ackerman, who previously oversaw the public schools in Washington, D.C., has been praised for helping boost test scores, addressing the achievement of minority students and improving the reputation of the public schools in a city where more than one-third of all families send their children to private school.

But during the last year, she has publicly clashed with three board members who have openly criticized her allegedly autocratic leadership style.
 
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Pa. schools mandate body-mass calculations
By Martha Raffaele, AP Education Writer, 9/9/05  

HARRISBURG, Pa. --As they wait for their children's first report card to come home this year, elementary-school parents across Pennsylvania also can expect to receive a separate report on a key indicator of their children's health.
 
In an effort to combat childhood obesity, the state Health Department is requiring school nurses to compute students' body-mass index -- or height-to-weight ratio -- during annual growth screenings, starting this year with children in kindergarten through fourth grade.

Parents will receive letters about the results that will encourage them to share the information with their family physician. The letters will explain whether the BMI is above, below, or within the normal range for the child's age and gender.

"Schools have screened students for height and weight for about 50 years," Health Department spokesman Richard McGarvey said. "They're simply taking what they've already been screening for and calculating the BMI."

The measurement will be required for students up to eighth grade next year, and for all students in the 2007-08 school year.

Pennsylvania joins four other states that already collect BMI data during student growth screenings, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Arkansas, California, Florida and Missouri.

About 35 percent of Pennsylvania's children are overweight or at risk of becoming overweight, according to a state Health Department study of more than 25,000 students' health records during the 2001-02 school year.

A pilot test of Pennsylvania's BMI reporting requirement in the fall of 2003, which involved 4,390 students at 10 schools, produced similar results.

"When you have a kindergartner who weighs 80 pounds, that's concerning," said Nancy Alleman, a nurse at one of the test schools, Sylvan Heights Science Charter School in Harrisburg.

But Dr. Reginald Washington, a Denver pediatrician who co-chairs an obesity task force for the American Academy of Pediatrics, said the recommended physician consultation is an overly simplistic solution.

"If you're a general practitioner, you see patients probably every 10 minutes. It takes about an hour of counseling and evaluation to even begin to do something about obesity," Washington said. "To say, 'Here's a piece of paper and the world will be right,' is foolish."

A districtwide BMI-notification program that the East Penn School District in Emmaus instituted in 2001-02 got off to a rocky start, partly because parents weren't informed ahead of time, said parent Lisa Lechmanik.

School officials also didn't consider that in some cases, muscle contributed to a high body-mass index, she added.

"They have athletes that are training year-round, and some of the premier athletes were getting these letters," including two of Lechmanik's children, who have since graduated, she said.

The furor died down after district made several changes, including giving parents the option of not receiving the letters, she said.

Schools should be prepared to help children address weight problems by educating them about proper nutrition and providing adequate exercise time, among other things, said Ivy Silver, founder of A Chance to Heal, a Rydal-based advocacy group for people with eating disorders.

"They should develop programs so kids who are possibly at risk have the wherewithal to better manage and take care of themselves," Silver said.

Beth Trapani, spokeswoman for Pennsylvania Advocates for Nutrition and Activity, a nonprofit group that is helping the department publicize the BMI requirement, said remedies need not be complicated.

"We're talking about simple, easy changes that can make a big difference -- switching to skim or lowfat milk, eating more fruits and vegetables," Trapani said.
 
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Everyone is telling teachers what to teach
Even in an era of standardized tests, state governments and others are adding mandatory subjects to schools.
By Stacy A. Teicher, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor, 9/8/05

From urban Philadelphia to rural Illinois, the new school year also means new requirements for what, precisely, students must learn. In addition to their normal English classes, science labs, and test-prep work, more will be studying topics such as African history, personal finance, and genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda.

Curriculum mandates sometimes come top-down from state legislatures. Others spring from grass-roots demands on school boards. They're the product of a wrestling match of sorts - between American education's tradition of local control and the growing movement to standardize subject matter for the sake of global competitiveness.

When the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) periodically shows US students performing dismally on a certain subject, "usually there's a hue and outcry," says Peggy Altoff, president-elect of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS). That can spur state lawmakers to try to expand the curriculum in, say, history or geography. But in addition, "states [or local districts] begin to pick up the mantle for certain issues ... when a certain segment of the population begins to say, 'There's a neglect here,' " she says.

Take the City of Brotherly Love: It's the first public school district to require all high school students entering this September to take a year-long course on African and African-American history before they graduate.

Unanimously approved by Philadelphia's five-member School Reform Commission, the mandate was in some ways 40 years in the making. In the 1960s, local activists won the fight for more Afrocentric curriculum development, but the courses have been offered as electives in just a portion of the city's schools. Now a college-level textbook has been adapted and instructors in all 60 high schools have been trained to teach the required course.

The textbook starts with the history of African civilizations and then moves to the Americas. "It puts in context that the slave trade was a period in our history - we did not enter humankind as slaves," says Sandra Dungee Glenn, a member of the reform commission. She recalls attending high school in the district in the 1970s, when she says she rarely saw her heritage reflected in her textbooks.

Not a total solution, but it's a start

About 65 percent of the district's students are African-American, but proponents of the course say it's equally important for others, because of the reverberations US racial history has to this day. The move wasn't universally applauded, however. John Perzel (R), the Speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, sent a letter to the commission this summer expressing concerns raised in his district, which is largely white and includes immigrants from Russia, Turkey, and other countries.

"While I believe it is appropriate to acknowledge ... cultural diversity within the district's curriculum, mandating an entire year of study focusing on a single constituency appears unnecessary," the letter reads in part. "A more prudent course might be to develop a multipronged course of study focusing on the many cultures embodied within the school district."

Ms. Glenn says the bulk of response has been positive and the decision is firm. "I don't believe that it's a silver bullet, but it is an important component [of reforming the city's schools]," she says.

Teachers' responses usually depend on how much they're consulted on new requirements. But even if they agree the subject matter is important, covering a long list of specific topics as well as attending to individual students is becoming much more difficult.

It's even more difficult as they face simultaneous demands to focus more on core skills such as reading and math, which have to be tested under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

"The teacher is caught [in] this whirling cycle," says Bruce Damasio, a history and economics teacher in Maryland and an NCSS board member. "You're supposed to meet this standard, and at the same time this topic du jour has come up ... and you've got 180 days to get all these things done."

Illinois takes on genocide

For political leaders, curriculum is one way to signal values. In August, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D) signed a law expanding the state's 15-year-old mandate on Holocaust education. Now all students will learn not just about Nazi atrocities but also about genocide in places such as Armenia, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Sudan.

"We have to be sure [students] understand that racial, national, ethnic, and religious hatred can lead to horrible tragedies," Governor Blagojevich said in a press statement. "These are not just the problems of our parents' or grandparents' generations. We ... [need to] encourage students to fight intolerance and hatred wherever they see it." Local districts will determine the details of how the subject will be taught at various grade levels.

Some efforts, on the other hand, never see the light of day. In Maryland in the late 1990s, lawmakers wanted to mandate more teaching about the Irish Potato Famine of the mid-1800s. Because the state has a tradition of leaving curriculum matters primarily to local districts, Ms. Altoff appeared before the legislature to warn against setting a precedent with something so specific. In the end, schools were given the option of using a suggested curriculum.

Creating commissions is one way states can influence curriculum without going so far as to issue an edict. In New York this summer, the announcement of an Amistad Commission to determine if there needs to be more content on slavery and African-Americans' contributions set off a controversy; it's unclear how many educators will be among the group's 19 political appointees. (The Amistad, for which the committee was named, was a slave ship. Setting out from Havana in 1839, the ship's cargo of 53 enslaved Africans took over the ship and sailed to Long Island, New York, where the mutineers were put on trial and eventually set free.)

New Jersey also has an Amistad Commission, one of many groups in the state charged with promoting better understanding of a variety of issues and ethnic groups. The state's Holocaust Commission is paired with a requirement that the subject be taught in public schools.

But others, like the Italian Commission, created in 2002, prepare curriculum that is strictly voluntary.

Persuading school districts and teachers to opt in requires some innovative lesson plans and training, so they can see how the materials meet state standards, says Roger Marinzoli, executive director of the New Jersey Italian Commission.

Italian-Americans make up about 25 percent of the state, he says, but "the attempt is not to make this a flag-waving exercise.... You have to make it appealing to a broad spectrum."

The group's lessons cover the US internment of Germans, Japanese, and Italians during World War II and address ethnic stereotyping. It also offers a language-arts segment linking Da Vinci's stream-of-consciousness writings to existing lessons on novelist James Joyce.

Feedback has been so good, Mr. Marinzoli says, that schools as far away as Sicily have asked to use some of the curriculum.

Textbooks can be quickly adapted

Because textbooks are often updated every few years and customized for states, the steady drumbeat of new material isn't usually a problem, says Chris Johnson, editorial director for social studies texts at McDougal Littell.

Texas, for instance, requires that texts at every grade level include information of the benefits of the free enterprise system. And California has asked for more material on Martin Luther King Jr. and labor organizer César Chávez to meet its social studies requirement. Shrinking photos often makes enough space so that the books don't get longer or lose other content, Mr. Johnson says.

But for teachers, there's a concern about trade-offs. A key question, Altoff says, is "what provisions are being made to ensure that the coverage of that content is more than surface - that it's actually going to be meaningful within the time frame [they have to teach]?"

"There is no simple answer," she adds. "That's why there's so much pressure from different curriculum groups."

Additional 'must' topics vary from state to state

State lawmakers sometimes get specific about the topics that public schools must teach. Some examples from recent years:

Human rights

• Sixteen states, ranging from Alabama to Nevada, have legislation on Holocaust education. Eight states require or encourage Holocaust instruction, while others simply establish commissions or task forces to help develop materials.

• Rhode Island has had a law since 2000 requiring the education department to develop material on genocide, human rights, and slavery, including specifics such as the Holocaust, famine in Ireland, genocide in Armenia, and Mussolini's Fascist regime.

• In several states, including New Jersey, Illinois, and New York, Amistad Commissions have been established to examine and improve the curriculum related to African-American history and slavery.

Civics/citizenship

• Most states require a course on government, civics, or citizenship, but to give these subjects more weight, five states now require a related exam as a graduation requirement. Another five states are phasing in such exams.

• In 2004, California passed a law in part to ensure that the history/social science framework would include six documents: The Declaration of Independence; the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights; The Federalist Papers; The Emancipation Proclamation; The Gettysburg Address; and George Washington's farewell address.

• Since 2003, Missouri has required every school (pre-K through 12th grade) to devote the equivalent of one class period to the meaning and significance of Veterans Day.

Financial literacy

• More than half the states have standards for personal finance education. Nine require testing in the subject, and seven - including Utah and Georgia most recently - require it for high school graduation.

Sources: Education Commission of the States; National Council on Economic Education
 
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===========================================================================

NATIONAL - NCLB

Steer clear of NCLB lawsuit
Sentinel Editorial, 9/4/05

The No Child Left Behind Act was one of the earliest legislative successes of the Bush administration, passed in a bipartisan alliance with Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. It was hailed as a step forward for accountability in education as well as a harbinger of the Bush governing style.

Four years later, the second part of that sentence appears to be true, only not in the way it was intended at the time. Where pundits saw passage of No Child as proof of the president's "uniter, not a divider" rhetoric, the administration's refusal to fund the act at the promised levels turned out to be the true indicator of its governing style.

Pennsylvania, for example, would have received an additional $208 million in federal education funds last year if the administration had kept its promises. That $415,000 per school district ain't, as they say, hay. A study in New Hampshire found that for every $5 in new costs No Child created, the federal government provided less than $1 in funding.

