News Clips –
September 8-14, 2007
TOP OF PAGE
STATE
Schools dragged
into Capitol spat / Daily Herald
Car, other prizes
encourage kids to go to class / Chicago Sun-Times
Bremen 228 school board
member opens MySpace Web site / Daily Southtown
Girls outperforming
boys in school / Rockford Register Star
Vegan teacher threatens
to sue school district / Daily Herald
Veganism's new martyr
/ Chicago Tribune
Area school leaders
urge bill passage / Decatur Herald & Review
Jefferson principal
placed on leave over grade changes / Rockford Register Star
Choice of reading
material is a parental responsibility / Daily Southtown
New law: Police must
tell schools of suspicion of sex offense charges / Lee News Service
Parent protests
textbook / Northwest Herald
Parents resisting
school uniforms / State Journal-Register
4 Moline school board
members face possible conflicts / Rock Island Argus & Moline
Dispatch
NATIONAL
Schools Under
Scrutiny Over Cheating / New York Times
Ark. obesity report
cards scaled back / Boston Globe
Student's yearbook
photo banned -- for flower / Boston Globe
Teacher-astronaut
talks about space life / Boston Globe
Real-World Lessons
/ Education Week
Experts Eye Solutions
to ‘4th Grade Slump’ / Education Week
Turning the Ride to
School Into a Walk / New York Times
Board of Ed increases
grad requirements / The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Attorney general says
he'll sue more charter schools / The Cincinnati Enquirer
NATIONAL - NCLB
House Plan Embraces
Subjects Viewed as Neglected / Education Week
Some Schools Take No
Restructuring Action, GAO Finds / Education Week
Policies Allow
Districts to Cut Corners With Substitutes / Education Week
Utahns hope to reform NCLB
/ Deseret Morning News
Why I am Fasting: An
Explanation to My Friends / Huffington Post (NY)
Business Leaders Urge
U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor to
Maintain Strong Accountability
in Reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act / Business Wire
Teachers attack education
law / San Mateo County Times (CA)
Teachers and Rights Groups
Oppose Education Measure / New York Times
Draft Retains Quality
Rules for Teachers / Education Week
The good and bad of NCLB
/ Washington Times
No Question Left Behind
/ National Review Online
A Failed Reform
/ National Review Online
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STATE
Schools dragged into
Capitol spat
Associated Press
SPRINGFIELD -- Gov. Rod Blagojevich has sent letters to every school district
superintendent in Illinois blaming House Speaker Michael Madigan for a delay in
an education funding increase.
The governor's letter, sent Friday, lambastes fellow Democrat Madigan, saying
$554 million for schools can't be distributed without a budget implementation
bill.
"The Speaker of the House, Michael Madigan, is the only person who can
call an implementation bill for a vote," Blagojevich wrote in the letter.
Each of the more than 800 letters contains the same language, with a different
dollar figure for what each district stands to lose if legislators fail to act.
Madigan spokesman Steve Brown said the implementation bill is "part of the
overall budget agreement" and is in a state of uncertainty because of
Blagojevich vetoes. Blagojevich trimmed $460 million in local projects from a
Madigan-backed budget that lawmakers sent him last month.
The governor's letters to school leaders came one day after Madigan announced a
series of statewide public hearings to build support against the governor's
cuts.
"I think the dog fight between the governor and the speaker is something I
don't need to be pushed into," said Normal-based Unit 5 Superintendent
Gary Niehaus after hearing about the letters.
The Senate has passed an implementation bill. The House has not and isn't
scheduled to return to Springfield until early October.
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Car, other prizes
encourage kids to go to class
Car, trips, scholarships, gift cards available
By Rossalind Rossi
Chicago Public Schools are pushing attendance once again this year, figuring
that every student who doesn't come to school costs CPS $95 a day in lost
funding.
Attendance incentives this school year include:
• A car: Students with
perfect attendance for three straight months, starting in September, December
or March, can enter a raffle for a new Ford. Offered by Clear Channel Radio.
• A family vacation for four
to the Wisconsin Dells: Will be raffled off among students who attend every day
of school from March 1 to April 30; six winners.
• Up to $1,000 in rent or
mortgage: Students with perfect attendance from September through November can
enter a raffle; 15 winners. Sponsored by Clear Channel.
• A $500 Jewel gift card:
Students with perfect attendance from September through November can enter a
raffle; 10 winners.
• Tickets to WGCI Big Jam
Concert: Will be awarded to six schools with the most improved October
attendance.
• A monthly breakfast hosted
by WGCI: For school with most improved attendance.
• A full four-year
scholarships to East West University: Offered to eight seniors at high schools
with low attendance -- Clark, Clemente, Crane, Farragut, Phillips, Tilden,
Washington and Wells. Requirement: at least 95 percent senior-year attendance,
2.5 GPA and 100 hours of community service. Other attendance awards at those
schools include the chance to record a public service announcement with a radio
personality from WGCI or KISS FM.
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Bremen 228 school board
member opens MySpace Web site
By Michael Drakulich
Many people running for office use popular Internet sites to help their
campaigns.
Bremen Community High School District 228 board member John Kirkton already has
been elected, but he said he's turning to the Internet so he can serve his
constituents better.
Following in other public office holders' footsteps, Kirkton has opened his own
MySpace account to solicit input from district residents. He got the idea from
watching his college-age children keep in touch with friends via the Web site.
The goal is to improve communications between the district and residents, he
says.
Opening communication through a Web site like MySpace also will give him a
chance to reach a broader audience in less time than it would take to get his
e-mail address out.
But he's not eliminating e-mail as a form of communicating.
"My home e-mail is on my business card. Residents can reach me there, too.
But just getting my e-mail out there would take more time," he said.
"Given the technological sophistication of some people, I thought they
would be more comfortable in this forum rather than coming to a meeting."
Kirkton said he got help from his daughter in setting up his site. He plans to
use it to receive messages from residents.
People have asked him if he's going to blog, but he says it's not likely. He
said he doesn't want to speak for the district.
Nor will Kirkton try to persuade other board members to do the same thing. He
said if others want to do it, it's up to them. But some may not be comfortable
enough to do it.
He said the idea has been accepted well by other board members. He plans to
take whatever information he receives and pass it to other board members and
administrators.
"They thought it was a good idea just to have another door that can be
opened to get input. They were surprised that I would jump into that level of
technology," he said jokingly.
With such an impersonal and often anonymous form of communication, Kirkton said
he's aware that some of the input he's seeking could be nasty. But he'll deal
with it.
"I won't be offended and won't take it personally. It was something I
thought about going in. I'd rather weed through things that may not be
constructive to get to something that is good solid input that will be
helpful," he said.
Kirkton's Web site is www.myspace.com/johndistrict228.
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Girls outperforming boys
in school
By Jeff Kolkey
ROCKFORD - Shawn Farr wanted to be cool. He wanted to fit in. But perhaps more
than anything, Farr said he wanted respect from the wrong people.
The former Auburn High student, 21, said he dropped out as a 17-year-old
sophomore. The only place his life was going was the criminal-justice system.
Farr said it took him getting caught for residential burglary and spending more
than a month behind bars for him to wake up.
“I needed to be humbled,” Farr said. “I had to realize that everything I knew
and all the people I was trying to impress, they weren’t there with me. The
only people behind me was my family and a higher power. It hit me to where I
needed to do something. Obviously, my way wasn’t working.”
For too many young men, their way isn’t working.
A new report from the University of Illinois College of Medicine’s Health
Systems Research notes that although Rockford’s gap in educational attainment
compared to the nation is well-known, another gap is increasingly pronounced:
Girls are outperforming boys in educational achievement.
Women historically lagged behind men when it came to education, largely because
of discrimination. They have more than caught up as historical barriers lifted.
Girls had a nearly 90 percent high school graduation rate in Illinois in 2006,
four points higher than boys. Locally, the gap appears more distinct. In
Rockford, girls had a 75.1 percent graduation rate to 66.8 percent for boys, an
8.3-point spread.
Other school districts in Winnebago and Boone counties had an even more
pronounced gender gap in 2006, and all but Hononegah had a significant gap.
The gap in educational attainment doesn’t stop at high school graduation.
In a few short decades, women have far surpassed men in the number earning
college degrees, said professor Thomas DiPrete, chairman of Columbia
University’s sociology department.
In a paper he wrote with associate professor Claudia Buchmann of Ohio State
University, DiPrete notes that in 1960, 65 percent of all bachelor’s degrees
were awarded to men in the United States. Women lagged until 1982, when they
attained parity with men. In 2004, women received 58 percent of all bachelor’s
degrees.
“It is a very strong societal change for sure,” DiPrete said. “In some sense,
the harder thing to understand is the behavior of boys rather than the behavior
of girls because college is now worth more in our society.”
Looking for respect
Farr’s story is extreme.
It took a trip to the slammer for him to find out that paying attention to
school work and planning for his future wound up being more important than what
his friends think.
Farr said he chose a route that got him attention because of the trouble he
caused.
He said he has cleaned up his act since then. Farr was accepted by
Comprehensive Community Solutions’ YouthBuild program where 16- to 24-year-olds
who have not graduated high school earn a GED and train in construction or computer
technology.
Now he helps mentor youngsters, encouraging them not to repeat the mistakes he
made.
“We teach kids moral character and try to get them to change their ways instead
of following the things they learned in the streets,” Farr said.
But boys in general may be facing a stacked deck, perhaps especially black
males.
The choice
Research shows that often minority boys must make a choice between popularity
and social success versus academic and life success, said Adam Smith, the
mayor’s director of education and lifelong learning.
“Especially in the African-American community and at a higher rate among boys,
it isn’t cool to care about yourself, your community, your family and to have
aspirations to do well in school,” Smith said. “We can all say it isn’t a big
deal to be accepted by peers, but when we were in high school, one of the most
important things at the time was to be in the cool crowd.”
Jefferson High School Principal Kenneth Jackson last year hosted a summit,
attempting to draw attention to the crisis that boys, especially blacks, are
facing.
Boys are expelled and drop out of school more often than girls. In Illinois in
2006, 14,313 boys and 10,531 girls dropped out of high school. Of the 3,413
Illinois students expelled in 2006, 38 percent were black boys.
Of the 251 students expelled from Rockford schools in 2006, 75 percent were
boys and 44 percent were black males.
“A lot of these boys are predestined to go to prison,” Jackson said.
Drop outs not only earn less money than high school graduates, they are at risk
for a life of social welfare and crime.
“Long before kids get with their peers, many go home to fatherless homes,”
Jackson said. “To moms and grandmothers. Where are the fathers of these black
males?
There are many reasons, long before they get with their peer group. More black
boys are in special ed, black boys have the highest drop out rate and the
highest failure rate. Let’s deal with facts. (Black males) are in dire straits
and in the most trouble.”
Why falling behind?
It’s not because they are dumber, DiPrete, the Columbia professor, said.
Tests of boys and girls in elementary school show that boys outperform girls in
mathematics. Girls outperform boys in reading.
And yet, although there may be parity in terms of intelligence between genders,
women now attain higher levels of academic achievement in nearly every
industrialized nation in the world, DiPrete said.
In their paper “The Growing Female Advantage in College Completion: The Role of
Family Background and Academic Achievement,” DiPrete and Buchman argue that the
shift from male dominance in higher education to female dominance has plenty to
do with familial influence.
There was no gap between men and women in wealthy families, DiPrete said.
But he said “the growing vulnerability of boys in families with low-educated or
absent fathers” increasingly appears a major factor in boys’ disadvantage in
educational attainment. Men gain an advantage when they “have a father in the
home with some college education, and they lose this advantage when their
father has only a high school education or is absent.”
And there are other factors.
“For one thing, boys don’t do as well in school as girls do,” DiPrete said, and
that disadvantage shows up as men attempt to earn a college degree. “Boys are
not preparing for college long before they understand the value of college to
their standard of living. Boys make up a portion of this gap in their 20s. In
some sense, they are maturing later and in high school they are not thinking
about the future.”
Mission: Save freshmen
Educators in Rockford and in Belvidere have noted the gender gap in educational
achievement and both are taking similar measures to combat it.