The educational benefits, meanwhile, are the subject of heated debate. Some call the law all stick and no carrot, demanding ever-escalating improvements in test scores even for the best students. This results in more and more class time devoted to "teaching the test."

Now, the state of Connecticut is suing the federal government for failing to fund No Child. This is a big deal, and the state teachers' union is encouraging Pennsylvania to join the lawsuit, as is state Rep. Peter Daley, a Democrat from Washington County.

Gov. Ed Rendell's spokeswoman said no formal request has come through normal channels, only through the media. She also said Rendell has so far not given the issue any thought.

We're guessing he'll think about it now. Should Pennsylvania join the suit? We know the state has in the past sought waivers for particular No Child-related issues. We also know that the feds have rejected some of the state's requests.

The federal Department of Education, not surprisingly, rejects Connecticut's charges and accuses the state of wanting to use the money for other purposes. This tells us the lawsuit is going to be hard-fought on both sides.

We doubt, however, that Pennsylvania's presence in the case is absolutely necessary. Whatever grievances our state might add to the case probably aren't too different from those Connecticut is citing.

And however well-founded the case may be, it's almost certain that any dealings between Connecticut and the education department in Washington will be prickly at best from now until the case is settled.

Better for Pennsylvania to maintain a cordial relationship with the feds for the time being — although it wouldn't hurt to let them know, when negotiating for future No Child waivers, that it's not too late for our side to change its mind.
 
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Back to School: NCLB and beyond
Journal News Editorial, 9/4/05
 
Education reform, be it on a national, state, district or school-by-school basis, is like lifelong learning for an individual: It takes commitment; an expectation of difficulties; consistent reappraisal; and the realization that the work is never really quite finished. Challenges are inevitable, as are naysayers, but so are gains.

That's worth remembering as Labor Day weekend heralds our collective turn from a barbecue mind-set to a back-to-school one. If we need help, most every education watchdog group — many with agendas, others with axes to grind — has in recent weeks issued a report, study or poll assessing the health, and wealth, of America's public school system.

Reading them, we find, of course, mixed results. Yet the analysis tilts toward the gloomy despite many positives. The most easily overlooked ones: Because of accountability demands by New York state and Washington, there is more, and better, information available; the attention paid it shows that excellent schooling remains a priority; and the data can, should and sometimes even does drive where priorities and efforts are placed.

The foremost factor driving soul-searching this "Back to School'' year is, of course, No Child Left Behind, the federal education-reform law that began taking effect in 2002. Its detractors have lined up ever since, and even supporters tend to pepper most discussions about NCLB with "Yes, but . . .'' Yes, the law's intent — high academic standards; strong accountability measures; highly qualified teachers in all classrooms; and proficiency for all students by 2014 — is terrific, they say, but it is too expensive to implement, often distracting and unwisely punitive.

And now NCLB's required annual testing of grades three through eight is to begin. In response, Connecticut, the National Education Association and its 2.7 million union members, and other parties are suing the Bush administration over the law.

Litigants claim that states and school districts are being forced to spend money on mandates that the federal government has not paid for — shortchanging states by at least $27 billion a year nationally. Connecticut projects it will be more than $41 million short in paying for NCLB's requirements through 2008. The administration disagrees, contending that, under President Bush, more billions of dollars than ever have flowed from Washington to classrooms. An advocacy group called NCLBgrassroots.org, with a Web site by the same name, though, practically chortles at the growing "revolt'' against the law.

With all the discord, it would be easy to conclude that the nation's education system is off-track, if not in chaos. It is not. There is learning going on and, slowly, documented progress in education reform. A new report, "Do You Know . . . The Latest Good News About American Education,'' by the Center on Education Policy in Washington covers more than 15 years of statistics. It shows that more Americans are completing high school or college than ever; high school students are taking more challenging courses; more high school students are completing advanced math and science courses; and more students are going to college, with more young adults earning degrees. Findings in New York are similarly positive.

All is not perfect. But data exists that is telling us something, a lot, in fact. We need to heed it. We need to use it.

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More than 70 percent of high schools meet NCLB standards
AP, 9/6/05   

HARTFORD, Conn. --Seventy-two percent of the state's public high schools are meeting federal standards under the No Child Left Behind Act, state education officials said Tuesday.
 
That's down from 76 percent a year ago.

Of the state's 181 high schools, 51 failed to meet the standard for adequate yearly progress based on performance of the 2005 Connecticut Academic Performance Test. Last year, 42 of 180 high schools failed to meet the federal standard.

But state education officials said high schools had to score 10 percent better this year to meet the federal standards. Sixty-nine percent of students were required to score a proficient levels in math and 72 percent in reading. In addition, 70 percent of 2001's freshman class were required to graduate last year and 95 percent of sophomores must participate in the CAPT test.

"There really was minimal effect on the schools as a result of the higher benchmark," said Fran Rabinowitz, the state Education Department's associate commissioner. "Only nine more schools were identified. We were expecting more."

Testing requirements are to grow more stringent until 2014 when all students are expected to be proficient on state reading and math tests, according to the No Child Left Behind law, the centerpiece of President Bush's education policy.

Last month, Connecticut became the first state in the nation to sue over the law's testing requirements, asking a federal judge to declare that state and local funds cannot be used to meet its goals. The state claims that the law is unconstitutional because it doesn't provide all the money needed for the testing and programs.

The federal government cites annual testing as a cornerstone of the law, and Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has repeatedly denied requests from the state for more flexibility.

State education officials say that they already know that minority and poor children don't perform as well as their wealthy, white peers, and that additional tests aren't going to tell them more.
 
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Your child's next tutor may be in India / AZ Central.com
Greg Toppo, USA Today, 9/6/05

When engineering student Jeff Bowman needed help in calculus last year, a professor at the University of North Dakota suggested he get tutoring. Bowman, who lives in the Caribbean and takes courses online, found a tutor - in India.

A working electrician, Bowman would log on to the Internet before work, around 3 a.m., and get one-on-one help from one of dozens of overseas tutors the university hired through a U.S. company called Smarthinking.

"I kind of doubt that I would have been able to pass it (calculus) without help," says Bowman, 45. "When I want help, I don't care how I get it." advertisement 
 
Soon, help like this could come to public school students. Thanks to President Bush's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, kids in struggling schools are eligible for free after-school tutoring in reading and math. In many schools, local teachers, nonprofit groups and even churches are approved to provide it.

So are for-profit companies. Many are investing in technology that allows students and tutors to communicate via special Internet chat rooms and Web-enabled telephone service. Several companies cautiously are considering the practice of "offshoring" a portion of their online tutoring to countries including India.

Despite some educators' worries that offshore tutors might not meet certification requirements, one U.S. company already has conducted a pilot program with Indian tutors.

Indian firms are eager to offer - and in some cases expand - their services here.

"This is a very good, upcoming field because there is a huge demand for teachers," says Basak Somit, manager of e-learning for Career Launcher, a New Delhi-based education firm. "The sort of queries which we are getting over here, it's tremendous."

Career Launcher piloted a tutoring program last year with eSylvan, a division of Baltimore-based Educate Inc., through Educate's retail operations. The sessions, staffed by five tutors, weren't part of NCLB; families paid privately. Somit says difficulties getting teacher certifications forced them to pull out of the pilot, but Career Launcher is developing its own program and hopes to launch sessions directly through schools this year.

Outsourcing long has been a contentious labor issue. U.S. teachers never have faced overseas competition, but a perfect storm of factors - better technology, rising numbers of struggling schools and millions of dollars in new federal aid - could change that, making "education process outsourcing" a reality.

Indian tutors work, on average, for the equivalent of about $200 monthly, putting in six to eight hours a day, five to six days a week. That means they earn the equivalent of about a $1.40 an hour, compared with upward of $20 to $30 an hour for many U.S. tutors.

Public schools last year spent about$218 million on tutoring with an anticipated price tag of $500 million this year, says J. Mark Jackson, a senior analyst at Eduventures, a Boston market research company specializing in education.

Outsourcing tutoring is "perfectly feasible," he says, but "politically it would be a disaster" for a for-profit company. "It's a very politically charged debate. The person who's not doing that work is the local teacher."

While workers in other professions suffer from outsourcing all the time, observers say it is unlikely that any community's public schools will be totally outsourced. So companies that want to peel off even a small portion of teachers' work must make the case for it locally, Jackson says. "You want the local community, where the teachers have such strong power in the political process, supporting what you want to do."

Liz Pape, CEO of Virtual High School, an online school that serves more than 6,000 students, says rural areas can benefit from online teaching.

"If your child happens to be in a very rural, somewhat isolated area and is going to a high school where there are no teachers who can teach A.P. statistics, wouldn't you want your student to take a course in A.P. statistics from a teacher in Massachusetts?" she says.

But Pape says she's not ready to outsource teaching overseas.

Steve Pines, executive director of the Education Industry Association, a group that oversees for-profit education providers, agrees. He says taxpayers "should not be supporting offshore educational staff. ... Frankly, offshore (tutors) do not fully understand our system of education, and their cultural and communication differences may impede student learning."

None of the major tutoring firms is offshoring their NCLB offerings, but a few small companies cautiously have been looking into it - if not for NCLB, then for more specialized applications, such as high school calculus or advanced science.

"It's really difficult to bring 20 tutors into a rural area and provide 20 students with one-to-one instruction," says Francesco Lecciso of Brainfuse, a New York-based company that provides one-on-one tutoring through NCLB in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Arizona, Maine and California. About 1 percent of his tutors live abroad, he says. While Brainfuse officials have discussed hiring more, he says logistical and political considerations are holding back the idea. "It's still a very sensitive subject."

But the education level of Indian tutors "is astounding" for the pay they get, he adds.

Rajeev Arora, vice president of business and strategy for Elluminate, a Fort Lauderdale online tutoring and software firm, says he looks for tutors in the United States and Canada first, but "to support the business, we'll look elsewhere." He won't rule out doing business under NCLB if demand grows.

So, too, would George Cigale, CEO ofTutor.com, a New York company that contracts with public libraries and others to provide individual after-school tutoring. In many cases, federal funds pay for it. Tutor.com doesn't sell NCLB tutoring.

About 700 libraries in 40 states are signed up for Tutor.com's service. They pay based on community size, how many hours they make tutoring available and how many computer terminals are used. Many use federal after-school and other education funds to pay for the service.

Cigale says 98 percent of his 500 tutors are stateside; the others are involved in programs such as a partnership with a Chilean company that recruits bilingual math and science tutors from local universities.

The bottom line is ensuring quality, he says. "If I think that I can do that by having tutors from Madison, Wis., or Bangalore, India, I will think about doing that."

The U.S. Education Department hasn't taken a stand on outsourcing, but Mike Petrilli, a former assistant deputy secretary for innovation and improvement, says, "This is an evolving sector, and I'll tell you, it's fun to be a part of it. It really is a new frontier."

Washington, D.C.-based Smarthinking pioneered the field, allowing college students 24-hour access to a pool of foreign tutors. CEO Burck Smith says offshoring works well in higher education because college students often need help at 3 a.m., when it's midday in India. About 20 percent of Smarthinking's 400 or so tutors live outside the United States, mostly in India, the Philippines and Canada. A few Spanish-speaking math tutors are in Chile.

"For the most part these are new jobs. No one's had 24/7 math tutoring before," Smith says.

Becki Robinson, who administers the federal tutoring program in the Los Angeles Unified School District, worries about safety, saying overseas tutors could glean personal information from students.

But Anirudh Phadke, a consultant at Career Launcher, says tutors are forbidden from asking students personal questions except for what state they're in. He says 15 to 20 of the firm's 100 or so tutors are working with U.S. students at any given time, generally helping three at a time. Students get a headphone and microphone and use voice-over-Internet technology. They also get a whiteboard, a high-tech chalkboard that's connected to a computer through a pen-type stylus. "There is a live conversation there," Phadke says.

Phadke says he thought U.S. students would resist the idea of overseas tutors, but they "don't really care about where we are."

He tutors online occasionally and says students assume he's an Indian living in the United States. When they find out he's in India, "they immediately ask me, "How far is the Taj (Mahal) from your place?' It actually is a very nice experience."
 
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Public Choices
What “no government dollar left behind” thinking means for schools
By Neal McCluskey, policy analyst with the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute, National Review Online, 9/6/05

It's back-to-school time, and many of the adults trying to run American education have a lot to learn. They ought to start by memorizing a simple formula: increased federal funding leads to decreased educational flexibility, producing academic stagnation.

They definitely have not learned that lesson in Connecticut, where last month state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal launched the first-ever state lawsuit against the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), calling the Bush administration's enforcement of the law "rigid, arbitrary and capricious." Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell supports the suit and recently declared to a group of Connecticut teachers that rather than NCLB's strict rules, "we want the leeway to let our schools perform."

Connecticut's problem is that it seems to want both more federal money and flexibility. "Our taxpayers are sagging under the crushing costs of local education," Rell commented the day the lawsuit was announced. "What we don't need is a new laundry list of things to do — with no new money to do them."

The day after Connecticut filed its suit the Center for American Progress (CAP), a progressive Washington, D.C., think tank, released a report in which it too decried schools' inflexibility but called for more federal funds.

The report, from CAP's National Task Force on Public Education, starts off reasonably, arguing that a lot of our educational trouble can be attributed to the fact that "too much of our education system supports the status quo and a basic 'one size fits all approach.'" Unfortunately, it soon contradicts itself, intoning that "tragically, the commitment to uniformity in expectations and standards for what students should be taught is not reflected in the K-12 education system."

The result of this confused analysis is a proposal for the federal government to provide "leadership" and to spend at least $325 billion over ten years implementing numerous CAP-endorsed initiatives including universal pre-school and a "voluntary" national curriculum tied to expanded "national accountability measures."

What both the Connecticut lawsuit and the CAP report demonstrate is the inability of policymakers to grasp history and understand that more federal money inevitably means more rules, and that neither of those things helps America's schools.

Keep in mind that it was only in the last few decades, with passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965, that the federal government became deeply involved in American education. Once it was in, though, its "investment" increased by leaps and bounds. According to the most recent inflation-adjusted data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the federal investment in education ballooned by nearly 400 percent between 1965 and 2003, and by more than 500 percent at the elementary and secondary level.

Federal meddling in education has grown with its funding. Over the last 40 years, despite the presence of a clause prohibiting federal control of education in almost all legislation passed in that time, as the federal government expended more money on the schools it heaped ever greater requirements onto the funds. Today its dictates are so extensive that Washington tells districts whether their teachers are qualified and their reading curriculum is acceptable, and requires schools to provide lessons on the Constitution every September 17, the anniversary of the signing of that once-respected document.

Despite this incredible growth in federal funding and "leadership," academic achievement has largely stagnated. The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress "Trends in Academic Progress" report reveals the sad truth. In 1971 seventeen-year-olds had an average score of 285 out of 500 points on the NAEP reading assessment. In 2004 the average wasn't a single point higher. Nine-year-olds' scores increased the most of any age group in reading, but their average only rose by slightly over 5 percent. Overall the improvements in math were higher, but were also nowhere near commensurate with federal spending increases.

What is critical for policymakers and voters to understand is that, contrary to Connecticut's complaint, the federal government does not simply force states to do as they're told. It buys compliance, attaching any and all requirements it wants schools to follow to the taxpayer money that states "voluntarily" accept. And, of course, the more money it supplies, the more rules and regulations it creates.

States aren't going to be able to have it both ways. They can either take federal money and give up on flexibility, or they can demand flexibility by telling Washington to get out of the education business. What they can't do is the impossible: fixing our "one size fits all" schools by demanding ever more federal dollars.
 
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State Could End Up Paying More Than Expected For NCLB Law / The Day (CT)
Federal Funding For Education Mandate to Drop In 2005-06
By DAN PEARSON, The Day Staff Writer, Education Reporter, 9/8/05

Hartford — A financial report released Wednesday by the state Department of Education shows that the state will receive less federal education funding this year than last year.

State Education Commissioner Betty J. Sternberg said the report indicates that Connecticut will now bear more of a financial burden associated with the No Child Left Behind Act than originally believed.

“In the beginning there were increases (in funding). But they have leveled off. So now we're actually in worse shape than we thought,” Sternberg said. “When (the federal government) talks about increases, it harkens back to an earlier time. They know the new numbers as well as we do.”

The State Board of Education accepted a report Wednesday on state and federal funding that found that state funding for education will increase by $144 million, or nearly 7 percent, in 2005-06, while overall federal funding will decrease by about $755,000, or less than one percent.

According to the report, federal grants for NCLB and Title I grants, which provide funding for students in the state's poorest districts, will decrease by about 3 and 1 percent, respectively.

The decrease in federal funding is significant in its relation to costs for the state and its municipalities, which must comply with NCLB, a law that seeks to improve public education by making schools more accountable for their students' performance on standardized tests.

Connecticut has become the first state to sue the federal government over NCLB, claiming it is an illegal, unfunded mandate that violates both a state law and a provision in NCLB itself that prohibits a state from spending its own money to comply with the law. The state has argued that money required for testing would be better spent on programs, such as preschool.

Responding to the state, the federal government has repeatedly said that it has provided historic funding increases to enable states to pay for NCLB compliance. Sternberg said the report reaffirms that this claim refers to increases that occurred shortly after passage of the law.

Earlier this year, the legislature commissioned a cost study that found that it would cost the state about $40 million and towns and cities hundreds of millions of dollars to comply with the law through 2008. Sternberg said Wednesday, however, that the projections were based on the state receiving “flat funding,” as it did in 2004-05. Since the state is now receiving less in federal funds, the NCLB costs to both the state and towns and cities will rise even more.

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Conn. lawsuit over NCLB is nothing for Arizona to emulate
East Valley Tribune Editorial, 9/5/05

The news last week that 13 East Valley schools had fallen short of passing muster under the federal No Child Left Behind law was disappointing but not all that surprising.
 
Twenty-one percent of Arizona’s schools failed to meet “adequate yearly progress” under NCLB, up 3 percentage points from last year — but due in no small part to tougher standards.

Most Arizona schools clearly are rising to the challenge of both NCLB and the state AIMS graduation standards, including some that fell short this year — largely because they serve students who are disadvantaged or have special needs. Getting these kids up to snuff academically won’t be easy or happen overnight.

Some may be tempted to take Connecticut’s tack: cry foul and sue. They should think again. That state’s Democratic attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, may have thought he’d be a hero among his liberal political base when he filed the suit a couple weeks ago, but he’s been taking some heat from civil rights leaders who’ve called the suit “ill-advised.”

Why? Because NCLB for the first time holds public schools accountable not only to produce respectable overall test-score averages, but to make sure those averages don’t hide pockets of failure — particularly among poor and minority kids.

It just so happens that Connecticut is No. 1 in the nation in hiding pockets of failure under high overall test scores. While the state boasts some of the highest overall test averages, it also has some of the lowest scores in poor communities.

In Connecticut, leaving no child behind apparently is just too much trouble for the liberal white elite who rule the state. So they sue the federal government for millions more — on top of the record increase in federal funding included in the NCLB Act — to educate the poor and the minorities.

East Valley school districts have been working hard to meet the worthy expectations of NCLB, and we commend them for it. They need to sustain that worthy effort.

Any thought of copping out and joining Connecticut’s litigious path should be rejected. With the hefty increases in education funding at the state and federal levels over the past decade, there no longer is any excuse for leaving even a single child behind.
 
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Dept. of Education Releases Report on Payola Controversy / Editor & Publisher
By Editor & Publisher Staff, 9/6/05 

NEW YORK - The federal Department of Education paid education-advocacy groups that produced Op-Ed columns, ads, and other material, according to a new report issued by the DOE's Inspector General.

This means that former Tribune Media Services (TMS) columnist Armstrong Williams wasn't the only person writing for newspapers while receiving DOE money.

The report said The Dallas Morning News, The Sacramento (Calif.) Bee, the Mobile (Ala.) Register, and The Grand Island (Neb.) Independent were among the papers that published Op-Eds by authors who failed to disclose they were receiving DOE money. Separately, the office of Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) determined that additional opinion articles ran in papers such as The New York Sun.

Miller, the senior Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee, requested the Inspector General report on Jan. 7 -- the day it was revealed that columnist/broadcaster Armstrong Williams received $240,000 from the DOE to help promote the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law. TMS terminated Williams' contract that evening.

The report notes that Kate Walsh, president of the "National Council on Teacher Quality," wrote a Nov. 21, 2004, piece for the Mobile Register; a Dec. 2, 2004, piece for The Grand Island Independent; and a Feb. 6, 2005, piece for The Sacramento Bee. (The last one was after the Williams revelations.) The first column supported NCLB, and the next two discussed teacher qualifications and merit pay.

Also, Marcela Garcini, director of parent outreach for the "Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options" (CREO), wrote columns for The Dallas Morning News in August and October 2004. The report said "CREO's September 2004 progress report to [the DOE] states that Garcini 'had the opportunity to become a regular guest writer for The Dallas Morning News.'"

Garcini and Walsh did not disclose in their columns that their organizations had received DOE money, according to the report. But the Inspector General said the paid-for material did not constitute covert propaganda because the DOE would have had to willingly mislead the public.

Miller disagrees with that assessment. "The department is trying to define itself out of trouble by setting the bar very high for what constitutes covert propaganda," Miller said in a statement. "But on multiple occasions, education groups used taxpayer money -- unbeknownst to taxpayers -- to promote controversial federal policies. The department allowed this egregious use of taxpayer dollars to continue with such consistency that it cannot now claim that it was ignorant of the practice. Either the department is grossly incompetent when it comes to awarding grants and contracts, or it is misleading investigators and engaging in a cover up."

The Inspector General did conclude that it was improper for organizations to use DOE grant money to produce and disseminate public materials without including a disclaimer about funding, and said the appropriate course of action is to recover grant monies paid to these groups.
 
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Letter: NCLB Is Working
Letter by Patricia M. Chlouber, United States Department of Education, Denver, Yankton Daily Press & Dakotan, 9/8/05

There's good news in the state of South Dakota -- No Child Left Behind is working!

Eighty four percent of South Dakota's schools and 98 percent of its school districts met their Adequate Yearly Progress targets for the school year. In addition, new evidence from the long-term National Assessment of Educational Progress and preliminary state test scores show that achievement is rising.

The data tells us that the basic principles of the No Child Left Behind Act - higher standards, strengthened accountability and a renewed focus on individual students and student groups - are leading to higher achievement.

I'm sure that this accomplishment is a source of pride for all the students, educators and parents who helped make it happen. It is the result of lots of hard work by many dedicated South Dakotans.

It's great to see no Child Left Behind working for the students and schools of South Dakota. We wish you continued success as you work to close the achievement gap and provide a quality education to every single South Dakota student.
 
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Bush faces growing revolt over education policy
Reuters, 9/5/05
 
HARTFORD, Connecticut -- Daria Plummer, a bespectacled suburban school teacher, is not your typical activist but she is now on the front line in a revolt against President George W. Bush's signature domestic policy.

As a veteran teacher in the first state to challenge Bush's "No Child Left Behind" education law in court, Plummer voices the frustrations of those who oppose the policy's strict, federally driven testing regime.

"More and more we are living in fear of the tests," said Plummer, 62, from her classroom in a middle-class Connecticut suburb. "We are taking the child out of the equation."