And it starts with freshman year of high school.
Freshman-focused educational programs have been introduced in Belvidere and
Rockford high schools. Although meant to raise the graduation rate of both
males and females, Auburn High Principal Richard Jancek said boys may have the
most to gain.
The idea is to create a better connection between students, their school and
their teachers through smaller class sizes and more personalized education.
That way, students may just begin to understand why they are in school.
Jancek said school systems over the last decade have implemented programs
directed toward at-risk students. He has found that girls, however, are more
likely to take advantage of such programs.
Students who fall behind in high school, like those who are 18-year-old
freshmen or sophomores, are likely to become discouraged and drop out, Jancek
said.
Males are less likely to enroll in night school or alternative diploma
programs, he said.
Often, they instead go straight to work at a low-wage job.
Rockford schools have opened an Auburn Freshman Campus this year that
segregates and caters to freshmen in hopes that they will become sophomores in
a single year.
Jancek said teachers are adapting to a world in which they have not taught
until students have learned.
“Kids are kids, and all will learn if given the appropriate resources,
nurturing and opportunity to fall down and get back up,” Jancek said. “Too
often in the past, in many school districts, there was one way and it was the
teacher’s way: I talk, you listen, and you get it or you don’t. And we know that
doesn’t work.”
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Vegan teacher threatens to
sue school district
By Jameel Naqvi
Fox River Grove Middle School teacher Dave Warwak gave school officials an
ultimatum Monday: Go vegan, or I'll sue.
Warwak told school officials that unless the middle school served exclusively
vegan lunches, which contain no animal products, Warwak would pursue a case
against the school for its violation of the Illinois school code.
"The state of Illinois is not going to be happy with Fox River Grove when
they find out that the vision they have for Illinois schools is being
abandoned," Warwak said.
Warwak's offer came less than a week after school officials removed him from
his middle school art classroom for teaching his students about the benefits of
a vegan lifestyle.
Even after a Monday afternoon meeting between Warwak and school officials, the
status of his job was still unclear. Warwak said school officials told him
Monday that he was insubordinate but that as far as he knows, he is still
employed and receiving a paycheck.
"I'm legally employed, but they don't want me in the building,"
Warwak said.
Fox River Grove Middle School Principal Tim Mahaffy declined to comment on
Warwak's employment or his threat of legal action.
Warwak told school administrators they were in violation of Section 27-15 of
the Illinois school code on moral and humane education.
The section states: "The superintendent of each region and city shall
include once each year moral and humane education in the program of the
teachers' institute which is held under his supervision."
During the eight years Warwak has worked for Fox River Grove School District 3,
he has never received instruction in moral and humane education, he said.
"That means they're in violation at least eight times," Warwak said.
When Warwak called McHenry County State's Attorney Lou Bianchi about the issue,
Bianchi suggested he contact the District 3 school board or the state board of
education.
"We have nothing to do with school curriculum," Bianchi said.
A state board of education spokesman said Warwak could file his complaint with
the McHenry County Regional Office of Education.
Warwak said there are animal rights organizations standing by to provide vegan
lunches to everyone in the middle school.
"The only way I'll drop charges is if the school goes vegan," Warwak
said.
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Veganism's new martyr
Chicago Tribune Editorial
Dave Warwak's campaign to teach his 8th-grade art students about the evils of
an omnivorous lifestyle is officially over the top.
Warwak, who says he was removed from his McHenry County classroom last week by
the "ardent meat eaters" who run Fox River Grove District 3, had
predicted he would be fired at a Monday meeting with his bosses. That didn't
happen, but Warwak now says he won't return to work unless the school cafeteria
goes vegan, eliminating meat, milk and other "poisons" from the menu.
He also wants the state's attorney to charge the district with child endangerment.
That's several notches above last week's complaint, which was that the Fox
River Thought Police were running amok. Although you had to wonder why the
8th-grade art curriculum was so heavy on nutrition and ethics, it did seem like
overkill for a middle school principal to chide a teacher for sharing ideas or
literature meant "to influence the students against our school lunch
program."
Some parents and teachers have been dismayed by the art teacher's fixation on
veganism. In the spring, Warwak created a fetching 3-D model featuring
marshmallow Peeps confined to cages, run over by trucks and otherwise abused by
humans. Last week, he passed out copies of "The Food Revolution,"
John Robbins' treatise on factory farming, after school officials refused to
remove the "Got Milk?" posters from the cafeteria.
Animal activists rallied to his defense after the principal sent him home.
Chicago-based Mercy for Animals volunteered to serve a vegan meal to the entire
student body. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals offered to provide
vegetarian starter kits and copies of PETA's DVD, "Meet Your Meat."
In a letter to Principal Tim Mahaffy, PETA said that instead of being
disciplined, Warwak should have been praised for exposing "the meat
industry's dirty secrets."
"Students in every school should have teachers like Mr. Warwak to tell
them that the 'chicken nuggets' they consume in the cafeteria were once living,
breathing animals who were crammed into filthy sheds and pumped full of drugs
before having their throats slit while they're still conscious," the
letter said.
OK, we've lost our appetite. But what the heck does that have to do with art
class? Warwak says art is a subject akin to philosophy; you can't teach kids to
appreciate art till you get them to think about life. It's not a bad point,
though it would seem he had addressed the anti-omnivore argument adequately
with the Peeps display and could move on to something else. Instead he
continued to preach the vegan gospel with the zeal of the recent convert that
he is.
Still, he didn't really start getting on our nerves till he announced his
one-man cafeteria strike. It's one thing for a teacher to speak his mind and
another thing entirely for him to demand that the school substitute his
prescribed diet for the one that parents clearly find perfectly suitable.
Those of us who haven't turned vegetarian aren't wholly ignorant of where our
meat comes from, even if we haven't watched PETA's DVD. We know those chicken
nuggets don't grow on trees. But parents of middle-schoolers also know how hard
it is to work all the necessary nutrients into the diet of a picky tweener
who's outgrowing jeans faster than they can be laundered. Take away the milk
and the chicken nuggets and all the other things vegans object to, and a lot of
those kids will try to survive on a diet of marshmallow Peeps while wagging
their fingers at those godless carnivores, their parents.
This is America, and Warwak is entitled to express his opinion. But the rest of
us are entitled to eat what we want.
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Area school leaders urge
bill passage
State superintendent: Education is feeling pinch from delay
By Valerie Wells, Decatur Herald & Review
Decatur - Illinois schools got a raise
in general state aid this year, but until the state House of Representatives
passes the budget implementation bill, schools are getting by on last year's
rates.
Christopher Koch, state superintendent of schools, visited Hope Academy on
Tuesday to urge lawmakers to pass the bill.
"Actually, we're somewhat surprised that they were in Springfield last
week and just chose not to do it," said Rebecca Rausch, spokeswoman for
Gov. Rod Blagojevich. "As soon as they pass that bill, schools will start
getting their payments for (fiscal year) 2008."
Surrounded by Hope Academy's fourth-graders and accompanied by Macon County
school superintendents Gloria Davis, Decatur; Damian Jones, Argenta-Oreana;
Wayne Honeycutt, Sangamon Valley; Emmet Aubry, Warrensburg-Latham; and Darbe
Brinkoetter, Mount Zion, Koch said that under the new budget passed in August,
schools are entitled to $400 more per student than they received last year.
In Decatur schools, that adds up to $2.6 million, while the other Macon County
schools' additional money ranges from $530,000 for Mount Zion to $309,000 for
Sangamon Valley.
Some of the reason for the holdup in passing the budget implementation bill is
the legislators' unhappiness with Blagojevich's line-item vetoes.
"Tomorrow, members of the Illinois house will hold a hearing on the vetoes
the governor made to this year's budget," Koch said Tuesday. "I would
urge you to tell them to pass the budget implementation act so that schools can
begin receiving the money that was promised to them when they passed the
budget."
The governor, Koch said, had to make hard choices in those vetoes and veto some
"worthy projects" the state couldn't afford and other projects that
didn't meet the governor's state goals. Instead, more money will go to schools
and health care in the state.
Some local projects that lost money due to the governor's vetoes include
CeaseFire, garages for American Red Cross vehicles, Good Samaritan Inn, Youth
With a Positive Direction, the Salvation Army and the Moultrie County Dive and
Rescue Team.
Dick Shelby, regional superintendent of schools, said Macon County is fortunate
in having a variety of large and small schools, but those schools need the
additional money in their budgets now.
"It's very important for downstate schools to receive the additional funding,
possibly to prevent cuts," Shelby said.
Aubry, superintendent of Warrensburg-Latham schools, said the superintendents
long ago learned to be conservative when making budgets and not count on state
money until it's in their hands. Due to the prolonged state budget process and
now the delay in receiving the extra funding, some districts are feeling the
pinch.
"We've learned not to stick our necks out because the money doesn't always
come as promised," Aubrey said. "So our budgets reflect that we aren't
getting the money, which is the bigger picture for our taxpayers. It means you
can't run very long in the red like that without having to cut services."
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Jefferson principal placed
on leave over grade changes
By Jeff Kolkey, Rockford Register Star
Jefferson High School Principal Kenneth Jackson was placed on administrative
leave Tuesday pending an investigation into last year’s controversial grade
changes.
Interim Superintendent Linda Hernandez said Jackson may return to the post
after what she hopes is a short investigation into whether the principal
violated district policy or school code.
In a teacher-conducted survey, Jefferson teachers reported 936 grades were
changed after the first semester last year, from failing to a passing grade of
"D."
Former Superintendent Dennis Thompson at the time supported Jackson’s decision.
Thompson has said he authorized the grade changes and that Jackson had the
authority as building principal to change the grades.
"The previous administration gave me the directive to do what I did and
supported me," Jackson said Tuesday. "It’s amazing how one
administration says it’s OK and another that it’s a problem."
Dave Rossi, a retired principal who helped design and lead the district’s Fresh
Start behavioral alternative school, was named acting principal of Jefferson,
Hernandez said.
"We are having what we hope is a very quick investigation (into Jefferson
grade changes)," Hernandez said. "And then, hopefully, he’ll be back
to work. He may be back to work. It’s very possible."
A Vietnam-era Marine who served in President Nixon’s honor guard, Jackson
brought an aggressive style to Jefferson High in his first-year when it came to
the behavior of students and teachers.
His efforts are appreciated by some students and parents — especially those who
see him as fighting for a safer school and to raise minority student
achievement.
Jackson said altering grades was a measure meant to force teachers to comply
with his demands to work closely with parents, especially parents of failing
students.
He said no student should fail without personal contact via a phone call or
meeting with parents, giving the adults a better chance to help students
improve.
Grades were changed back to failing if teachers could prove they had personally
contacted parents. However, teachers reported that 603 grades remained changed
and a lower but unknown number were changed second semester.
Parent Renee Taylor said her son had a grade changed last year after an algebra
teacher did not contact her about her son’s struggles in mathematics. She said
she left several messages with the teacher that were not returned and
appreciated Jackson stepping in to mediate her concerns with the teacher.
Taylor said behavior seemed to improve at Jefferson under the principal’s
leadership and he is helping students to see the value in education.
"He is taking these kids under his wings and making them be
somebody," Taylor said.
Some teachers were outraged by the grade changes.
Parental contact directives weren’t made clear until this year and the changes
undermined their authority over students, said Babs Erickson, a retired
publications adviser who led Jefferson students to a state journalism
championship last year.
"As soon as kids realized they wouldn’t fail, they became obnoxious and
disrespectful," Erickson said.
Although Thompson said the grade change issue was one of getting teachers to
properly evaluate student performance and grade correctly, Erickson said that
was not how grade changes were portrayed by school administrators.
"Even though we followed district policy, that didn’t matter,"
Erickson said. "We were made to feel we were poor teachers and that is why
the grades were changed."
When can a principal change grades?
Rockford School Board policy 6.280:
Grading and promotion
Every teacher shall maintain an evaluation record for each student in the
teacher’s classroom. The grade assigned by the teacher cannot be changed by a
District administrator without notifying the teacher. Reasons for changing a
student’s final grade include:
A miscalculation of test scores.