As schools open this week, 47 states are in some "stage of rebellion" against the 3-year-old policy, according to a study by the Civil Society Institute, a nonpartisan advocacy group. About 20 states may opt out and forego the funding.

Connecticut, taking the strongest stand yet in its lawsuit accusing Washington of failing to pay for the testing and its programs, expects other states to follow its lead, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said in an interview.

He likened the White House to a bully in the playground.

"Sometimes one person has to stand up to them," he said.

Education reform has been critical to Bush's support among minorities in an education system where only two-thirds of teenagers graduate from high school, a proportion that slides to 50 percent for black Americans and Hispanics.

New Jersey and Maine are likely to launch their own lawsuits. Utah passed a measure trying to overturn the federal law, while the National Education Association, a teacher's union, also has filed suit.

"The big question is will the Bush administration be able to defuse this political opposition," said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy in Washington.

Race against time

"It's a race against time over whether the Bush administration will be able to administer the act more sensibly so that people do not get so angry that the act will be overthrown by court or rewritten or substantially amended by Congress," Jennings added. The law is up for review in 2007.

U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said in a speech in Chicago last week the law was working, citing data showing reading scores for 9-year-olds up more over the last five years than in all the years from 1971 to 1999, though some dispute whether this reflects the policy.

At the heart of the law are yearly tests in math and reading. Those scores and other variables like graduation rates can lead to sanctions against poor-performing schools.

"It is a matter of good intentions gone awry," said James Weaver, president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association, a union representing 115,000 teachers. "Funding has been an issue, and it ends up being a lot of bureaucracy."

Critics call some provisions unreasonable, such as one that punishes schools where disabled students or children without native English score lower than other students.

Blumenthal says it is an unfunded mandate that leaves Connecticut lacking $41.6 million to comply with the law.

Spellings has said states critical of the law simply fear the results -- a statement that riles Connecticut Education Commissioner Betty Sternberg, whose state has the highest graduation rate in the country.

Worrisome gaps

Connecticut also has the nation's worst gap in academic achievement between poor and richer children, with 18 percent of low-income 9-year-olds proficient in reading, against 53 percent of those who are not poor.

Sternberg says that reflects the extreme wealth and poverty in Connecticut, where Greenwich ranks among America's wealthiest cities and others such as Hartford are among the nation's poorest.

Such gaps alarm Cynthia Brown, the author of a joint study by the Center for American Progress and Institute for America's future that reckons a crisis looms unless America overhauls its schools and invests $325 billion over 10 years.

That would only boost the education portion of the federal budget from today's 3 percent to 4 percent.

Her report found that by age 9, low-income students read on a level three years behind their better-off peers. Nationwide, only 15 percent of low-income fourth-graders can read proficiently, compared 41 percent for non-poor students.

But money isn't everything, says Jay Greene, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, whose work shows that only half of all U.S. high school graduates have done the studies needed to apply to college.

"We have doubled per pupil spending over the last three decades, adjusted for inflation, and yet student achievement has not improved," he said. "It is crisis now more than it used to be in that the skills the world demands are now higher.

"A quarter of the kids who failed to graduate high school in 1970 could expect entry into the middle class," he said. "That's different from today."
 
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FROM “EDUCATION WEEK”

School Leaders Assess Damages, Plan Recovery Effort
Education Week writers Erik W. Robelen, in Baton Rouge, La.; Alan Richard, in Gulfport, Miss.; and Christina A. Samuels, in Houston, reported on the challenges left by Hurricane Katrina, 9/7/05

Louisiana officials are piecing together a picture of what their school system will look like in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. For now, it appears that both the New Orleans district, the state’s largest, and the nearby St. Bernard public schools could be out of commission for the entire school year, and that other districts could take weeks or even months to reopen, state schools Superintendent Cecil J. Picard said in a Sept. 6 statement to the press.

In Mississippi, state and local education officials were considering setting up portable classrooms and establishing double-shift schedules at some schools to accommodate students whose schools were destroyed or are too damaged to use for months.

And in Houston, a prime destination for hurricane evacuees, one of the largest school enrollment efforts in local history is starting Sept. 7 in the Houston Astrodome sports arena, the convention center, and other nearby facilities that have been turned into shelters that Houston residents are now calling “Dome City.”

In the aftermath of one of the worst natural disaster in U.S. history, education officials from the three states are working hard to get children back in school and, in hard-hit Louisiana and Mississippi, establish plans to rebuild or repair destroyed and damaged school buildings. In addition to Texas, states throughout the country are also welcoming displaced students into their schools.

“Parents must get their children enrolled in the schools where they are taking shelter, and teachers and support staff must apply for jobs at those schools,” Mr. Picard said.

That’s exactly what appears to be happening across Louisiana, from the state capital of Baton Rouge and nearby communities all the way up to Shreveport in the north east corner of the state.

Some 30 miles north of Baton Rouge, Principal Dorothy R. Temple has seen her elementary school population grow by 80 students, to more than 670, since the hurricane struck the state’s southeast coast in late August, causing breaches in levees and flooding New Orleans and nearby areas.

“We started getting them last Wednesday,” Aug. 31, she said after helping students onto buses at end of the day Sept. 6 at Bains Elementary School, which is part of the West Feliciana Parish school system. “Our attendance clerk is totally exhausted.”

She said the influx of new students had gone relatively smoothly so far, though class sizes have climbed steadily, with some adding as many as four or five children. The class sizes typically do not exceed 25 pupils, she said.

“The challenge is going to be … getting to know these students and their families, and what their needs are,” she said.

Sarah M. Fudge, a 2nd grade teacher at the school, said she has three new students, two from New Orleans and one from Mississippi. The Mississippi student is temporarily staying with a cousin who already attends the school.

Mr. Picard, the Lousiana schools chief, said that the state education agency had already sent critical student data to operating districts across the state, and that as of Sept. 6, the same information was also being forwarded to other states that might be taking in Louisiana students.

‘The Next Step’

While the West Feliciana schools closed only for two days, others, such as the East Baton Rouge school system, were closed all of last week. Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco for several days had ordered state emergency officials to use school buses from East Baton Rouge and other districts to help transport people out of New Orleans.

The 45,000-student East Baton Rouge district, the state’s third largest, reopened its schools Sept. 6, though newcomers escaping the wreckage from Hurricane Katrina were not expected to begin attending classes there until Sept. 12.

In the meantime, district officials have been busy enrolling students. As part of that effort, they have sent district personnel to local shelters where families are temporarily housed.

Carolyn R. Coleman, the Baton Rouge district’s homeless-student liaison, estimated that district officials had visited at least a dozen shelters so far. Families may also register their children at any of the district’s public schools, though the students will not necessarily attend those particular schools.

“The next step will be to choose which schools these children will be attending,” Ms. Coleman said. “Along with that, we must provide supplies, everything from shoes, underwear, the whole nine yards. And uniforms.”

At Baton Rouge’s St. John the Baptist Church, Kawenee Hartford was enrolling her three children, ages 9, 15, and 17.

“I lost everything,” she said. Her home in the downtown area of New Orleans was still under water, as far as she knew.

As for her plans, she said: “Right now, stay here, get a job, put my boys in school, find a place to live, and once they rebuild New Orleans, I’m going back to New Orleans. … That’s where I was born and raised.”

Displaced Educators Look for Jobs

Many educators from southeast Louisiana are also looking for a new place to call home. Two principals from New Orleans stopped by the East Baton Rouge district office Sept. 6 to apply for jobs.

“I live about a half-mile from the 17th Street canal, where they had the breach,” said Leonard M. Parker Jr., the principal of an elementary school in the city. He’s applied for jobs with the state department of education, as well as the East Baton Rouge school district.

Of the 80 staff members at his New Orleans school, he said he had heard from 23 so far. “I check every day,” Mr. Parker said.

Despite having lost practically all his belongings, and possibly his home, Mr. Parker, an ordained minister, appeared to be in remarkably good spirits. “You’ve got to have a positive frame of mind, and trust God and move on,” he said.

Sitting next to him, Monica Boudouin, a fellow New Orleans principal, said she agreed. She’s already registered her three children to attend the public schools in Baton Rouge. But even while expressing hopefulness, she remained visibly upset about her situation.

“I’ve cried till I can’t cry anymore,” she said, though moments later her eyes welled up.

Ms. Boudouin said that while she’s hoping to return to New Orleans eventually, a lot will depend on how things turn out for her family in the coming months.

“My heart is still in New Orleans, and it will always be in New Orleans,” she said. “But if it ends up that we’re needed here, and once we get established,” she may decide to stay put, she said. “You don’t know what’s going to happen.”

‘My Central Office? Nothing There’

In Mississippi, hundreds of schools felt the impact of Hurricane Katrina—even those far away from the storm’s direct hit on the Gulf Coast.

High winds and a tremendous storm surge destroyed several schools along the coast. Two of the four schools in the 2,000-student Pass Christian, Miss., school district, about 60 miles northeast of New Orleans, were completely swept away. The town’s new two-story high school was flooded on the first level and had its windows and doors blown out on the second.

“There’s really just nothing there anymore,” Pass Christian Superintendent Sue Matheson said of her town’s elementary and middle schools. “My central office? Nothing there.”

Ms. Matheson, who lost her own home and was staying at a campground in coastal Alabama, joined other school leaders in districts along the battered Mississippi coast in predicting they would begin classes again between Oct. 1 and Oct. 15. Some cam-puses, including those being used as shelters, will be repaired and could reopen sooner. Others will require more significant repairs, such as replacing entire roofs or fixing severe water damage to classrooms.

Students in the Pass Christian district may attend class in a village of portable class-rooms that will be set up near the only school in the district that did not see severe damage. That school is in the community of Delisle, Miss., Ms. Matheson said.

Paul A. Tisdale, the superintendent of the Biloxi, Miss., schools, said two new schools in the eastern part of his district saw high floodwaters. “It may well be that we may not use those schools for the rest of the year,” he said.

Double-Shifting Seen Likely

In Mississippi’s 13,000-student Harrison County district, which mostly surrounds the cities of Gulfport and Biloxi, three schools may not reopen for months, or even for this entire school year. “I am anticipating having to double-shift some schools,” said Har-rison County Superintendent Henry Arledge.

One of his district’s schools, D’Iberville Middle School in the town of D’Iberville, just across an inland bay from the city of Biloxi, saw eight feet of water invade its hall-ways and classrooms and the neighborhood surrounding it. The school’s cafeteria and library were filled with water and mud. Trophies floated down hallways, and classroom supplies ended up strewn about the community. A moldy stench could be detected in the school through smashed-out classroom windows.

Mississippi state schools Superintendent Hank Bounds met with officials from dis-tricts throughout southern Mississippi on Sept. 7. The state education department planned to post on its Web site information in a question-and-answer format for edu-cators in affected areas, he said. A former superintendent of the Pascagoula schools on the Gulf Coast, Mr. Bounds said in an interview that he and his immediate family had lost their coastal home and most of their belongings in the storm.

District-level officials said they hoped to convince state leaders that some missed school days will need to be forgiven. They worried about paying teachers and other employees, how to plan for the reopening of classrooms, and what lies ahead in fund-ing and possible drops in enrollment. Many families have moved out of the area and are enrolling children in schools elsewhere in Mississippi and in neighboring and more distant states.

Schools farther from the coast were accepting evacuees from Mississippi and Louisi-ana. Hundreds of evacuee students were expected to enroll in Jackson-area schools.