A technical error in assigning a particular grade or score.
The teacher agrees to allow the student to do extra work that may impact the
grade.
An inappropriate grading system used to determine the grade.
An inappropriate grade based on an appropriate grading system.
Should a grade change be made, the administrator making the change must sign
the changed record.
State law:
105 ILCS 5/10-20.9a (school code)
Final grade:
(a) Teachers shall administer the approved marking system or other approved
means of evaluating pupil progress. The teacher shall maintain the
responsibility and right to determine grades and other evaluations of students
within the grading policies of the district based upon his or her professional
judgment of available criteria pertinent to any given subject area or activity
for which he or she is responsible. District policy shall provide the procedure
and reasons by and for which a grade may be changed; provided that no grade or
evaluation shall be changed without notification to the teacher concerning the
nature and reasons for such change. If such a change is made, the person making
the change shall assume such responsibility for determining the grade or
evaluation, and shall initial such change.
Jefferson High School teacher handbook:
Grades
Each teacher will provide failure cards for failing students in classes for all
grade levels. Submit this list with grade sheets at the end of the each
semester (sic). No student should fail a quarter and/or semester class without
some form of documented formal communication to parents/guardians during the
grading period. Otherwise, the student will pass.
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Choice of reading material
is a parental responsibility
Letter by Sherrie Jankowski of Alsip, Daily Southtown
With all the controversy regarding the book "Fat Kid Rules the
World," I decided to read the book to see what was so horrible about it.
I am a parent of a former Prairie Junior High School student who took part in
the reading program for two years. I always was a part of choosing my son's
selections in order to be sure they were suitable for him.
That being said, I did not find this book to be as immoral as the Oak Lawn mom
has suggested. It seems to me that some parents are living in a bubble. This is
2007, and things are much different for our kids than they were for us.
The issues in this book aren't much different from what our children are
exposed to daily on TV, in movies, video games or the news. As far as being
sexually explicit, "looking at the waitress and wanting to touch her"
is not something I'd want my son to do, but come on, let's get real: What
adolescent boy isn't having some of these thoughts? There actually are worse
things going on in the real world right under our noses.
I didn't care for the language used in the book, but once again, I have heard
kids younger than seventh- or eighth-graders using much worse than what was in
the book. I do not condone this language, and my children know it, so reading
it in a book isn't going to make them start using it.
I guess what it comes down to is how involved is a parent in her child's life
and schoolwork? The issues raised in the book are real, and they can't be
candy-coated, especially in this day and age. Instead, as parents, we need to
be involved in our kids' lives and be able to answer their questions and
explain different situations.
The District 126 schools are wonderful, and the teachers are top notch, but
they are not and cannot be parents to our children. That job is ours alone.
We need to take more responsibility for our own children. The book in question
was not a mandatory assignment; it was a choice. Our kids will face many
choices in their lives, but with a good support system, they will be able to
make the correct ones, unlike the people who are sending nasty e-mails to the
school and showing their children how immature they are.
TOP OF PAGE
New law: Police must tell
schools of suspicion of sex offense charges
Mike Riopell, Lee News Service
SPRINGFIELD — Under a new state law, police must now tell a school district
superintendent if one of its employees is suspected of a sex crime.
Before, school officials could ask and receive police records if one of its
employees was being investigated. But law enforcement wasn’t responsible for
alerting school officials of the arrest.
State Rep. Dan Brady, the Bloomington Republican who sponsored the proposal,
said many police officers already let school leaders know if an employee was
arrested. The new law simply makes that notification mandatory.
“They have to make sure they reach out to the employer,” Brady said. “You
certainly should be privy to that kind of information.”
Brady said the idea came from a situation when a McLean County Unit 5 bus
driver was arrested for an alleged sex offense but continued driving without
the district knowing about the charges.
Gov. Rod Blagojevich signed the legislation this week, and lawmakers had
already approved it.
The legislation is House Bill 3512.
TOP OF PAGE
Parent protests textbook
Tom Musick, Northwest Herald
HUNTLEY – A parent of a Huntley High School student met Wednesday with school
officials to voice her concern over a world history textbook that she said
teaches evolution as fact.
“It is blatant,” said Lisa Szatkowski, who first read the book’s material about
the “peopling of the world” and human origins in Africa after her daughter’s
second day as a freshman at Huntley High School. “This is definitely evolution
that they’re teaching.”
Huntley High School Principal Dave Johnson said he did not take part in
Wednesday’s meeting, but he expressed support for the social studies staff and
its curriculum.
“I think the department chair and the teachers involved are very confident that
the book presents various theories of the origin of civilization,” Johnson
said. “There is a process that the school district has in place when a parent
is concerned about curriculum, and to her credit, she’s following that
process.”
Szatkowski said she planned to start a MySpace page where parents could read
the material and decide whether they thought it was appropriate. She said she
eventually could file a formal complaint with the district, although she
emphasized that her problem was with the textbook, not the teachers or school
officials with whom she had “agreed to disagree.”
“What I really want to do is make people aware of the situation,” she said. “It
concerns me that other parents before me did not catch this.”
The textbook in question is “World History: Patterns of Interaction,” by
McDougal Littell. The book is assigned to freshmen in Huntley’s honors-level
world history class.
Szatkowski said she took issue with several statements and graphics in the
book’s first chapter, which focuses on the beginnings of civilization from
pre-history to 2500 B.C. The book offers a timeline showing, from left to
right, skeletons of an Australopithecine, a Homo habilis, a Homo erectus, a
Neanderthal and a Cro-Magnon.
Szatkowski questioned how the book’s authors could state as fact that Lucy was
the “oldest humanoid,” as they phrased it. She also questioned the book’s
statements about prehistoric footprints.
“They say in here that they found the prehistoric footprints that resemble
those of modern humans,” she said, reading the text. “ ‘These footprints were
made by humanlike beings that were called the Australopithecines.’ ... You
don’t have to be a scientist to know it’s impossible to know that. That’s when
it starts getting weird.”
Szatkowski said she did not necessarily want to abolish the book or prevent her
children from learning about the theory of evolution. But she said the school’s
textbooks should teach all of the prominent theories about how humans came to
be, or none of them at all.
“I’m glad that they’re being taught this part ... because it’s going to be out
in the world and they’re going to have to come across it someday,” said Szatkowski,
a Christian who believes in creation as described in the Bible. “But I really
want the other teachings to be in there as well. Who decided that this is the
one? It’s still out. Nobody has ever proven any of them.”
TOP OF PAGE
Parents resisting school
uniforms
Informational meeting tonight
Pete Sherman, State Journal-Register
Several parents who oppose school uniforms are fighting a Springfield School
District trend in favor of them.
The Coalition of Parents Against Public School Uniforms will hold an
informational meeting at 6:30 p.m. today in the Carnegie Room South of Lincoln
Library, Seventh Street and Capitol Avenue.
Members are clear about their agenda.
“We want the uniforms to disappear,” said Rachel Zehr, a parent of a Franklin
Middle School student. “We don’t want them.”
“We want them to go away,” said fellow member and Franklin parent Cheryle
Pruitt.
Seven schools in the district, including Franklin, recently started requiring
students to wear certain colors and styles of shirts, pants, shorts and skirts.
Most of these schools have adopted rules and color schemes that are much more
restrictive than the district’s overall dress code.
Zehr and her husband, Thomas, Pruitt and her husband, Sam, and other parents in
the new organization object to the general concept of uniforms. In a recent
letter to the editor of The State Journal-Register, they argued against them on
constitutional grounds.
Coalition member Jerry Zarley, a Grant Middle School parent, is attempting to
exempt his child from wearing restricted clothing there for religious reasons.
But the parents also have gathered a list of specific complaints about how some
schools have implemented their own uniform policies. They say children,
including some of their own, have been unfairly disciplined for disobeying
confusing and inconsistent rules.
At Franklin, for instance, they say students are restricted to subjective
shades of hunter-green shirts. The parents also accuse Franklin of profiting by
encouraging students to wear clothing sold exclusively by the school that
carries the school’s logo.
Franklin students who wear such items, including tie-dyed T-shirts, are exempt
from the uniform policy. The group says this penalizes students who can’t
afford the school-sold clothing, which tops off at $25 for a sweat shirt.
Some colors and styles of clothing are too difficult to find in certain sizes,
members of the group say. They also argue that low-income families and families
that move from one uniformed school to another are punished because they are
forced to buy more clothes.
Kris Huddleston, principal of Franklin, challenged some of the parents’ claims,
although she acknowledges the school, in its second year of requiring students
to wear uniforms, is enforcing the dress code more stringently. She said
parental criticism has been minor.
Whatever profit the school earns from selling its specialized clothing is used
to restock more clothing, Huddleson said. As for the exemption policy for
students wearing clothing sold by the school, Huddleston said she simply wants
to encourage school spirit.
The school also recycles dozens of shirts, pants and belts that it gives to
needy students for free, she said.
The Coalition of Parents Against Public School Uniform will be up against a
belief throughout the district’s uniformed schools that such a policy cuts down
on discipline problems.
However, the group’s timing could work in its favor.
Several of their concerns resemble those expressed by some Springfield School
Board members, who also have recently started questioning the uniform policies,
most of which were adopted by individual schools without the board’s approval.
The board recently passed a temporary measure requiring that any more schools
that want to adopt uniforms receive board approval first. The board also has
pledged to formulate a consistent, district-wide policy regarding uniforms.
TOP OF PAGE
4 Moline school board
members face possible conflicts
Dawn Neuses, Rock Island Argus & Moline Dispatch
MOLINE - Four members of the Moline School Board must either resign or give up
district health insurance benefits to avoid a conflict of interest, according
to a recommendation the board has received.
The members, Linda Davis, Jeff Quick, Gary Brown and Ben McAdams receive health
insurance as former full-time district employees. There is a question as to
whether or not they are able to vote on anything related to employee benefits
as long as they receive those benefits.
The district pays half the cost of retirees' health insurance premiums.
Retirees can use accumulated, un-used sick leave to pay their share of the
premium. Once that leave is exhausted, they must pick up their share.
With the exception of Mr. McAdams, who pays full cost for the insurance, the
former employees are using sick leave to pay for health insurance benefits. The
remaining board members do not receive health benefits.
Superintendent Cal Lee said the board has talked with its attorney and with the
Rock Island County Regional Superintendent of Schools, Joe Vermeire, who
consulted with the Illinois State Board of Education.
Mr. Vermeire said he doesn't feel he is in a position to recommend anything.
"I tell them what is law then the school board reviews it than makes a
recommendation to each other and the superintendent," he said.
The board is waiting for a ruling from Springfield to see if there are any
other options that would allow them to resolve the issue.
School board president Kathy Weiman said she couldn't disclose who the board is
awaiting the ruling from.
"I can't share that with you yet. That is information out of a closed
meeting," she said, adding she would share the information as soon as the
board has an definitive answer.
"We are still waiting for one piece of information that will hopefully
give us the answer we are looking for," Mr. Lee said. "Whatever it
is, it is. We should know by Monday and have some resolution by Monday.
"We want to explore all of our options. Our board is very interested in
doing the right thing," he added.
"Anything that might be a conflict we have to be careful about," Mr.
Lee said.
Mr. Lee said that no one has been told or asked to resign as of Thursday
afternoon.
If any board members were to resign, it would be up to the school board to fill
the vacancy, according to the Illinois Association of School Boards.
The board is meeting in closed session Monday to discuss the issue, citing an
exclusion to the Open Meetings Act that allows for executive sessions when litigation
is "probable or imminent."
Just who might be litigating, or whether any threat of litigation has been
received, was not disclosed by officials Thursday.
Ms. Weiman twice said she "can't speak to that" when asked if someone
has made a complaint against, or was threatening to sue, the district. She did
say that no one is currently suing the district over this issue.
Earlier this summer, the four board members abstained from voting on health
insurance issues that would affect retirees.
Voting to increase or decrease premiums or coverage could be considered a
conflict of interest, so the district, through the Regional Office of
Education, asked for an opinion from the Illinois State Board of Education, or
ISBE.
Mr. Vermeire confirmed the ISBE did respond with an opinion, but declined to
give a copy to the The Dispatch and The Rock Island Argus. He said it was a
legal document that was not yet accepted by the school board in an open
meeting, and the board was still working through the issue. He also declined to
give any other information about the response by the ISBE.
The ISBE declined to give the The Dispatch and The Rock Island Argus a copy of
the opinion, citing client-attorney privilege.
Mr. Vermeire has had discussions with the superintendent and some members of
the board over the issue, but declined to go into detail.
He is the only person who can remove a school board member from office, and can
only do so if there is a willful failure to perform their official duties. Mr.
Vermeire said two examples are continually missing school board meetings or
while at the meetings failing to perform his or her duties.
Mr. McAdams said at this time, he doesn't know how the issue will affect him.
Mr. Brown referred all questions to Ms. Weiman. Ms. Davis and Mr. Quick did not
return calls for comment.
TOP OF PAGE
===========================================================================
NATIONAL
Schools Under Scrutiny
Over Cheating
By Ford Fessenden
At a time when the pressure to do well on standardized tests in public schools
creates incentives to cheat, states are just beginning to look for the patterns
that betray it.
While there is nothing new about cheating, in the last year state officials say
teachers or administrators on Long Island and in New Jersey and Westchester
have tried to improve their schools’ standings using methods that were
ultimately easy to detect. But no one was looking systematically.
New Jersey has since begun flagging big changes in scores at individual
schools, and New York is considering such a measure. But unlike some other
states, neither New York, New Jersey nor Connecticut looks systematically at
individual tests for the kinds of patterns that ultimately confirmed the
cheating in Yonkers and Uniondale.
In Camden, a large improvement in scores at two schools in 2005 — one school’s
fourth-grade math test scores rocketed from near the bottom to the very top in
the state in one year — went unnoticed by the state until The Philadelphia Inquirer
reported on the matter last year. The state eventually said the scores resulted
from “adult interference.”
In Yonkers, erasures on last year’s state-mandated English examination that
changed the same wrong answers on test after test at four elementary schools
were found only after an anonymous whistleblower pointed them out to the State
Department of Education.
And in Uniondale on Long Island, someone altered an entire column of answers on
hundreds of math tests in 2006, substituting right answers for wrong ones. The
state discovered a pattern to the substitutions while looking at how well the
district was doing in specific subject areas, but the cheating, state officials
said, had been going on for some time; the investigation showed a similar pattern
in 2005.
No one has been charged in any of the cheating cases. But they have provoked
some changes in how test results are examined and may lead to more.
After the revelations in Camden, New Jersey instituted a simple screening of
test results that would flag any school whose score changed beyond what was
statistically likely. New York authorities are considering some kind of
screening.
None of the states take advantage of computers to look for patterns of changes
of the sort that made the Yonkers and Uniondale cheating easy to prove once the
state was alerted to them.
“The question is: Is what happened in Yonkers and Uniondale very isolated, or
is it indeed more prolific than we think it might be?” said Roger B. Tilles, of
the New York State Board of Regents. “We don’t know, because we don’t have the
resources to detect it.”
Thomas M. Haladyna, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University who has
conducted numerous studies on cheating, said, “Anyone with half a brain could
cleverly cheat and never get caught, but teachers and administrators know the
state and the districts have no oversight.”
The testing mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind law creates
consequences, including the closing of schools and the reassigning of teachers
and administrators, when its standards are not met. Because the groups that
suffer consequences are also charged with test security, Dr. Haladyna said he
thought cheating was “epidemic.”
But state and local officials say that they believe cheating is rare. “Malevolent
behavior is a small subset,” said Jay Doolan, assistant commissioner of the New
Jersey Department of Education.
In Connecticut, William Congero, the director of student assessment, agreed.
“We’re certainly aware of the kinds of things that can happen,” he said, “but
we believe the test examiners are honest and don’t take part in this.”
In New York, the number of complaints of cheating by teachers has increased, to
37 in the 2005-6 school year from 22 in 2004-5. But state officials point to
the number of cases that were verified, 12, which is down from 16 in the
previous year, and say they see no cause for alarm.
“We’re not going to deny we’ve seen some actions from bad actors in the field,”
said David M. Abrams, the assistant commissioner for standards, assessment and
reporting for the New York State Department of Education. But, he said, “We
don’t believe cheating is widespread.”
In Uniondale, a Nassau Board of Cooperative Educational Services analyst who
was examining performance on each question on state exams to find weaknesses in
instruction found the cheating pattern: very high scores by all students on the
last few questions of math tests, but mediocre scores on the earlier ones.
The pattern existed on five different tests — two regents examinations, a
middle school test and two grade school tests. Once lined up question by
question, the pattern was obvious and corresponded on some tests to the last
column of answers, which had been systematically changed.
Mr. Tilles has begun pressuring the New York New Yorkpartment of Education to
screen all schools for such patterns, but Mr. Abrams said the department had
not decided what to do. “We are looking at ways to apply large-scale
statistical analyses,” he said.
New Jersey has begun screening tests using a simple mathematical equation that
measures the change in scores at a school from year to year. Some districts
were asked to explain sudden changes, but none are suspected of cheating, said
Mr. Doolan, the assistant commissioner.
Some states have taken further measures. California and Ohio automatically
screen all tests for suspicious erasures.
“The states should be doing this simply because they have the technology to do
it,” said Robert Tobias, director of the Center for Research on Teaching and
Learning at New York University and a former head of testing for New York City
schools. “With the high-speed computers and the advanced psychometrics, one can
actually do this fairly quickly and identify places where there appear to be
anomalies.”
TOP OF PAGE
Ark. obesity report cards
scaled back
By Andrew DeMillo, Associated Press Writer
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. --Teenager Jeffery Trimble used to wolf down as many as six
cheeseburgers in a day and wasn't worried about being overweight. But then his
school sent home an obesity report card.
"They let me know that I was at risk of having things like diabetes and a
heart attack if I kept going the way I was," Jeffery said. "I knew I
was overweight, but I didn't know how bad it could be."
The 16-year-old Jeffery changed his diet, started exercising and dropped 35
pounds.
Four years ago, Arkansas became the first state in the nation to track the
number of overweight students in its schools. School officials say it has
helped improve the state's childhood obesity rate, and a new report due Monday
is expected to show that more Arkansas school children are winning their own
battle of the bulge.
Health researchers, however, fear recent changes to the law could tip the
scales the other way. Students will be weighed only every two years and it's
now easier for parents to take them out of the program.
"The risk is that many parents who needed that screening information will
now opt out," said Wendy Ward-Begnoche, a pediatric psychologist at
Arkansas Children's Hospital. "Parents often underestimate the weight
status of their child."
Arkansas' initial law, pushed by former Gov. Mike Huckabee, called on schools
to measure students each year and report to their parents whether pupils were
overweight or were at risk of becoming overweight. Huckabee, now a Republican
presidential candidate, championed the program as he lost more than 100 pounds
after being diagnosed with diabetes.
Some parents and legislators complained that putting into words what was
obvious from afar -- that some kids are overweight -- was hurting some
children's self-esteem. Legislators this year considered scrapping the program
entirely but then voted to reduce the number of weigh-ins and make it easier
for students to leave the testing program.
State health officials defend the changes, saying that cutting the number of
children who are tracked doesn't mean the state is turning its back on efforts
to combat childhood obesity.
Jim Raczynski, dean of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences' College
of Public Health, said the reliability of the reports will now depend on the
number of students who don't want their body mass index tracked.
"If the children that opt out -- or the parents who opt out -- are the
more overweight children, the data will be skewed," Raczynski said.
"It will look like there are fewer overweight children when in fact there
aren't."
Last year, a study showed that the percentage of Arkansas children who were
overweight or at risk of becoming overweight was 37.5 percent, down from 38.1
percent in 2004. University figures from a later study showed that 68 percent
of parents and 85 percent of students said they were comfortable with the
reports.
When Arkansas adopted the BMI testing program, the state ranked third in the
nation in obesity, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Many states have adopted their own testing programs.
Jeffery, a student at Little Rock Central High School, said he was initially
uncomfortable with being weighed at his school each year. A BMI report that
listed him as obese motivated him to cut down on the cheeseburgers, pizza and
other junk food items that he said were staples of his diet, and he exercises
on a nearly daily basis.
"Now I know it's OK to eat those things, but only moderately," he
said. "It was nothing for me to eat six cheeseburgers in a day."
Arkansas Surgeon General Joe Thompson said the state will still be able to
reach out to children like Jeffery with its BMI report cards and through other
measures, such as limits on junk food sales at schools.
"After four years of reporting to every parent, we are transferring some
of the responsibility back to the parents," Thompson said. "That's an
imbalance that's OK."
TOP OF PAGE
Student's yearbook photo
banned -- for flower
AP
NASHUA, N.H. --A New Hampshire teenager's yearbook photo has been rejected --
because she's holding a flower.
Merrimack High School student Melissa Morin's senior photograph featured her
and a small red flower. School officials, however, said the picture is not
going to make it in the yearbook because props aren't allowed.
"I totally understand that schools have right to dictate policy,"
said Manchester photographer Brad Mallard. "I think the issue is people
need to be made aware that we've thrown common sense out the window. When we're
restricting kids from holding a stupid flower in their hand, it's kind of
silly, quite frankly."
The policy stemmed from a 2005 controversy in Londonderry, where a student
posed with his gun. A judge ruled in favor of the school, but Nashua officials
said they didn't want to face similar scuffles.
Morin's mother says she wasn't aware of the policy.
"I understand (the school's) dilemma in trying to make it black and white
... and not blur the line," said Kathie Roy. "On the other hand, if
something is allowed in the classroom, something benign, then I think it's
perfectly acceptable (to allow it in a photograph)."
TOP OF PAGE
Teacher-astronaut talks
about space life
By Marcia Dunn, AP Aerospace Writer
LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. -- Three weeks after returning to Earth,
teacher-astronaut Barbara Morgan cheerfully carried out her first space
education assignment Monday, sharing the magic of flying in orbit with children
at Walt Disney World.
"Our mission to the international space station truly was a dream come
true," Morgan told youngsters and their parents, and NASA and Disney
employees gathered outside Epcot's Mission: Space attraction.
"I do have some words to share and they say, 'Reach for your dreams ...
the sky is no limit,'" said the astronaut, who at 55, achieved her dream
of spaceflight.
Those words and Morgan's name are etched into a plaque on an outer wall of
Mission: Space. This so-called Wall of Honor bears quotes from such visionaries
as Charles Lindbergh, Neil Armstrong, John F. Kennedy, Stephen Hawking, Carl
Sagan, Galileo and Christa McAuliffe, the first designated teacher in space who
died aboard Challenger in 1986. Morgan had trained as her backup.
Morgan's plaque is right next to McAuliffe's, which reads: "Space is for
everybody ... That's our new frontier out there."
Morgan and her six shuttle crewmates met with schoolchildren inside Spaceship
Earth, the huge golfball-looking structure that is the emblem of Epcot.
One girl asked if the astronauts had seen any UFOs.
Morgan joked that she saw plenty aboard Endeavour: misplaced items like her
floating scissors. But she added that when she gazed out the window and saw all
the stars, it was difficult to imagine that Earth is the only planet with life.
Another youngster wanted to know whom the astronauts would most like to take
into space.
Morgan answered, "As a teacher, I would want to take every student on this
planet and every teacher on this planet. You all would love it."
In an interview with The Associated Press, Morgan said it was a relief, in a
way, to have the shuttle mission behind her and to focus more on children and
education again.
She would love to return to space, she says. But with only three more years
left for the soon-to-be-retired space shuttles and three more
teacher-astronauts waiting to fly, that is unlikely.
In any event, Morgan didn't want people to think of the past mission as though
"Barbara completed Christa and the Challenger's mission. I didn't."
"The work of a teacher is never finished and the legacy of a teacher is
never finished," she said.
After training as backup to McAuliffe and then watching her die during liftoff,
Morgan returned to teaching elementary school in Idaho. Then in 1998, she
joined NASA's astronaut corps. The 2003 Columbia disaster delayed her journey
into space by four years.