Mr. Bounds said the two major issues that remain for Mississippi schools are power outages and gasoline for school buses. Power remained out in most coastal communi-ties on Sept. 6, and outages were reported in rural areas as far north as the Jackson and Meridian areas, roughly 150 miles from the coast. Gas stations throughout the state mostly were closed, and residents sometimes waited hours for gasoline. Cur-fews remained in effect, with coastal residents expected in their homes by 6 p.m., and in inland communities such as Hattiesburg by 8 p.m. and Jackson by 10 p.m.

Inland areas of Mississippi that saw a less-direct hit from the hurricane prepared to open schools this week. For instance, Jackson-area districts announced through local TV stations that classes would begin Sept. 8. Power outages that had lasted a week in some areas had finally begun to end.

Along the coast, police and National Guard troops sealed off streets a half-mile from the shore, barring residents from returning to obliterated homes, businesses, and schools near the water. Tidal waters had surged nearly to the level of highway over-passes near Biloxi, flooding many homes and bringing down trees and brush. Power lines were down in many parking lots, near some schools. Highways were open, but virtually no traffic signals were working in coastal areas Sept. 6, and many signs and buildings were severely damaged.

Massive Enrollment Effort

In the days after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, its surrounding Louisi-ana parishes and other Gulf Coast areas, Texas was the first state to extend a formal welcome to evacuees, offering Houston’s Astrodome stadium as a shelter. Since then, the Astrodome, other facilities in the Reliant Park complex, and the George R. Brown Convention Center have become home to about 25,800 people and an unknown num-ber of children.

The Houston school district says it will welcome all children in the shelter complex to its schools, and by early this week the sprawling 208,000-student system had al-ready grown by 889 students. School officials say they have no idea how many more will enter the school system now that registration of children in shelters has begun.

“Up to this date, no one has been able to give us a number, even an unexact number, of how many kids we’re talking about,” Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra said at a regularly scheduled meeting of the Houston board of education Sept. 6. “We’re going to do the right thing,” Mr. Saavedra said.

But the cost is as much a question mark as the number of children to expect. The figure Mr. Saavedra gave the board during its meeting was sobering: Educating 10,000 children for a school year costs the district about $60 million. Normally, the state pays about 12 percent of the $6,000 to $7,000 it costs to educate a Houston public school student, with another 10 percent coming from the federal government and the rest coming from local taxes, he said.

Without subsidies from the state and federal governments far above the normal fund-ing formula received from the state, the district could be bankrupt, board members said.

“There’s a cost to this effort—there’s a serious cost,” Mr. Saavedra said. “This is a conversation [with state and federal lawmakers] that needs to be at the forefront.”

Also at the forefront: the sheer logistics of absorbing so many children so quickly. Two-person teams, along with a support staff of school nurses and information-technology employees, will work 13-hour days to enroll students in the more than 13,000 spaces that have been identified for them in the Houston Independent School District.

Two city elementary schools that were closed last year because of underenrollment have been reopened to accommodate the extra students, with recently retired district administrators running them. And 300 to 400 teachers, including retirees, substi-tutes, Teach for America educators who were based in Louisiana, and displaced New Orleans teachers were ready to start work Sept. 8, Mr. Saavedra said.
 
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States Pressed to Refashion Reading First Grant Designs
Documents Suggest Federal Interference
By Kathleen Kennedy Manzo, Education Week, 9/7/05

Evidence is mounting that federal employees and their agents may have directed or even pressured states to choose specific assessments, consultants, and the criteria for evaluating core reading programs as conditions for getting funding under the Reading First initiative, possibly in violation of federal law.

Education Week found such a pattern of behavior in an examination of thousands of pages of correspondence and official documentation obtained through open-records requests, as well as interviews with education officials across the country.

The close oversight of the $1 billion-a-year program has allowed a handful of commercial reading programs, assessments, and consultants to reap much of that money, while others have been shut out of the competition, according to documents and confirmation by several state officials.

Among the complaints that federal representatives have overstepped their authority:

• In January 2003, Kentucky officials complained to the U.S. Department of Education after Christopher J. Doherty, the director of the federal Reading First program, told them they would have to use what is known as the DIBELS assessment to get their grant approved. Kentucky officials also complained that a federal consultant had suggested that they hire specific experts to train teachers.

• Also that year, Georgia Reading First officials complained that a federal consultant had suggested that if the state adopted a list of core programs, it would improve the state’s chances of getting a grant.

• Illinois was told in 2003 by the Education Department to drop the use of its state literacy assessment for Reading First schools and instead use the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills, or DIBELS, even though the state’s grant proposal had already been approved and districts were beginning to implement the program.

• In 2002, Oklahoma was repeatedly advised by a federal review panel to change its selection criteria for reading texts.

All but a few states, in fact, changed their initial plans for Reading First after federal reviewers rejected or sent back their grant proposals for specific revisions. A study by the Washington-based Center on Education Policy found that it was common practice for states to adopt the DIBELS assessment and the “Consumers Guide for Evaluating a Core Reading Program” after their initial proposals were rejected. Those instruments had little to prove their worth.

Both the assessment and the guide were written by researchers at the University of Oregon, which later was chosen as one of three regional technical-assistance centers for Reading First.

As more information about the grant-approval process unfolds, former federal officials, as well as publishers and others are calling for greater transparency in the administration of the grant program.

“The federal government should have put in place, or should put in place right now if they hadn’t before, a conflict-of-interest agreement that clearly makes everybody’s advice above board,” argued Susan B. Neuman. She helped launch Reading First as the Education Department’s assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education from July 2001 to January 2003.

Federal officials, however, maintain that they pressed state and local officials only to meet the law’s demand for research-based materials, assessments, and practices and provided counsel on how they could do that.

“In fact, what we’ve said about Reading First is that there is no approved list of programs or assessment, truthfully,” Mr. Doherty said last week. “Over a couple-of-years the period, some states may say it seems as though we were pressed into this and pressed into that, but what was going on is this: This is not an ‘anything goes’ reading program.”

In correspondence to states and districts, in fact, federal officials repeatedly included reminders that they cannot help them select specific programs and products that meet the law’s requirements.

But some documents and interviews indicate that such officials, including Mr. Doherty, gave directives in phone calls and closed-door meetings.

Purposely Prescriptive

Reading First is restrictive by design. Many federal education initiatives over the past decades had high ideals but imposed limited accountability. Too often, however, the recipients did what they pleased and ended up implementing ineffective and faddish instructional approaches.

The initiative is intended to help the nation’s low-performing and disadvantaged schools provide professional development for teachers and purchase high-quality, research-based materials and assessments for grades K-3.

While the No Child Left Behind Act—particularly the Reading First initiative, which is part of the nearly 4-year-old law—is considered to be the most prescriptive of any federal education law to date, it forbids federal employees “to mandate, direct or control a state, local educational agency, or school’s specific instructional content, academic achievement standards and assessments, curriculum, or program of instruction.”

Such intrusion has long been a concern, said Christopher T. Cross, who helped draft that prohibition in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in the 1970s and later served as an assistant secretary of education in President George H.W. Bush’s administration. The No Child Left Behind law is the latest renewal of the 40-year-old ESEA.

Mr. Cross, now a policy consultant with Cross & Joftus LLC in Danville, Calif., said the alleged interference regarding Reading First may violate that provision.

“What the feds have said and not said in regard to Reading First gets pretty close to the edge of what the law allows, or crosses the line in my view,” he said.

Education officials, publishers, researchers, and critics of the law have alleged as much since early in its implementation.

Now, documentation has turned up to support those claims. Information gathered by Education Week, including hundreds of e-mail messages between officials in several states and federal representatives for Reading First, reveal some of the negotiations. In at least some cases, states yielded—often reluctantly—to the recommendations of federal consultants, and adopted materials and tests that those states had not included in their original proposals.

Several officials said the demands made by federal officials and consultants felt intrusive and violated the rights of the state or local authority to make such decisions.

Kentucky Issues

Kentucky officials, for example, complained 2½ years ago to then-U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige that advice they had received from the federal review team and Mr. Doherty was inappropriate. After the state’s Reading First plan was rejected three times, Mr. Doherty told them, in a conference call, that they would have to change their choice of assessment, according to Starr Lewis, the associate commissioner for teaching and learning in Kentucky.

“During the conference call, Chris told us that we would not get funded using [the assessment we chose],” she said. “The bottom line was everybody sitting around the table, and there were six or so of us, understood very clearly that we were … to use DIBELS.”

At that point, according to Kentucky education department spokeswoman Lisa Y. Gross, “staff felt so frustrated with the whole process. … Finally, they were just throwing up their hands and said, ‘We’ll use DIBELS.’ ”

Moreover, state schools Superintendent Gene Wilhoit wrote in a Feb. 25, 2003, letter to Mr. Paige that the fact that a member of the federal review team was a DIBELS trainer raised “serious issues concerning conflict of interest,” and that the committee formed by RMC Research Corp. to evaluate which assessments met Reading First requirements included Roland H. Good III, a University of Oregon researcher who designed DIBELS.

In fact, that assessment committee included several of Mr. Good’s colleagues at the University of Oregon, in Eugene, including Edward J. Kame’enui, now the commissioner of the National Center for Special Education Research at the federal department, and Deborah Simmons. Both are authors for publishers that have competed for Reading First money. Mr. Kame’enui, who was the director of the Reading First technical-assistance center at the University of Oregon until his appointment as commissioner, and Ms. Simmons, now a professor of education at Texas A&M University, are the authors of the “Consumer’s Guide.”

In response to the Kentucky complaint, Eugene W. Hickok, the U.S. undersecretary of education at the time, wrote that the federal panel had been “appropriately meticulous in holding state plans to the highest standards.” After reviewing the state’s claims, Reading First staff members at the department did not find anything inappropriate, he said in a letter.

Mr. Hickok also wrote that reviewers had been “screened for real and perceived conflicts of interest.”

Later that year, in June 2003, Georgia officials complained to the Education Department about advice they had received from a federal consultant assigned to help them revise the state Reading First application. The consultant suggested the officials have “the courage” and “step up to the plate” and put together a state list of approved reading programs, a move that is prohibited by state law.

Mr. Doherty and Everett Barnes, the RMC president, apologized to state officials and confirmed that the law does not require states to list approved programs.

The Education Department hired the Portsmouth, N.H.-based RMC Corp. to help states revise grant proposals that were deemed inadequate. The company later won a $36 million federal contract to oversee technical-assistance centers for Reading First, located at Florida State University, the University of Oregon, and the University of Texas at Austin.

“The suggestion [by the consultant] was entirely inappropriate and shows a lack of understanding of the role and authority an agency such as yours has in implementing state law, regulation, and policy,” Mr. Barnes wrote in a June 18, 2003, e-mail message to the Georgia education department.

Mr. Barnes maintains that the Georgia incident was a misunderstanding. The language, he said, was part of the banter sent by e-mail between consultants—and inadvertently attached to a message to Georgia officials—but was not intended as official advice.

Mr. Doherty said he responded quickly to any such complaints.

Many state officials have praised Mr. Doherty and RMC for their advice and support.

“Truthfully, the technical assistance we got from the U.S. Department of Education and technical-assistance centers was mostly excellent,” said Ms. Lewis.

‘Require DIBELS’

In Illinois, the directive from the Education Department to use DIBELS came after the state’s $32.8 million grant had already been approved, in September 2002, and the state had issued grants to districts. While the proposal endorsed by federal reviewers included plans to use a state test to assess students’ reading skills, by spring 2003, representatives of the federal Education Department’s Reading First staff told Illinois officials a change was required.

“The U.S. Department of Education told us to look again at [the state test] to see if it matched their criteria. In any case, [they said], ‘We want you to require DIBELS,’ ” said Gail Lieberman, who was the manager of curriculum and instruction for the state education department at the time and worked closely on the Reading First application and initial implementation. Ms. Lieberman, who is now retired, works as a consultant to the state education department on the No Child Left Behind Act.

“Even though [our grant proposal] had been accepted,” she recounted, “and we have a letter stating that our grant was approved, [the Reading First staff at the Education Department said], ‘You will, like everyone else, use DIBELS.’ ”

Oklahoma’s application was sent back several times after reviewers questioned the plan’s choice of assessments and its mandate that districts choose only those reading programs with three years of longitudinal research demonstrating their effectiveness. Such a standard would exclude all but a “small pool” of texts, the report by the federal review panel said.

A subsequent review, which also deemed the state’s revised application “unready for funding,” again questioned the state’s restrictive approach. Oklahoma eventually included DIBELS in its proposal. The state also agreed to use the less-rigorous “Consumer’s Guide” to evaluate core reading programs, on which only a few brand-name products tend to score well, according to some observers.

Some 40 states agreed to use DIBELS as a core assessment for Reading First schools. Several have adopted it for all schools and have bought hand-held computers and database services to help teachers track students’ progress on the test. Although the assessments are free, the data-monitoring service costs $1 per pupil. The hand-held computers and other packaged sets of assessments are sold separately. Nearly all states included the “Consumer’s Guide” in their final applications as a required tool for evaluating texts.

‘Overly Intrusive’

As states were submitting their proposals in 2002 and 2003—most of which were sent back for revisions before winning federal approval—state officials were reluctant to publicly express their concerns for fear of having the federal money withheld or delayed, according to Charlotte Postelwaite, who conducted a 2003 survey of state Reading First directors as the chief education policy analyst for the Council of State Governments. For fear that there would be repercussions for states that criticized the process, the Lexington, Ky.-based council did not release the results of the survey.

But Ms. Postelwaite, who is now teaching at a Kentucky middle school, said many state officials she spoke with were upset by the demands made by the Education Department and its representatives.

“You cannot allow a vendor to dictate [grant implementation], yet with so many people [representing] the DIBELS sitting on the assessment committee and serving as consultants to Reading First,” she said, “the vendors were telling [states] what they were going to put in their grants.”

Officials in several states, she said, had to go an extra step and get approval from their legislatures to change assessments.

“We understood pretty early on that we had to be pretty prescriptive, and we had to tell districts if you want this money, this is what you have to do,” said Mike Fry, who has retired as the North Carolina education department’s chief consultant for language arts.

North Carolina officials had to ask the legislature for a waiver from the state’s assessment law—which allows only oral testing of K-2 children—in order to meet Reading First’s testing mandates.

“It felt overly intrusive,” Mr. Fry said, “but once we talked to other states, we understood that this is not just somebody picking on North Carolina.”
 
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Defying Predictions, State Trends Prove Mixed on Schools Making NCLB Targets
By Lynn Olson, Education Week, 9/7/05

Many people predicted this would be the year that schools nationwide began feeling the bite of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, as states ratcheted up their performance targets and more schools failed to meet those benchmarks.

But such dire predictions are not playing out uniformly across the states, an Education Week analysis shows. Of the 33 states and the District of Columbia that had released information by the end of August on the percent of schools that made adequate yearly progress under the federal law, about half saw the proportion of schools meeting their performance targets climb, while half saw the percentage go down.

And that mixed national picture may have as much to do with how each state calculates progress, based on agreements worked out with the federal government, as on overall test-score trends.

“You’re getting a different set of factors in each state,” said Jack Jennings, the president of the Washington-based Center on Education Policy. “So you’re getting all types of results.”

As states get closer to the federal law’s ultimate goal of having all students academically proficient by the 2013-14 school year, this year’s AYP scorecard is being affected by more ambitious expectations for test-score gains, as many analysts predicted. But at the same time, the pressure is being tempered by concessions granted by the federal government as states seek greater leeway in determining which schools make the grade.

For this article, the Education Week Research Center collected data on the percent of schools that made adequate progress in 2004 and in 2005 by state, and the percent of students who scored proficient or higher on state reading and mathematics tests in grades 4 and 8, the two grades also yielding state-by-state results on the congressionally mandated National Assessment of Educational Progress. Though many states calculate AYP using additional grade levels, the findings provide a rough indication of whether test-score trends and AYP results are in tandem.

Among the states with data available, 14 saw gains in both the proportion of students scoring proficient or better on state tests and the percent of schools making AYP; 11 saw their proficiency rates rise, while the proportion of schools making AYP fell; one state had the reverse pattern; and four saw declines in both categories.

The nearly 4-year-old federal law, a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, requires states to test their students in reading and math annually in grades 3-8 and at least once in high school.

To make AYP, schools and districts must have a minimum percent of students scoring at the proficient level or higher on state tests, both for the student population as a whole and for numerically significant subgroups of students who are poor, speak limited English, have disabilities, or come from racial or ethnic minorities.
 
Schools and districts that don’t meet their targets for at least two years in a row face consequences, particularly if they receive federal Title I money for disadvantaged students.

The law requires states to raise their targets for schools and districts at least once every three years, with the aim of bringing all students to proficiency on state exams by 2013-14. But the U.S. Department of Education has negotiated with each state about the specific timeline for raising those targets, the minimum number of students in a subgroup before it counts for accountability purposes, and other details of state accountability plans.

Those negotiations may explain some of the differences in AYP results.

Different Ground Rules

Take the cases of Florida and Hawaii. About a third of Hawaii’s schools made adequate progress this past academic year, down from 53 percent in 2004. In contrast, Florida saw the proportion of schools meeting its performance targets jump from 23 percent to 36 percent.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that Florida’s schools are getting better and Hawaii’s schools are getting worse. In fact, the proportion of students scoring proficient or better on state math and reading tests rose in both states.

Hawaii, though, significantly raised the bar its schools must meet for the first time this past academic year: In 2005, schools in Hawaii had to get 28 percent of their students to the proficient level or higher in math, up from 10 percent in 2004, and 44 percent in reading, up from 30 percent the previous year.

“That was a huge step,” said Greg Knudsen, the communications director for the Hawaii department of education. While many schools have made gains since 2004, he noted, they weren’t large enough to satisfy the higher performance criteria.

In contrast, Florida negotiated a revised timeline with the federal Department of Education that let it raise its targets in smaller, annual increments. Originally, schools were to have 53 percent of their students score proficient on state math tests this past academic year, up sharply from 38 percent in 2004. But the target was revised to 44 percent. For reading, the original target of 48 percent was scaled back to 37 percent, up from 31 percent a year earlier.

Like Hawaii, many other states saw the percent of schools making AYP targets decline this past academic year largely because they raised the bar for the first time since the law was enacted.

‘Imprecise Process’

In New Jersey, for instance, the proportion making adequate progress fell from 72 percent to 61 percent after the state raised its proficiency targets. In a press statement, Commissioner of Education William L. Librera said the stiffer targets were the “biggest reason” more schools were identified as needing improvement under the federal law in 2005.

“What that boils down to with this confusing and imprecise process is that you can have schools that make real gains in the numbers of students who pass the test, but still didn’t make AYP, because the bar just got higher,” he said.

California, meanwhile, nearly doubled the percent of students who must score at the proficient level on state tests for a school to make AYP.

“I think that’s a very important point, when you’re trying to make sense of the results,” said William Padia, the director of the policy and evaluation division for the state department of education. The proportion of California schools making AYP dropped from 65 percent in 2004 to 56 percent this past academic year.

Schools found it particularly hard to meet the new targets for some subgroups of students, said Mr. Padia, despite widespread gains in state test results in nearly every grade and subject.

In contrast, the proportion of schools meeting their schoolwide growth targets under California’s “academic performance index” rose. That accountability index focuses on the gains schools make from an initial starting point. The state has been petitioning the federal government, so far unsuccessfully, to use the index as the primary means of measuring progress under the federal law.

Last week, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger asked U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings to form a joint task force of high-level state and federal education officials to develop an accountability system “that meets the needs of both California schools and the federal government.” The federal Education Department has agreed to participate, but has not yet named the individuals who will serve on the task force.

Another big difference from one state to another is the number of students who must be in a subgroup before they factor into the accountability equation.

In New Jersey, for instance, a subgroup need only contain 20 students for it to count in calculating adequate yearly progress. “That continues to be a thorn in our side, and I think, for a lot of our colleagues around the country,” said Isaac Bryant, the state’s assistant commissioner for student services.

Subgroup Size a Factor

Florida used to have a subgroup size of 30. But, following negotiations with federal officials, each subgroup now must constitute 30 and at least 15 percent of a school’s enrollment or 100 students.

That change “probably helped a number of schools look better in terms of AYP,” said David N. Figlio, a professor of economics at the University of Florida, in Gainesville. “Prior to the rule change, the cards were really stacked against Florida schools,” he said.

Hanna Skandera, the deputy commissioner of accountability, research, and measurement for the Florida Department of Education, said: “Number one, our schools are improving. So that’s the good news, right off the bat.”

In 2004-05, Florida saw significant gains in the proficiency rates of African-American, Hispanic, and white students on reading and math tests given in grades 3-10.

But Ms. Skandera agreed that the extra flexibility from the federal government affected the number of schools making AYP. Like a number of other states, Florida also received one-year flexibility to count more of its special education students with moderate disabilities as proficient on state tests.

Florida was testing students in grades 3-8 even before President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act into law in January 2002. But that’s not true in many other states.

As those states add tests in more grades, schools are likelier to exceed the threshold for individual subgroups to count for accountability purposes. The result: Schools have many more targets to meet.

“There are up to 37 separate ways in which a school can miss making AYP,” said Keith Rheualt, Nevada’s superintendent of public instruction.

In 2004-05, Idaho added state tests in grades 5 and 6, testing about 38,000 more students than the year before. It also increased the percentages of students who must score at the proficient level to make adequate progress, from 66 percent to 72 percent in reading and from 51 percent to 60 percent in math.

And it instituted a minimum graduation rate as an additional benchmark for high schools. The proportion of schools making AYP dropped from 82 percent in 2004 to 57 percent in 2005.

Indiana also doubled the number of students and grade levels tested in 2004-05. The expansion of the testing program to all of the grade levels required by the NCLB law “drastically increased the total number of AYP targets” that schools had to meet statewide, said Mary Tiede Wilhelmus, a spokeswoman for the Indiana Department of Education.

Whether the public will understand the nuances behind why schools fared better or worse this year than last under the federal law remains to be seen.

“We have two daily papers,” Mr. Knudsen of Hawaii said. “One played it up like the glass was half-empty; the other like the glass was half-full. So it’s kind of confusing.”
 
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Ed. Dept. Allows Chicago to Provide NCLB Tutoring
By Catherine Gewertz, Education Week, 9/7/05

The U.S. Department of Education will allow the Chicago school district to provide tutoring under the No Child Left Behind Act, a reversal signaling more flexibility for districts in complying with the increasingly tough mandates of the law.

Similar deals were said to be in the works to enable nine other large urban school districts to run their own tutoring programs, even if they have failed to meet state academic goals, a factor that normally bars them from being providers. As in Chicago’s arrangement, the other cities were expected to be permitted to serve as federally financed tutoring providers in exchange for agreeing to specified conditions.

The Sept. 1 announcement marked the second time in one week that Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings enabled more flexibility around tutoring. She revealed on Aug. 25 that four districts in Virginia will be allowed to reverse the law’s normal procedure by offering tutoring to low-income students in struggling schools the year before they can transfer to higher-performing schools. 

Appearing in Chicago last week, Ms. Spellings said the two “pilot” programs are aimed at getting more children the help they need. Studies have shown that only 10 percent to 20 percent of eligible children are served. The Chicago schools have agreed, among other things, to extend the enrollment window and submit to a third-party evaluation of the tutoring program citywide.