Morgan said the educational part of her recent flight was designed not as a
one-time event, but as "the beginning of what we hope to do for many years
down the road." Besides talking to schoolchildren from space, she carried
up 10 million basil seeds that will be distributed, with students encouraged to
build space-style growth chambers for them.
More than anything, Morgan said she's looking forward to hearing what children
want to know about spaceflight. "Kids are full of curiosity and what we do
is find out what they want to know and learn, and I can't wait," she said.
TOP OF PAGE
Real-World Lessons
A nonprofit group runs an ‘alternate route’ for urban principals.
By Lesli A. Maxwell, Education Week, 9/12/07
Boston - Since 2000, New Leaders for New Schools has recruited and trained more
than 300 principals and placed them at the helms of troubled schools in cities
across the nation.
But the nonprofit organization, co-founded by Jonathan Schnur, an education
policy adviser in President Bill Clinton’s administration, and sustained by his
political savvy and prowess at fundraising, aspires to much more.
Even in schools where achievement has been mired at the bottom for years, New
Leaders principals are expected to ensure that their students dramatically
improve in reading and mathematics. By 2014, the organization has pledged to
raise 90 percent of students to proficiency at any school where one of its
principals has been in charge for five straight years—a goal that Schnur
expects will add up to somewhere between 300 and 400 schools. For its
principals in high schools, New Leaders is expecting graduation rates of at
least 90 percent.
“We didn’t get into this to just make bad schools OK schools,” says Schnur, the
chief executive officer of New Leaders for New Schools, which is based in New
York City. “We got into this because of our fundamental belief that regardless
of a child’s race or background, they can achieve at high levels.”
Such ambitious, well-defined goals are a hallmark of the 7-year-old
organization. Only 22 percent of the schools that have New Leaders-trained
principals running them are on track to get such dramatic results, Schnur says,
in acknowledgment of the challenges in reaching those achievement goals.
Operating in nine urban districts—including Chicago, the District of Columbia,
Oakland, Calif., and New York City—New Leaders for New Schools has steadily
emerged as a premier alternative route for becoming a city principal.
Schnur, 41, is a swift talker who gives the history of New Leaders in less than
60 seconds before directing the conversation to what he prefers to discuss
these days: his new school reform ideas and the future of New Leaders, or what
he calls “chapter two.” That energy, and the political skills and contacts he
picked up while working in the Clinton administration, have been vital to the
group’s success.
Schnur has raised tens of millions of dollars for the program that he and
co-founder Benjamin G. Fenton, now the chief cities officer for New Leaders,
cooked up while they were at the Harvard Business School. The Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and the NewSchools Venture Fund are
among the biggest backers.
New Leaders, in fact, is reliant on aggressive fundraising to pay the
six-figure bill to train one principal, which some say could limit its expansion
and sustainability.
In partnership with three school districts and a group of charter school
organizations, New Leaders won grants from the federal Teacher Incentive Fund,
roughly $75 million over five years that the organization is using to create a
largely Web-based program for sharing what it deems to be the best practices in
urban schools. As part of the project, schoolwide awards will be paid for
dramatic improvement in student achievement and successful teachers who open up
their classrooms and share their expertise will be paid bonuses.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the program’s first year, Schnur approached school leaders in New York City
and Chicago to strike an agreement on training new principals. Now, cities and
school districts must approach New Leaders first, then go through a vetting
process to win a contract, in part by agreeing to raise private dollars from
local businesses and foundations to cover half the cost of training the
principals.
Within five years, Schnur established a solid enough track record to persuade
district officials to give the New Leaders organization what he insists is
critical for the program to succeed: access to student-level data so that the
training program can hold itself accountable. New Leaders also insists that its
trainees—once placed as principals—get a degree of autonomy that other school
leaders in those districts don’t necessarily have.
Selecting each class of New Leaders trainees is a rigorous process that
requires applicants to write essays and survive a first-round interview. For
the roughly 25 percent who become finalists, the screening becomes especially
tough. Finalists are brought in for a daylong round of one-on-one interviews,
case-study analyses, and role-playing as principals. They must demonstrate some
expertise in classroom instruction by watching videos of teachers and offering
detailed critiques.
The role-playing scenarios—Schnur declined to discuss them to avoid tipping off
future applicants—are one of the main ways that New Leaders officials winnow
the pool of finalists.
“What we are really screening for is a fundamental belief system,” says Schnur.
“We look for all kinds of signals and clues, subtle or not, that someone is
truly going to be focused on the achievement of kids in every decision they
would make as a principal, and not on what makes adults happy or comfortable.”
Those who make it are then trained in a manner that resembles the residencies
of new physicians who work in hospitals under the guidance of more-experienced
doctors.
After five weeks of training over the summer in instructional leadership, in
establishing a school culture that is centered around high student achievement,
and in managing a school building day to day, the “new leaders” are assigned to
work in schools with strong principals who serve as role models and mentors.
Immediately, they are each given a project to manage, one that usually requires
them to work with a team of teachers to raise achievement for a group of
students over the course of the school year. They are paired with coaches,
usually retired principals, who offer advice and professional development
constantly, and who ultimately make recommendations on whether the new leaders
are ready to run schools on their own.
“They put us in schools right away and get us solving real-world problems as
soon as possible,” says Shaylin Todd, a New Leaders-trained principal who
started her second year as principal of Fort Worthington Elementary School in
Baltimore last month.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In late June, the latest crop of would-be principals—105 in total; roughly 10
to 15 from each of the nine cities where the program has contracts—gathered at
Boston University to begin their five weeks of training. Two-thirds were racial
or ethnic minorities. More than half were women. All had at least two years of
teaching experience; most had more than five. Several became teachers through
Teach For America, the nonprofit group that recruits novice teachers for
high-need schools.
On the second day of their boot camp, the aspiring principals were immersed in
case studies about using student-achievement data to help teachers become better
instructors. In fact, much of the New Leaders curriculum is devoted to teaching
and reinforcing the skills of being a good instructional leader.
Broken into small groups, the new leaders pored over the results of a math
assessment that showed that nearly half the students who were tested didn’t
understand such concepts as complex fractions. One new leader was put on the
spot to act as the principal and discuss the results with two teachers: a
frustrated one who blames the students, and an eager one who wants to use the
data to adjust how he teaches. The other new leaders critiqued their handling
of the two scenarios.
“These are the kinds of real situations that perplex principals every day in
schools,” says Darlene Merry, the chief academic officer for New Leaders. “What
we are doing with these case studies and role-playing is preparing these new
principals for something they will have to deal with in a matter of weeks when
they start their residency.”
The program’s curriculum evolves constantly, Merry says, especially in response
to surveys of first-year residents, who offer detailed feedback on which of the
summer courses and exercises proved most relevant. One of the essential
features of the program—the use of retired principals as coaches and confidants
to the aspiring principals over the first two years—also starts during the
summer training session. The coaches meet with their assigned new leaders
several times a week to discuss the lessons they learned and to answer
questions and offer advice.
Since selecting its first class in 2001, New Leaders has placed roughly 85
percent of its trainees in principalships after they completed the residency
year. Another 10 percent landed jobs as assistant principals, while 5 percent
washed out or were “counseled out” of the program, Schnur says. Placements have
been relatively easy, except for the organization’s first few years in Chicago,
where locally elected school-site councils have a say in principal hiring and
were initially wary of the training program.
To hold its principals accountable and to measure how well the program works,
New Leaders has been amassing student-level data from each of the schools where
its people are hired. The organization is working with the RAND Corp., an
independent research organization, to do a detailed analysis of how much
achievement improves at schools led by a New Leaders principal.
“I don’t know of a university program that is tracking the results of its
principals like that,” Schnur says.
But it’s too soon to declare that New Leaders has found the right formula for
training principals, says Michelle D. Young, the executive director of the
University Council for Educational Administration, a University of Texas at
Austin-based consortium of major research universities with programs that train
school leaders.
“We have seen statements in the media and places on the Internet that indicate
that the New Leaders-trained principals are getting gains in student
proficiency after a couple of years, but those can be misleading,” she says.
“What we haven’t seen is a published evaluation of how they are doing. While
there may be some data showing improvements, what we can’t determine is whether
those can be attributed to the quality of people that they recruit or the
curriculum and pedagogy that their people get in training.”
Young calls New Leaders’ selective screening of candidates both a strength and
a weakness of the program.
“With better people coming in at the start, of course you end up producing
better leaders in the end,” she says. “But along with increasing selectivity,
you also decrease the size of your candidate pool and therefore end up having a
smaller impact, number-wise, on schools.”
The cost of the program—$102,000 to train each candidate—has caused some critics
to raise questions about how long it can last and whether it could ever be
expanded to every urban school system. The trainees themselves pay nothing.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
But educators in some of the districts where New Leaders trains principals
report that its methods are bearing fruit. When New Leaders officials began
negotiating to train leaders for the 82,000-student Baltimore city schools,
they insisted that their principals be certified as administrators by the
Maryland Department of Education without going through a university-based
certification process.
State Superintendent of Schools Nancy S. Grasmick agreed.
“The rigor with which they chose their people, the rigor of their training, and
the ongoing, quality professional development that their aspiring principals
get from mentor principals and coaches was so impressive to us,” Grasmick says.
Since Maryland signed off on certifying New Leaders trainees as principals, the
group sought and won similar licensure agreements from Louisiana, Tennessee,
and Wisconsin, once it started training principals in New Orleans, Memphis, and
Milwaukee. It also works in the Prince George’s County, Md., school district.
Todd was one of eight people in the first class of new school leaders to be
trained for Baltimore. During her residency year at Baybrook Elementary School,
the principal put her in charge of managing one of the school’s two buildings.
Todd also worked with the school’s 2nd grade teachers to develop interim
assessments in mathematics to track achievement throughout the school year.
Now, Todd is the principal at Fort Worthington Elementary in East Baltimore.
Diane Goldian, a retired high school principal who has been Todd’s coach since
she started the New Leaders program in 2005, drops by the school, unannounced,
once every two weeks. Goldian sits in classrooms to watch teachers and examines
achievement data. She tells Todd what needs work and attention and what is
going well.
“I consider her to be a critical part of my instructional team,” says Todd.
For Todd, reaching 90 percent proficiency at Fort Worthington, where a majority
of children are poor and African-American, is a mantra. That goal is written on
posters in the hallways, and it comes up in every conversation with teachers
about instruction, Todd says.
To get there, the school has a big gap to close. It has been in
“restructuring,” for failing to make adequate yearly progress under the federal
No Child Left Behind Act, since the 2002-03 school year.
“We’ve got our plan in place,” Todd says. “Now we’ve got to work and teach our
hearts out to get there. The kids are capable. It’s up to the adults to help
them.”
TOP OF PAGE
Experts Eye Solutions to
‘4th Grade Slump’
By Christina A. Samuels, Education Week, 9/12/07
For the first few years of school, struggling readers can usually get by. The
material is simple, the lessons are repeated often, and intensive remedial help
is common.
But for some of those pupils, reading ability starts a dramatic downhill slide
right around 4th grade. While good readers are sponges for new words and
grammar rules, slower readers are left further and further behind. Some never
catch up.
Researchers have called the phenomenon the “4th grade slump,” because it tends
to occur when reading instruction shifts from basic decoding and word
recognition to development of fluency and comprehension.
But questions remain. If there is a slump, what is causing it? And can children
at risk of “slumping” be identified much earlier than they typically are, and
their problems eased or eliminated?
The National Institutes of Health has awarded $30 million over the next five
years to research centers devoted to studying the issue, along with other
questions related to reading disabilities. The four centers will delve into the
learning process in children and adolescents to find out what goes wrong for
some young readers, and determine ways to address the problems when they develop.
The centers conducting the research are based at the University of Colorado at
Boulder, Florida State University, the University of Houston, and Baltimore’s
Kennedy Krieger Institute, a research and education facility that focuses on
children with developmental disabilities.
Though the focus of each center’s study differs, the goal for all is to come up
with interventions that can be used in the classroom.
The project is being funded through and overseen by the National Institute of
Child Health and Human Development, a branch of the NIH that has long played an
influential part in research on reading.
James H.Wendorf, the executive director of the National Center for Learning
Disabilities, a New York City-based advocacy organization, said he welcomed the
research. “NICHD produces the scientific bedrock for reading instruction and
reading interventions,” he said. “School personnel are clamoring for
information on how to teach efficiently and effectively.”
Knowledge Base Lags
Part of the drive behind the federal grants is great interest in “response to
intervention,” a teaching framework promoted in the 2004 version of the
Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, said Peggy McCardle, the chief of
the child-development and -behavior branch of the NICHD.
In RTI, teachers provide increasingly strong educational interventions for
students struggling in a particular subject. The hope is that by catching and
addressing academic problems early, the difficulties will not persist.
RTI also has been billed as a way of identifying students with learning
disabilities, because children who do not respond to interventions may have
other deficits.
But in such situations, “practice is way ahead of the research,” Mr. Wendorf
said. Educators are already starting RTI models in their schools, and some of
those efforts have shown success but not been scientifically tested, he said.
Ms. McCardle agreed: “Everyone’s out there rushing to figure out how to do
[RTI], but without a very strong research base.”
The research centers are trying to figure out “what’s the best way to do this,
on a very practical level,” she said. “We’re trying to understand even more
what’s going on in the brain.”
The Kennedy Krieger Institute is the center specifically assigned to dig into
the “slump” as part of its multiple research areas.
The term “4th grade slump” is attributed to the late Jeanne S. Chall, a
professor and educational psychologist at Harvard University’s graduate school
of education who was one of the nation’s foremost experts on reading.
Ms. Chall and her fellow researchers found that the slump was worse among poor
children, and they suggested that was because such children typically were not
exposed to a vocabulary-rich environment. She recommended that educators expose
young readers to a variety of rich, engaging texts that would teach vocabulary
along with decoding skills.
Still, some children continue through school with reading problems. And, 30
years of research has not provided all the answers, educators say.
Researchers do know what happens around 4th grade that makes reading difficult
for students who are weak in the subject.
“When you’re younger, you’re learning to read. When you’re older, you have to
be comprehending very well what you’re reading,” said Laurie E. Cutting, the
associate director of the Kennedy Krieger Institute’s Center for the Study of
Reading Development. “It really becomes a tool for learning, not a tool that
you are learning.”
Early reading instruction focuses on decoding skills, or associating letters
with spoken words. And it is possible that for some children, Ms. Cutting said,
the slump could simply reflect reading problems not addressed early enough. Yet
neuroimaging scans have shown that fluent reading involves other processes in
the brain.
“The evidence so far seems to suggest there is something going on beyond
decoding problems,” Ms. Cutting said.
Need for Help Persists
The reading-development center will use a variety of methods to examine reading
in older children, including using magnetic-resonance-imaging, or MRI, scans,
to see if there are telltale brain patterns that predict how children will
respond to certain remedial efforts.
In addition, the center is examining possible connections between attention
deficit hyperactivity disorder and reading comprehension, and will try to
determine the prevalence of different types of reading disabilities, based on
the knowledge it gains from its research efforts.
“The research in this area of learning disabilities is minimal, and the need
for answers is urgent,” Ms. Cutting said.
Timothy Shanahan, the director of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s
Center for Literacy, said that reading is such a complex task that dealing with
one difficulty may only unveil others.
“These kids may have double deficits, or multiple deficits,” said Mr. Shanahan,
a former president of the International Reading Association. “If you clear up
the decoding problem, it becomes obvious there are other problems, too.”
Another hypothesis, Mr. Shanahan said, is that the slump in students’ reading
ability occurs because teachers start to assume pupils “get it.”
“These may be kids who were in need of reading help. In 2nd grade, that kid is
going to get extra help with his reading. In 4th and 5th grade, they’re not getting
that help,” he said.
That pattern, he said, is one reason why educators need to continue to develop
good interventions for older students. “It is critical that these older kids
not get lost,” Mr. Shanahan said.
It seems likely that the interventions for older students with reading problems
will differ from those for younger students struggling to read, Ms. Cutting
said.
“There’s certainly enough evidence to show that at certain stages, reading
difficulties can be ameliorated,” she said. “When you get into the older
grades, that may not be as clear-cut.”
TOP OF PAGE
Turning the Ride to School
Into a Walk
By Jane E. Brody
The signs say “School Is Open, Drive Safely.” Of course, one should always
drive safely, school or no school, and not only “when children are present,” as
speed limit signs near schools often state. If only these signs reflected what
health and safety experts hope will become a major change in how children get
to and from school and after-school activities.
Forty years ago, half of all students walked or bicycled to school. Today,
fewer than 15 percent travel on their own steam. One-quarter take buses, and
about 60 percent are transported in private automobiles, usually driven by a
parent or, sometimes, a teenager.
The change was primarily motivated by parents’ safety concerns — a desire to
protect their children from traffic hazards and predators. But it has had
several unfortunate consequences. Children’s lives have become far more
sedentary. They are fatter than ever and at greater risk of developing
hypertension, diabetes and heart disease at young ages.
The sedentary life also affects their behavior and the ability to learn.
Studies have shown that children who engage in moderate to vigorous physical
activity show improvement in concentration, memory, learning, creativity and
problem solving, as well as mood, for up to two hours after exercise.
With more children being driven to school, traffic congestion has mushroomed.
That has increased stress to drivers and risks to pedestrians and cyclists, as
well as air pollution, especially in and around schools. Parents who drive
their children to school make up about a quarter of morning commuters. More
traffic also means more vehicular accidents, endangering the lives of children
and the adults who drive them. It has become a vicious cycle that must be
broken, and soon.
Safely moving children to and from school and after-school activities is a
matter of great concern, not only to parents, but also to the American Academy
of Pediatrics, which in July issued a policy statement on school transportation
safety.
School Buses Versus Cars
The academy’s statistics on injuries and fatalities suggest that being driven
to school in a passenger vehicle is by far the most dangerous way to get there,
and riding in a school bus is the safest. Seventy-five percent of the
fatalities and 84 percent of the injuries occur in passenger vehicles, but just
2 percent of student deaths and 4 percent of injuries result from travel by
school bus.
The numbers might not tell a complete story. The academy’s Committee on Injury,
Violence and Poison Prevention and the Council on School Health pointed out
that “school bus crash data are incomplete, and that injuries cannot be reliably
estimated.
“The first emergency-department-based study of nonfatal school-bus-related
injuries found that the number of injuries, 17,000 annually to children 0 to 19
years of age, greatly exceeded previously published estimates.”
When the Minneapolis highway bridge collapsed this summer and a school bus
filled with children plunged toward the Mississippi River, witnesses described
children “flying” around in the bus. There are just two ways that could have
occurred. Either the bus was not equipped with safety restraints or the
children, all of whom escaped safely, were not buckled in.
Before child-restraint systems and safety belts came along, large school buses
relied on “compartmentalization” to protect their occupants. This meant closely
spaced seats with high energy-absorbing backs, which we now know to be
inadequate, especially in rollovers and side impacts with other large vehicles.
As of this summer, Florida, Louisiana, New Jersey and New York, as well as many
local school districts, had passed laws requiring seat belts in school buses.
California requires them in newly made buses.
Children should be secured in age-appropriate restraints in all motor vehicles.
On a school bus, someone other than the driver should be responsible for
assuring this.
There are potential side benefits, too: better student behavior, a more
consistent seat belt habit among children and fewer distractions for the
driver.
The academy urged that all school buses built before 1977 be retired from use
“because they are deficient in several significant safety standards.” Old buses
also spew undue emissions of pollution that children inhale, increasing
respiratory symptoms and hospitalization for asthma.
Safer Routes
Cities and communities throughout the country are trying to encourage more
children to walk or bike to school. The only way this can occur is if children
can travel there safely. That means more sidewalks and clearly marked bike
lanes or paths separated from roadways, lower traffic speed on school routes,
safer crosswalks, well-trained crossing guards at all corners near schools and
adult supervision.
Also helpful are traffic-calming measures — changes in the design of streets
and intersections to slow traffic automatically to acceptable speeds. In 2005,
Congress allocated $612 million over five years to help communities create such
safer routes to school.
Seattle has reported a 77 percent to 91 percent reduction in traffic accidents
after installing a citywide traffic-calming program that included 700 new residential
traffic circles. Just last week, Gov. Eliot Spitzer announced that New York
would spend $32 million in federal money on a Safe Routes to School initiative
that includes transportation and public education projects across the state.
More information on traffic calming is available from the Local Government
Commission at www.lgc.org or by calling (800) 290-8202.
Oct. 3 is the date of national Walk to School Day this year, promoted by the
Partnership for a Walkable America (www.walktoschool-usa.org). Children who
fail to learn how to walk safely face greater risks whenever they are
pedestrians. They have to learn when it is safe to cross and how to judge the
speed of oncoming traffic. They must be taught to look both ways for traffic,
even on one-way streets. Vehicles do sometimes make mistakes, and bikes can
come from any direction.
Parents, who are notoriously pressed for time to exercise, can benefit, too, if
they walk or bike with their children to school. Just as parents have managed
to organize car pools and play groups, they can organize groups of children who
walk or cycle to school accompanied by a different adult each day or week. A
walking version of the car pool, the Walking School Bus, has been successful in
Canada and England. Parents share the responsibility of escorting children to
and from school on foot or bike.
For guidance on setting up a Walking School Bus, a guidebook is available from
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Check the Web site,
www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/kidswalk/, or call toll-free, (888) 232-4674.
No need to wait for Walk to School Day. Start today to promote better health
and safety for all schoolchildren.
TOP OF PAGE
Board of Ed increases grad
requirements
Ken Sugiura, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Starting next fall, all Georgia public high school freshmen will need four
years of math and science in order to graduate. But they won't have to take a
single foreign language class -- unless they want to.
The state Board of Education voted unanimously Thursday approving new rules
that merge the college-prep and vocational studies tracks into one. For the
college-prep track, students have been required to take four units of math,
three units of science and two units of a foreign language.
"I am all for it," said Duluth High School principal Pat Blenke, who
was part of a committee that developed the proposal. "I do believe that
this graduation rule raises the bar, not only here at Duluth, but throughout
the state."
The proposal met with resistance from foreign language teachers. Some board
members were concerned about possible ramifications of not requiring foreign
language study. Proponents pointed out that most students take a foreign
language because colleges usually require it.
Instead of requiring a foreign language, the new guidelines call for students
to take three credits from among computer technology, foreign language or fine
arts.
State Superintendent Kathy Cox even predicted that foreign language enrollment
will rise.
The board's intent with the increased math and science requirements is to
prepare students for the economy of the 21st century.
"I don't think it's any coincidence that Georgia has one of the highest
default rates of mortgages and one of the highest rates of bankruptcy and we
have lackluster mathematics performance," Cox said.
The new graduation requirements may create an even greater demand for math and
science teachers, which are among the most difficult to hire, Blenke said.
Gwinnett County's public school system goes as far as China and India to hire
qualified math and science teachers.
TOP OF PAGE
Attorney general says
he'll sue more charter schools
Stephen Majors, Cincinnati Enquirer
COLUMBUS - Ohio's attorney general plans to file additional lawsuits seeking to
shut down charter schools that aren't meeting academic and financial
requirements, a spokesman said Thursday, a day after he filed suit against two
Dayton schools accused of repeated academic failings.
Attorney General Marc Dann will sue at least one school next week and, in the
near future, more suits will follow, said spokesman Leo Jennings. Charter
schools are privately run but receive state taxpayer dollars.
The move brought about the latest tiff between Dann, a Democrat, and a
Republican-controlled Legislature that claims he is repeatedly invading its
turf.
A spokeswoman for House Speaker Jon Husted, a Kettering Republican and ardent
supporter of charter schools, said laws already hold the schools accountable, including
measures that shut down schools for poor academic performance and cut funding
for those with poor accounting standards.
"We have put significant accountability measures in place for charter
schools in order to weed out the bad actors," said Karen Tabor. "What
the attorney general is doing isn't really necessary. He's making his move at
the same time these schools would be reviewed."