“The point of all of these agreements is to give parents better information and more choices, and to help more children get the extra help they need to succeed in school and beyond,” the secretary said in a prepared statement.

Arne Duncan, the district’s chief executive officer, hailed the agreement as a “huge win” for schoolchildren and “the most significant change in policy since the No Child Left Behind law was passed.”

Political Overtones?

Mr. Duncan has long contended that Chicago should be allowed to keep serving as a provider because, while it fell short of state targets, it could show significant progress in student achievement and could demonstrate that the after-school tutoring program played a crucial role.

The change of direction in Chicago marked a congenial turn in a dispute between the country’s third-largest district and federal education officials over whether a school district that has failed to meet its state’s academic targets may provide the tutoring, or “supplemental educational services,” the NCLB law requires. 

Some observers heard predominantly political tones in the announcement.

“I believe the Bush administration is very worried about the political opposition to No Child Left Behind,” said Jack Jennings, a former top education aide to congressional Democrats and the president of the Washington-based Center on Education Policy, a research and policy group. “I think the objective is to grant flexibility to defuse political opposition.”

Chicago’s situation has been closely watched because of its implications for districts nationwide. As states’ goals under the federal law get steeper annually, more schools and districts will fall short and have to offer tutoring.

A study by the Center on Education Policy found that in the 2004-05 school year, about 10 percent of the nation’s districts had schools required to offer tutoring. One-quarter of those districts were themselves tutoring providers.

But the federal regulations that Ms. Spellings selectively waived forbid districts to use money set aside for the No Child Left Behind law to run their own tutoring programs once they are deemed to be in need of improvement. They must find other sources of money, or leave that job to private vendors who win state approval to offer tutoring.

Ms. Spellings’ decision means that Chicago can run its own tutoring program again with a portion of the Title I money for disadvantaged schools that it must set aside to finance the tutoring and choice provisions of the federal law.

The 431,000-student district used city and other federal money last winter to continue its program, which served about half the 80,000 children enrolled in tutoring there. But it could not afford to keep up that financing scheme for 2005-06, so it would have stopped being a provider, said Elizabeth F. Swanson, who oversees tutoring programs for the district and 53 private vendors. More than 275,000 children are eligible for the services this year.

In an interview, Holly Kuzmich, the Education Department’s deputy assistant secretary for policy, said the new arrangements in Chicago are not so much a recognition of progress as a way to get tutoring to more children and afford parents more choices.

Other districts that had to stop providing tutoring when they fell short of academic goals said they never bothered to request flexibility because the Education Department had taken such a strong and public stance on Chicago. But given the change in the Windy City, some were reconsidering their decision.

“I felt like there was no possibility of a waiver,” said Susan Wright, the Title I director of the Clark County, Nev., schools. The district, which includes Las Vegas, ceased its own tutoring program last fall. “But if they are going to give [Chicago] a waiver, we need to have that opportunity also.”
  
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Some Dallas Principals Must Learn Spanish
By Mary Ann Zehr and Linda Jacobson, Education Week, 9/7/05

Some administrators in Dallas will be required to learn Spanish, under a policy approved by the school board.

The new policy, approved on a 5-4 vote last month, requires that all elementary school principals who work in schools in which at least half the students are English-language learners, or formerly carried that designation, must learn the native language of those students.
 
In Dallas, where 65 percent of the school system’s 160,000 students are Hispanic, that basically means some principals must learn Spanish. Those administrators have one year from now to enroll in Spanish courses and three years to become “proficient,” which isn’t defined in the policy adopted Aug. 25. The district will pay for the courses.

Elementary schools that have received a “recognized” or “exemplary” label in the Texas state accountability system are exempted. The policy applies similarly to middle and high schools with large numbers of English-language learners, but those schools are permitted to select a principal, vice principal, or dean of instruction to fulfill the requirement, rather than just the principal.

The policy is the brainchild of Joe May, a Dallas school board trustee. A Mexican-American, Mr. May grew up in a Spanish-speaking household in Laredo, Texas. He learned English after he enrolled in school.

The requirement is intended to increase parent involvement in schools with large percentages of parents who don’t speak English, Mr. May said.

Harley Eckhart, the associate executive director of the Texas Elementary Principals and Supervisors Association, said he considers the policy “another dang mandate” that is going to have a polarizing effect on minority communities.

Other districts with large populations of Hispanic residents, he said, might implement similar requirements “without thinking it through.” He added that cities with large concentrations of Vietnamese, or other residents of Asian descent, could argue that principals receive training in those groups’ languages.

“There’s no data to indicate that student performance is enhanced with a principal who is fluent in Spanish,” said Mr. Eckhart. As the principal of a 2,300-student high school in San Antonio for several years, he said, “there was always somebody right outside my door that I could pull in to translate.”

Schools, he added, have already been moving toward improving their abilities to communicate with language- minority families. Finally, he said, he worried that schools or districts might begin passing over otherwise qualified principal candidates because they don’t speak Spanish.

In explaining his case for the policy, Mr. May said: “The new [educational] approaches that are coming out are collaborative approaches. That means working together with parents. If you are going to be applying it to kids whose parents don’t speak English, the only way that’s going to happen is through the requirement that the principal learns the language of the parent.”

But Ron J. Price, a board member who voted against the policy, said it is unfair. “To ask people who have active lives and busy schedules to learn a second language and become proficient is almost impossible in some cases,” he said.

Other Options

It is important for school staff members to be able to communicate with parents who don’t speak English, Mr. Price said, but the responsibility for doing so shouldn’t be put on administrators. Schools have other options, such as hiring bilingual liaisons to talk with parents, he said.

“When you connect a person’s employment to the ability to speak a second language, that might be unconstitutional, and it’s un-American,” he said.

Mr. May said the new policy would affect almost 50 schools in the district. Out of 14 elementary schools that have a high percentage of English-language learners, a dozen already have a principal who speaks both English and Spanish, he pointed out. But only about half the middle and high schools with large percentages of English-language learners have a bilingual administrator, he added.

“I’ve never heard of a school board ever requiring this,” said Dora Johnson, a senior program associate who monitors school foreign-language issues at the Center for Applied Linguistics, located in Washington. She said some police departments have mandated that officers learn rudimentary Spanish, but she hadn’t heard of a school district requiring administrators to learn the language.
 
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Schools to Tackle a New Mandate: Teaching About U.S. Constitution
By Joetta L. Sack and Andrew Trotter, Education Week, 9/7/05

Schools across the nation will be on the same page next week—on the crinkled and sepia-toned parchment that records the basic liberties of U.S. citizens and the structure of the government.

Though the U.S. Constitution’s final signing on Sept. 17, 1787, has long been celebrated by some, Congress mandated for the first time that all public schools and colleges conduct educational programs about the document annually, on or around that date.

The measure, a pet project that Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., tacked onto a federal spending bill last December, also requires all federal agencies to provide educational and training materials on the Constitution on the same date for all their employees.

Sen. Byrd has repeatedly warned that a decline in knowledge about the Constitution in government and the citizenry is having negative consequences for the nation. Even many members of Congress “do not come really with, in so many instances, a basic knowledge of the Constitution and, of course, with a love and reverence for it,” he said in a talk at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston last October.

Because Sept. 17 falls on a Saturday this year, the measure allows educators to schedule their programs either the week before or the week after; Sept. 16 seems to be the most widely chosen date.

Better Support

Some educators have bridled at Uncle Sam’s telling them what to include in the curriculum and when to teach it, while not providing any money to help cover the costs. But others say teaching about the Constitution is too important to quibble over.

The nation has days to honor labor, veterans, war dead, and Thanksgiving, so “why not Constitution Day?” said Peggy Altoff, the K-12 social studies supervisor in the 30,000-student Colorado Springs, Colo., district. “Without [the Constitution], we wouldn’t have the others.”

Ms. Altoff, who is president-elect of the National Council for the Social Studies, said the group has been concerned for some time about the quality of history and civics courses taught in public schools, and that those subjects are getting squeezed out by the testing emphasis on mathematics and language arts in the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

The Silver Spring, Md.-based curriculum group appreciates Sen. Byrd’s efforts, said Al Frascella, its director of communications and government relations, adding that a much more structured plan would be needed to be effective.

“We agree with Sen. Byrd’s concerns that not enough kids are learning about the Constitution and U.S. history in general,” he said. However, “we could have pointed him to things he could do to really support civics education.”

For instance, the council has supported teaching academies and summer camps to train teachers to better teach about the Constitution and U.S. history in general. It would also like to see a section of the National Assessment of Educational Progress exam devoted to social studies and civics education.

History and civics are covered on NAEP on an irregular basis.

‘A Ton of Resources’

Schools in Colorado Springs will design their own programs to comply with the federal requirement, with some drawing ideas from a Web site, www.coloradosocialstudies.org, that Ms. Altoff maintains for the Colorado social studies teachers’ organization.

“There’s a ton of resources,” Ms. Altoff said. “That, as usual, is not the problem; it is having people focus on the topic to meet the letter and the spirit of the law. I’m concerned about the spirit.”

In Missouri, the 28 schools in the 20,000-student Parkway district also are planning a range of activities for Sept. 16, said Liz Morrison, the district’s social studies coordinator.

Some schools may have everyone wear red, white, and blue, she said. And many will join in a national reading of the Constitution’s Preamble, organized by the nonprofit group Constitution Day Inc., with recitations by student leaders or choruses of students over school public-address systems.

She said Missouri’s U.S. senators provided the district with recordings of themselves discussing the Constitution, which will be played for students.

Jim Lake, a teacher of Modern Warfare and Challenges to Democracy classes at the 2,100-student Parkway South High School, is planning to lead his 11th and 12th graders in a discussion about why the Constitution has succeeded as a political document while its predecessor, the Articles of Confederation, failed.

As for younger students in the Parkway district, Ms. Morrison said she plans to give a 45-minute program at one elementary school for 5th graders.

“We’ll take the Preamble, and break it down, asking, ‘We the People’—what does that look like today, and what did it look like when the Constitution was signed?” she said.

Raven Padgett, a spokeswoman for the National Association of Elementary School Principals, said she recently sent members of the group an e-mail to ask about Constitution Day plans.

“Many of the principals I’ve queried are saying they’ve never heard of it,” she said. “Those that had, it was kind of short notice. There’s a little bit of an element of surprise here.”

Educators just catching on to the federal requirement might take some comfort in the fact that, as of last week, the U.S. Department of Education had not settled on its required employee program for the day. Jim Bradshaw, a department spokesman, advised a reporter to check back this week.
 
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Fewer Phila. Teachers Hired on Seniority Basis
By Jeff Archer, Education Week, 9/7/05

Students in Philadelphia are set to return to class this week to schools in which record numbers of teachers were hired for reasons other than their years of experience.

Changes made last year to the teachers’ union contract have chipped away significantly at long-standing, and long-debated, rules that have guaranteed open positions in schools to the most veteran teachers who apply.

Seniority hasn’t been eliminated as a factor, but it’s been greatly reduced. At a minimum, each school now has the option to fill half its openings through site-based selection. Newly configured schools needn’t consider seniority at all, nor must schools where three-quarters of the teachers agree not to.

“The bottom line is that the vast majority of principals have been given the authority to make decisions based on talent rather than on seniority,” said Paul G. Vallas, the chief executive officer of the 210,000-student district.

As a result, the district reports that 555 teaching positions were filled using the site-selection process through the end of July, compared with 386 handled the traditional way. Last year, when the site-based option was limited to schools that got the approval of their staffs, the number of site- selected hires was 119.

Ruth Curran Neild, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s graduate school of education, in Philadelphia, said the change in the district’s teacher-assignment process was long overdue.

“It’s hard to imagine any business in any industry that would want to hire an employee without finding out about their interests, their background, their qualifications, and how they would fit into the existing employee culture,” said Ms. Neild, who has researched the issue.