In the lawsuits, Dann argues the schools were not meeting their obligations for
receiving taxpayer money. Jennings said accountability measures passed by the
Legislature would take too long to hold the schools accountable.
"How many more millions of dollars are we going to waste and how many more
kids are going to be waiting for an education while we wait for the laws to
take effect?" Jennings said.
On Wednesday, Dann filed suit against New Choices Community School and the
Colin Powell Leadership Academy, which together have received more than $17
million in state money. New Choices, a middle school, has met one of 29
academic benchmarks during six years of operation, while the Powell academy,
for preschool through eighth grade, has met one of 61 standards in six years,
according to the lawsuits.
Shane Floyd, the new superintendent of the Powell school, said the staff has
been overhauled and students must now daily spend at least 90 minutes each on
math and language arts.
"We are making some outstanding strides thus far in ensuring the academic
success of our young people," Floyd said.
Gary Hardman, administrator at New Choices, said Dann doesn't understand the
school and its mission to admit students who have dropped out or not succeeded
at other schools. Many come from impoverished backgrounds or have mental-health
or substance-abuse issues, he said.
"If New Choices were to go away, my 260 students would be on the
streets," Hardman said. "We work very, very hard for very, very
deserving kids that have next to nothing."
The Legislature has passed two laws regarding the academic and financial
performance of charter schools.
Thirty charter schools are currently in "academic emergency," the
state Department of Education said. The department can't shut down charter
schools under the academic accountability measure until the end of the
2008-2009 school year, said spokeswoman Karla Carruthers.
TOP OF PAGE
===========================================================================
NATIONAL - NCLB
House Plan Embraces
Subjects Viewed as Neglected
By Kathleen Kennedy Manzo, Education Week, 9/12/07
Advocates for broadening the curriculum hope a draft House proposal for
reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act will give a boost to history,
art, music, and other subjects that they believe have been marginalized in many
districts under the 5½-year-old federal law.
The draft of changes to Part A of the Title I program, released by Rep. George
Miller, D-Calif., Rep. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon, RCalif., and key colleagues
late last month, features potential incentives for states to test students in
core subjects other than those now required—mathematics, reading, and,
beginning this school year, science.
“It’s a good start … and encouraging that Congressmen Miller and McKeon are
showing sensitivity to the criticism that there has been a narrowing of the
curriculum” under No Child Left Behind, said Jack Jennings, the president of
the Center on Education Policy, and a former aide to House Democrats. “If
school districts can include testing in other subjects [in gauging how well
their schools are doing], it allows them to pay more attention to those other
areas.”
A report released in July by the CEP, a research and advocacy organization
based in Washington, found that most districts have significantly increased
instructional time in reading and math in the hope of improving student
achievement and helping schools meet goals for adequate yearly progress, or
AYP, under the federal law. The law requires testing in those two subjects
annually in grades 3-8 and once during high school.
As a result of that emphasis, nearly half the nation’s school districts pared
down instructional time in other critical subjects by more than two hours each
week, according to the report. ("Survey: Subjects Trimmed To Boost Math
and Reading," Aug. 1, 2007.)
Other surveys and reports have confirmed that trend.
Grants and Measures
The preliminary House Education and Labor Committee plan would allow states to
include student scores from state tests in history and other subjects as
additional measures of how schools were performing. Those test scores would be
given a fraction of the weight of math and reading results in determining AYP.
The use of multiple measures would give states more information on school
performance, said Mr. Miller, the chairman of the committee, whose ranking
Republican is Mr. McKeon.
“We address the question that’s been raised, … whether NCLB is driving the
narrowing of curriculum by school districts responding [to the law] simply by
teaching to the test,” Mr. Miller said in a conference call with reporters last
week. “Instead of using one multiple-choice test on one day,” he said, “we
ought to allow schools to provide additional information that would give a more
comprehensive and accurate picture of how schools are doing.”
The discussion draft also proposes a grant program for districts to strengthen
instruction in “music and arts, foreign languages, civics and government,
economics, history, geography, and physical education and health as an integral
part of the elementary and secondary school curriculum.” It does not specify
funding levels or say how many grants would be available.
According to Martin West, a professor of education at Brown University in
Providence, R.I., who has studied the impact of the NCLB law and state tests on
the school curriculum, the prospective grants would likely be less of an
inducement to enhancing state testing programs than the multiple-measures
provision.
“The testing proposal is potentially important to states that might want to
consider testing in other subjects,” he said, “because doing so under the
current NCLB creates a divergence between the state system and federal system.”
The Miller-McKeon draft plan “would remove an important disincentive,” Mr.West
said.
Some educators said they were encouraged by the plan.
“The notion that only very practical training equips you to deal with life and
the world that we live in goes against every educational tradition for
thousands of years,” said Theodore K. Rabb, a professor emeritus of world
history at Princeton University and board chairman of the National Council for
History Education, in Westlake, Ohio. Mr. Rabb asked the council’s membership
this past summer to write Congress about their concerns over reductions in
history education.
“This proposal is the most encouraging single thing that has happened lately,”
he said, “that [lawmakers] are beginning to realize that there is a problem.”
TOP OF PAGE
Some Schools Take No
Restructuring Action, GAO Finds
By David Hoff, Education Week, 9/12/07
Researchers have found that schools are reluctant to make major changes even
after failing to reach student-achievement targets under the No Child Left
Behind Act for five consecutive years.
Now, a Government Accountability Office report suggests that at least 6 percent
of the 2,790 schools facing the severest sanctions under NCLB took none of the
law’s prescribed actions to initiate improvements. What’s more, the
congressional watchdog agency says, the number may actually be higher. The
Department of Education hasn’t checked to see whether states are adequately
monitoring the restructuring activities in their schools, according to the GAO.
The department “does not require states to report on the specific measures
taken for each school, and therefore, the department has limited information on
whether states have found that some districts may not be in compliance with
[NCLB] requirements,” says the report, released Sept. 5.
In fact, the GAO estimates, 42 percent of schools in the corrective-action and
restructuring phases under the law did not receive all the help they were
entitled to.
In studies commissioned last year by the American Enterprise Institute,
researchers documented that most schools in the law’s corrective-action and
restructuring phases had chosen to make few changes.
The authors attributed that lack of action to weak enforcement by the federal
government and to schools’ efforts to escape major overhauls by using the law’s
catchall category for “other” changes.
The GAO found similar results. Forty percent of schools facing restructuring
made “other” changes, such as creating smaller learning communities or
reopening under a new theme.
By comparison, 27 percent of such schools replaced portions of their staffs, 9
percent contracted with a different education provider, and 5 percent were
taken over by their states—much stiffer remedies available under the law. Just
1 percent of schools closed and re-opened as charter schools, the report says.
TOP OF PAGE
Policies Allow Districts
to Cut Corners With Substitutes
By Vaishali Honawar, Education Week, 9/12/07
Thousands of students in districts struggling to find teachers entered
classrooms in the past few weeks staffed by substitutes. But the bar that
Congress and most states and school systems have set for such educators is much
lower than for regular classroom teachers.
The majority of states don’t require substitutes to have more than a high
school diploma. Nor do they require districts to give them any training before
they set foot in classrooms.
In Prince George’s County, Md., administrators had to rope in 140 subs for the
opening day of classes after the 134,000-student district, located just outside
Washington, failed to fill more than 10 percent of vacancies.
The figure, while high, is by no means unusual. Most big-city districts draw
from large pools of substitutes to make up for teacher absenteeism and
vacancies throughout the school year. The Substitute Teaching Institute at Utah
State University in Logan, Utah, which helps districts develop training
programs, estimates that 8 to 10 percent of teachers in classrooms on any given
day, or 274,000 teachers, are substitutes.
Despite subs’ rampant use, the issue has failed until recently to capture the
attention of federal lawmakers as they discuss reauthorization of the No Child
Left Behind Act. At present, the law only “strongly” recommends that long-term
substitute teachers meet requirements for being “highly qualified”; it does
nothing more to address minimum qualifications for those teachers. A House
draft for the reauthorization proposes grants to high-poverty districts to
provide training for substitutes.
The 5½-year-old law does require that parents of children in a Title I school
be notified if their children have been taught for four weeks or more by a
teacher who is not highly qualified. The law leaves it up to states and
districts to define “long-term substitute.” ("Draft NCLB Bill Intensifies
the Discussion," Sept. 5, 2007).
Jack Jennings, the president of the Center on Education Policy, a research and
advocacy organization in Washington, said the need for subs appears to be
rising as a large number of teachers from the baby boom generation retire and
districts labor to fill jobs. “There has been a lack of publicity on the issue
[of substitute-teacher qualifications]. Policymakers deal with issues brought
to their attention,” said Mr. Jennings, a former aide to House Democrats.
“Otherwise, it just slips by and is not addressed.”
No College Necessary
The federal government’s only requirement of Title I schools that use long-term
substitutes—parental notification—is better than nothing but hasn’t been very
effective, observers say.
While working on a report covering some Southern states in 2003, Barnett Berry,
the president of the Center for Teaching Quality, a teacher-advocacy and
-research group in Hillsborough, N.C., said his group found superintendents in
some rural areas who were having a hard time finding teachers would move substitutes
from school to school to circumvent the requirement.
“It is a loophole that has been used by superintendents, and quite frankly, I
don’t believe that this is necessarily a malintention,” Mr. Berry said.
Geoffrey Smith, the president of the Substitute Teaching Institute, said most
districts consider 21 school days or more to be long-term subbing.
At present, 28 states require nothing more than a high school diploma for subs,
even long-term ones, although Mr. Smith pointed out that only about 10 percent
of those in the current workforce hold that minimal qualification.
About a third are certified, and another third hold at least a bachelor’s
degree, he added.
Still, 90 percent of the substitutes don’t receive any formal training before
taking charge of a classroom. “That’s a big area that needs to be addressed and
worked on,” Mr. Smith said.
A handful of states have, in recent years, taken steps to improve the quality
of their substitute-teacher workforce. For instance, California, which requires
all substitutes to have at least a bachelor’s degree, also demands that its
long-term substitutes go through a teacher-credentialing program at a college
or university. Florida, too, puts substitutes through a training program that
has proved effective at preparing candidates for schools, according to Mr.
Smith.
In the 57,000-student Boston district, substitutes take an online test before
they are granted a job interview. They must have at least a bachelor’s degree,
and undergo a training program designed for the district by the Substitute
Teaching Institute.
Some districts that do not set a high bar on formal education and training
qualifications still say they seek out the most qualified candidates. In
Austin, Texas, the 81,450-student district has 1,700 substitutes on its rolls
at all times, said Kristen Hilsabeck, the substitute-services coordinator.
Although subs don’t have to have a bachelor’s degree, about 75 percent do, she
said, and 30 percent are certified.
Ms. Hilsabeck said the district also gives first preference to those who are
highly qualified in the subjects they are expected to teach, when
administrators first try to fill a position.
In Maryland’s Prince George’s County schools, about 75 percent of substitute
teachers are certified or have at least a bachelor’s degree, said Randy
Thornton, the director of human resources for the district.
When interviewed Sept. 5, Mr. Thornton said the district still had 110
vacancies that were being filled by substitutes. However, he added, his office
was working “round the clock” to recruit teachers.
The county considers a substitute who teaches for 15 consecutive days to be
long-term. Mr. Thornton could not say how many of the vacancies were in Title I
schools—those receiving federal aid for disadvantaged students under that part
of the NCLB law—and thus could trigger the parental-notification clause.
What’s ‘Highly Qualified’?
A big area of concern for teacher advocates is that many substitutes—and
particularly the least qualified—end up in high-poverty schools.
“In well-heeled communities, you will find substitute teachers who are
certified, who want to be a teacher there, and will substitute for several
years to get into the good graces of administrators,” said Mr. Berry of the
Center for Teaching Quality. “In rural and high-needs urban communities, what
you find are people off the street, people who are willing to work for $10 an
hour.”
What further complicates the situation of finding and setting a bar for
substitute teachers is the concern some observers, such as Mr. Berry, feel over
the current definition of “highly qualified” under the NCLB law, which, they
believe, is inadequate.