But Will They Come?

Critics of the seniority-based process further say it has kept newer teachers waiting to find out which school they might work at until after their more-seasoned colleagues had the chance to make their picks of openings. That, they add, put the city at a disadvantage in recruiting novice educators.

Leaders of the district, which was put under state control in 2001, pushed hard for changes in the teachers’ contract during negotiations last year. They noted that, until then, only 42 of the district’s 270 schools had voted on their own to adopt site selection in staffing.

Even with the new contract, principals didn’t flex all the authority given them. The total number of vacancies districtwide that could have been filled through July using the new procedure was 820. District leaders argued nonetheless that it was important that principals at least had a choice of methods.

Jerry Jordan, the vice president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, said he isn’t convinced the new contract language will improve student results. Letting schools choose their hires still doesn’t mean that better teachers will want to work in the most challenging schools, he said.

“Where you have very good working conditions, you’re going to have good teachers voluntarily site-select into those schools,” he said.

Still, he praised district leaders for working with the union to get the word out on how to navigate the new hiring process. Among other efforts, the district greatly enhanced its Web-based system for schools to post openings and let teachers shop for them.

With school leaders more empowered to choose who works in their buildings, Mr. Vallas predicts the district will continue to make steady gains in achievement. Results released last week showed the percentage of needy students who scored at the proficient level on state reading tests has more than doubled since 2002, from 15 percent to 31 percent.

“When principals are allowed to hire the best candidates, they go out and get the best,” Mr. Vallas said.
 
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Suit Claims Anti-Religious Bias in Calif. System
By Sean Cavanagh, Education Week, 9/7/05

The battle over what schools should teach about life’s origins has shifted to another front: the world of college admissions.

The Association of Christian Schools International has filed a federal lawsuit against the University of California system, charging that the institution’s high school course requirements for applicants violate the constitutional rights of students from religious schools.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, charges that UC unfairly rejects science courses that use textbooks casting doubt on evolution and espousing creationist beliefs. It also challenges the university system’s guidelines for course content in English, history, and social studies, in which the plaintiffs also claim anti-Christian bias.

“This is not in any sense [only] a creationism-versus-science suit,” said Wendell Bird, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs.

The case was filed Aug. 25 on behalf of Calvary Chapel Christian School, a religious K-12 school in Murrieta, Calif., and six families of students there. Advocates for Faith & Freedom, a religious organization based in Temecula, Calif., is also a plaintiff.

Universities “used to encourage innovation in teaching and learning,” Mr. Bird said last week. “Why would California need to intrude into what has always been a teacher and student question?”

Academic Preparation

The suit emerges as the theory of evolution—advanced by Charles Darwin and overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community—faces challenges in school districts and states.

In California, if public or private high schools want their graduates to be eligible for admission, they must submit course descriptions to the UC system for review and approval. A committee of university faculty members from different disciplines sets guidelines for those courses.

University officials say their goal is to ensure that students are academically prepared for college. Applicants to the nine undergraduate UC campuses, which serve roughly 150,000 students, are also judged by such factors as class rank and nonacademic criteria—an approach that is widely regarded as a model for public institutions nationwide.

UC system spokeswoman Ravi Poorsina declined to comment last week on the specifics of the lawsuit. But she said that the university accepts roughly 85 percent of all courses high schools submit, and that schools that have courses rejected can reapply. “We want to work with schools,” she said.

Other Subjects in Question

“We totally respect the rights of public and private schools,” Ms. Poorsina said. “We’re not looking to make this difficult for anyone, or any religion.”

The lawsuit says that UC administrators balked at the use of textbooks that advocated creationism, the belief that God created the universe and all living things as described in the Bible. One such textbook, according to the complaint, was published by Bob Jones University Press, which is associated with the well-known, Greenville, S.C.-based Christian institution.

History courses submitted for UC approval were also unfairly rejected, the lawsuit contends, because they did not conform to what university officials describe as “empirical historical knowledge.” Similarly, social studies and English courses were turned down because their coursework or texts were deemed biased or incomplete, the plaintiffs say.

None of the students in the lawsuit has been rejected yet for admission to UC, the plaintiffs ‘ lawyer said last week. But because of previous course rejections, the lawsuit argues, those students will be subject to even more-stringent entry requirements at UC, where admissions are already extremely competitive at several campuses.

Barmak Nassirian, an associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, in Washington, said he was not aware of a case that addressed the same legal issues as the California complaint. Other universities follow processes similar to the one UC uses, which, he said, are aimed at bringing uniformity and fairness to admissions.

Still, Mr. Nassirian said he was worried about the potential implications of asking a university to ignore its course requirements—which had been shaped by experts in various fields—in favor of a “free-for-all,” in which any interest group is allowed to shape policy.

“We’re being asked to treat the consensus of the scientific community as just another opinion,” he said of the lawsuit’s complaint about the teaching of evolution. Admissions officers “don’t call the shots,” he said. “We defer to the judgment of the faculty.”
 
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Iowa Law Ends Use of Finger-Scan Technology
After easy passage, districts are critical of law’s consequences.
By Catherine Gewertz, Education Week, 9/7/05

A little-noticed Iowa law, designed to protect children by forbidding schools to collect their fingerprints, has halted the use of new technology that district leaders say has improved cafeteria and library operations.

About a dozen of Iowa’s 365 school districts have had to stop using a scanning system in which children press an index finger onto an imaging pad capable of recognizing the fingertip. The systems have been used most commonly in place of lunch-line and library bar-code cards, and sometimes on buses, as a way to detect whether children are missing.

District officials who have invested in the new technology argue that it offers many advantages and poses no danger of unwarranted governmental intrusion into children’s lives. Some local administrators have urged their state legislators to change the law to enable them to resume using the scanning devices.

“This was a poor piece of legislation enacted without a thorough understanding of school operations and what the system does,” said Mike Book, the superintendent of the 4,500-student Burlington Community School District in southeastern Iowa, which began using the fingertip-recognition system in its three middle schools last year and had planned to introduce it in its high school this year.

Changes to Be Sought

Signed May 20 by Gov. Tom Vilsack, a Democrat, the law bars government entities from fingerprinting children. There are a few exceptions, such as when fingerprinting is required by a court order, or when a parent permits it to help locate a missing child.

The law, modeled after a measure enacted in Michigan in 1985, was prompted by a complaint from one of Republican state Rep. Tom Sands’ constituents, who was concerned that the local school district had begun using the fingertip-recognition technology in its cafeterias.

“As technology evolves, it’s a concern that even though all good intentions may take us down a road, we have to be careful,” Mr. Sands said in an interview last week. “They’re still minors. Whether they should be fingerprinted and put into a system is questionable.”

But Thomas G. Courtney, a Democratic senator who voted for the measure, now plans to seek changes to the law in the 2006 legislative session, which begins in January. The practical effects of the measure, which sailed through the legislature and was signed by the governor in 11 days, were not adequately understood by lawmakers, said Sen. Courtney, a former Burlington school board member.

“This bill was like mom and apple pie,” he said. “We all said, ‘How could this be bad? It protects our kids from Big Brother.’ Then I saw there were problems with it. I’m not sure we’ve saved anyone, and I think we’ve hurt more people than we’ve helped.”

Jeff Berger, the Iowa Department of Education’s legislative liaison, said the bill “scooted right through the legislature on a public-safety agenda, and wasn’t tracked very well until the smoke cleared.”

David Roed, the technology coordinator for the 750-student West Burlington Independent School District, oversaw the $6,000 purchase and the operation of six of the biometric devices in the libraries and cafeterias of the district’s two schools last year.

Lunch and library lines got noticeably shorter, he said. In the cafeteria, the biometric pads facilitated correct charges by instantly showing if the carrier was a student or staff member, or was entitled to free or reduced-priced meals, he said, and spared the district the cost of scores of lost cards.

The new law is based on a groundless fear of misuse, Mr. Roed contends. The system does not take a fingerprint in the usual sense, he said, but instead electronically measures the ridges and dimensions of a fingertip.

The bottom line, Mr. Book added, is that those electronic measurements can’t effectively be used outside the school system. “They’re not even stored in the computer, so if law enforcement comes in and says, ‘I want this one,’ we couldn’t even give it to them,” he said.

Even as some officials hope for a revision in the law, others advocate caution in making changes. Rep. Sands, the bill’s sponsor, said he was “not closed-minded” on the issue, but would need to be convinced that sufficient safeguards were in place to protect children in an age of increasing Internet-based scams and identity theft.

Ben Stone, the executive director of the Iowa Civil Liberties Union, which supports the law, said that it “may be comforting now” to say that scan technology doesn’t lend itself to misuse. But sometimes it doesn’t become apparent until too late that unintended applications of technology can cause harm. “People need to be wary of the idea that technology is always cool and great,” he said. “We need some old-fashioned American skepticism.”
 
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Calif. Special Education Students Could Get Exam Break
By Linda Jacobson, Education Week, 9/7/05

California special education students who are on track to graduate next year wouldn’t have to pass the state’s high school exit exam to get their diplomas, under a settlement reached between the state and a legal-advocacy center for people with disabilities.

The agreement, reached Aug. 26, could affect about 25,000 students who have individualized education programs and have met, or are likely to meet, all other requirements for graduation.

To qualify for exemptions, students would also have to have taken the exam at least twice since sophomore year, taken it at least once during senior year, and taken remedial courses or received academic tutoring to help them do better on the two-part test in English and mathematics.

For the settlement to go into effect, however, the legislature will have to pass, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will have to sign, an amendment to state law, which now says that all students must pass the exam. State officials and the plaintiffs’ lawyers say they were confident they could get such legislation passed before the session adjourns at the end of this week. The settlement is valid for one year.

“The exit exam has focused our schools like never before on teaching to our world-class standards, and students across the state are working harder, proving that when challenged, they will rise to meet our high expectations,” state schools Superintendent Jack O’Connell, who helped negotiate the settlement, said in a press release. “However, we know that our standards-based education reforms take time to implement, particularly for students with disabilities.”

2001 Lawsuit

The lawsuit, a class action known as Chapman v. California Department of Education, the Superintendent of Public Instruction, and the State Board of Education, was filed in federal district court in San Francisco in 2001 by the Oakland, Calif.-based Disability Rights Association. The plaintiffs challenged the high school exit exam as invalid and as discriminatory against students with disabilities. The case was later moved to state court.

In 2004, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Ronald M. Sabraw put the case on hold and commissioned WestEd, a regional education laboratory based in San Francisco, to do a study on the impact of the exam on students with disabilities.

The study, completed earlier this year, recommended that the exit-exam graduation requirement be delayed for at least two years.

Legislation that would actually delay the test requirement until the 2007-08 school year, unless the state allowed certain accommodations for students with disabilities, has already been introduced by Sen. Gloria Romero.

Stephen Tollafield, a staff lawyer at the Disability Rights Association, said the settlement would give the state additional “breathing room” to handle critical issues, such as giving such students the extra support they need in the classroom to pass the test, or accepting alternative assessments for students with disabilities.

“It’s not fair to deny a diploma when the student was never taught the material,” Mr. Tollafield said in a press release. His group has settled similar lawsuits in Alaska and Oregon.

Mr. O’Connell, the elected state schools chief, said he has doubts that any alternative assessment would be as challenging as the exit exam. “I continue to be concerned that permanently lowering our expectations for any group of children would consign those children to a lower-quality education,” he said.

The association acknowledged that exit-exam passing rates for students with disabilities have increased, but that as a group, they perform at the lowest level.

According to the latest state data, 54 percent of such students received passing scores on the English portion of the test, and 51 percent passed the math section. Statewide, 88 percent of students passed each section.

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