Under current guidelines, a highly qualified teacher must have a bachelor’s
degree, hold full state certification, and demonstrate competence in the
subject he or she teaches.
“I refuse the claim that highly qualified teachers are really highly
qualified,” Mr. Berry said. “It is nothing more than a minimal qualification.
“Substitute teachers ought to be teachers who know the curriculum, know the
program, know the kids,” he added.
Yet others say that rather than focus on the qualifications for substitutes,
they would prefer it if the law ensured that fewer students were taught by
substitutes.
“Districts need to look at teacher absences … and focus on it,” said Ross
Wiener, the policy director for the Education Trust, a Washington-based group
that promotes educational improvement for poor and minority children. “They
ought to be looking at their absence policy, … attrition rates, and see what
they can do to stabilize staff,” he added.
Mr. Jennings of the Center on Education Policy said lawmakers need to approach
the issue of improving substitute-teacher quality in a “commonsensical” manner.
“There should be at least an investigation of this issue as a problem,” he
said. “We need to look at how many substitute teachers are there, how long they
stay in schools, and are they on the way to fulfilling requirements for
certification.”
TOP OF PAGE
Utahns hope to reform NCLB
Matheson bill would give more leeway to states
By Jennifer Toomer-Cook and Suzanne Struglinski, The Deseret Morning News,
9/11/07
WASHINGTON — As debate starts on Capitol Hill over the next federal education
policy bill, Utah's congressional delegation is probing ways to give power back
to the people who run local schools.
Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, introduced a bill last month that outlines changes
to testing and gives flexibility to teacher requirements. Rep. Chris Cannon,
R-Utah, has a panel of education experts working on recommendations on how to
make the education law better, and Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, who was a high
school teacher for almost 30 years, would rather allow Utah and other states to
opt out of the federal rules and use federal money for education as it sees
fit.
On Monday, the House Education and Labor Committee heard from 43 witnesses as
part of reauthorization work on the No Child Left Behind Act, the Bush
administration's controversial federal education bill.
The law, known as NCLB, seeks to have all children, regardless of race, native
language, disability or income, reading and doing math on grade level by 2014.
It requires annual reports on progress toward the goal of each student and
school. If one student group doesn't meet state test score goals, then the
whole school fails to make adequate yearly progress.
There are other parts to the law, too, like requiring a teacher be highly
qualified to teach, meaning a major in the subject, and sanctions for
low-income schools not meeting state goals. Education officials decry the
regulations as a one-size-fits-all program that doesn't really fit in, say,
rural areas where teachers teach many subjects at once and students with
disabilities.
The state receives about $109 million a year under No Child Left Behind, mostly
for low-income and disadvantaged children.
The Utah Legislature has talked about opting out of the program they largely
view as trampling on states' rights to govern public education. Twice state
lawmakers have examined bills to assert their position, both to hasty response
from the U.S. Department of Education seeking their retreat.
But lawmakers nevertheless passed a law requiring state resources be put toward
state — not federal — education goals.
Now Congress is trying to figure out how to fix the federal law.
"We still feel like the general nature of the bill must be changed to
restore the control of public schools to states and to their state
leaderships," State Superintendent of Public Instruction Patti Harrington
said.
Matheson's bill would make changes Harrington's office has been clamoring for
but been largely denied by the U.S. Department of Education. That includes
letting states give schools credit for test score improvement and use several
tests to determine whether schools make the grade.
"All these provisions really came from what we heard from people in
Utah," Matheson said. "Be it the state Board of Education, or the
teachers or the PTA or the superintendents or the principals, it's been a
rather extensive dialogue since frankly the bill passed in 2001."
The bill would let school districts decide to offer tutoring first, and
transfer options second, for Title I schools repeatedly failing to make
adequate yearly progress toward state achievement goals. Right now, districts
have to offer to bus kids elsewhere first, then give them tutoring a year
later. It also would let students with disabilities take tests on their
intellectual level, instead of age-based grade level, as determined by
individual education plans.
Matheson's bill also touches on "highly qualified teacher"
requirements. It would give teachers rural schools until the 2011-12 school
year to become highly qualified, typically meaning, a degree in the subject
they're teaching, such as math or science, and put up $50 million extra to help
them.
"Yes, we want qualified teachers, yes we want some standards but let's
expand that definition," Matheson said. "Let's acknowledge
experience, let's acknowledge a college minor."
Matheson used the example of a teacher in Utah who may have served a church
mission in a foreign country and can now fluently speak the language, but under
the rules now, because the language was not their college major, they are not
deemed qualified under the law.
"We are not saying we don't want qualified teachers, we're saying let's
have a more reasonable and expanded set of accommodations for how we decide if
someone is qualified," Matheson said.
While Matheson would like to see his bill passed as a stand-alone piece of
legislation, he would also like to see parts of his bill incorporated into the
bill.
The bill also would seek to focus help on the specific group of kids who fail.
So, if only low-income kids in a school fail the math exam, then only the
low-income kids would receive an invitation to transfer to a higher-scoring
school or get supplemental services, like tutoring.
"We very much support the concepts that he's pursuing," Harrington
said.
But Andrea Rorrer, University of Utah assistant professor in educational
leadership and policy and director of the Utah Education Policy Center, says
the proposal contradicts NCLB's philosophy of accountability for student
achievement to every school rather than just low-income schools and student
groups.
"I don't think there's going to be a lot of leverage for proposals ...
that go back to targeting particular students," Rorrer said.
"The catch with a proposition like that is ... say the group not
performing well in mathematics is actually Pacific Islander girls. But not all
of those are eligible for Title I, and not all of those are performing
poorly."
So really, resources aren't any more effectively targeted.
An education advisory committee to SolveEdNow.org was set up to examine NCLB,
available research on what works and what doesn't, and make recommendations to
Cannon on how to improve the federal program.
Cannon created the committee in March specifically to address NCLB
reauthorization and any other education issues they see fit.
Cannon wants to make sure the law — or any changes to it — would not stand in
the way of teachers using new technology in the classroom or other creative or
innovative ways to get through to their students.
"Tests are not helpful in helping kids learn," Cannon said. He added
that teaching to a test does not help students and limits what teachers can do.
Cannon wants to see NCLB fixed so that it that encourages states to experiment
and institute change without having to first check with Washington. He does not
want the federal obstacles to be put in the way of teachers teaching or
students learning.
Meanwhile, Bishop called Matheson's bill "cute," and said if there
was ever a time to use the cliche "rearranging the deck chairs on the
Titanic, this is it."
"All this tinkering does nothing to help out," said Bishop, who sits
on the Education Committee. "The bottom line is that the federal
government should not be telling the states how the states run their schools.
... It is not the details of the bill, it is the actual premise of the
bill."
Bishop said schools should be responsible to "the clientele" — the
parents and kids — not someone in Washington.
"No one is actually helping a kid in the classroom," Bishop said.
"The federal government doesn't make schools better."
TOP OF PAGE
Why I am Fasting: An
Explanation to My Friends
Commentary by Jonathan Kozol, Huffington Post, 9/10/07
This morning, I am entering the 67th day of a partial fast that I began early
in the summer as my personal act of protest at the vicious damage being done to
inner-city children by the federal education law No Child Left Behind, a
racially punitive piece of legislation that Congress will either renew,
abolish, or, as thousands of teachers pray, radically revise in the weeks
immediately ahead.
The poisonous essence of this law lies in the mania of obsessive testing it has
forced upon our nation's schools and, in the case of underfunded, overcrowded
inner-city schools, the miserable drill-and-kill curriculum of robotic
"teaching to the test" it has imposed on teachers, the best of whom
are fleeing from these schools because they know that this debased curriculum
would never have been tolerated in the good suburban schools that they,
themselves, attended.
The justification for this law was the presumptuous and ignorant determination
by the White House that our urban schools are, for the most part, staffed by
mediocre drones who will suddenly become terrific teachers if we place a sword
of terror just above their heads and threaten them with penalties if they do
not pump their students' scores by using proto-military methods of instruction
-- scripted texts and hand-held timers -- that will rescue them from doing any
thinking of their own. There are some mediocre teachers in our schools (there
are mediocre lawyers, mediocre senators, and mediocre presidents as well), but
hopelessly dull and unimaginative teachers do not suddenly turn into classroom
wizards under a regimen that transforms their classrooms into test-prep
factories.
The real effect of No Child Left Behind is to drive away the tens of thousands
of exciting and high-spirited, superbly educated teachers whom our urban
districts struggle to attract into these schools. There are more remarkable
young teachers like this coming into inner-city education than at any time I've
seen in more than 40 years. The challenge isn't to recruit them; it's to keep
them. But 50 percent of the glowing young idealists I have been recruiting from
the nation's most respected colleges and universities are throwing up their
hands and giving up their jobs within three years.
When I ask them why they've grown demoralized, they routinely tell me it's the
feeling of continual anxiety, the sense of being in a kind of "state of
siege," as well as the pressure to conform to teaching methods that drain
every bit of joy out of the hours that their children spend with them in
school.
"I didn't study all these years," a highly principled and effective
first-grade teacher told me -- she had studied literature and anthropology in
college while also having been immersed in education courses -- "in order
to turn black babies into mindless little robots, denied the normal breadth of
learning, all the arts and sciences, all the joy in reading literary classics,
all the spontaneity and power to ask interesting questions, that kids are
getting in the middle-class white systems."
At a moment when black and Hispanic students are more segregated than at any
time since 1968 (in the typical inner-city school I visit, out of an enrollment
that may range from 800 to 4,000 students, there are seldom more than five or
six white children), NCLB adds yet another factor of division between children
of minorities and those in the mainstream of society. In good suburban
classrooms, children master the essential skills not from terror but from
exhilaration, inspired in them by their teachers, in the act of learning in
itself. They're also given critical capacities that they will need if they're
to succeed in college and to function as discerning citizens who have the power
to interrogate reality. They learn to ask the questions that will shape the
nation's future, while inner-city kids are being trained to give prescripted
answers and to acquiesce in their subordinate position in society.
In the wake of the calamitous Supreme Court ruling in the end of June that
prohibited not only state-enforced but even voluntary programs of school
integration, No Child Left Behind -- unless it is dramatically transformed --
will drive an even deeper wedge between two utterly divided sectors of American
society. This, then, is the reason I've been fasting, taking only small amounts
of mostly liquid foods each day, and, when I have stomach pains, other forms of
nourishment at times, a stipulation that my doctor has insisted on in order to
avert the risk of doing longterm damage to my heart. Twenty-nine pounds lighter
than I was when I began, I've been dreaming about big delicious dinners.
Still, I feel an obligation to those many teachers who have told me, not as an
accusation but respectfully, that it was one of my books that diverted them
from easier, more lucrative careers and brought them into teaching in the first
place. Some call me in the evenings, on the verge of tears, to tell me of the
maddening frustration that they feel at being forced to teach in ways that make
them hate themselves.
I don't want them to quit their jobs. I give them whatever good survival
strategies I can. I tell them that the best defense is to be extremely good at
what they do: Deliver the skills! Don't let your classroom grow chaotic! A
teacher who can keep a reasonable sense of calm within her room, particularly
in a school in which disorder has been common, renders herself almost
inexpendable.
At the same time, I always recommend a healthy dose of sly irreverence and a
sense of playful and ironical detachment from the criticisms of those clipboard
bureaucrats who come around to check on them. (Teachers call them "the
curriculum cops" or "NCLB overseers.") I urge them to develop
mischievous and inventive ways to convince these gloomy-looking people that
whatever they are teaching at that moment, no matter how delectably subversive
it may be, is, in fact, directly geared to one of those little chunks of
amputated knowledge, known as "state proficiencies," they are
supposed to be "delivering" at that specific minute of the day.
But I've also felt the obligation to bring this battle to its source in
Washington. I've tried very hard to convince a number of the more enlightened
Democrats who serve on the Senate education panel to introduce amendments that
will drastically reduce our government's reliance upon standardized exams in
judgment of a child, school, or teacher, and attribute greater weight to
factors that are not so simple-mindedly reducible to numbers.
Sophisticated as opposed to low-grade methods of assessment would not only tell
us whether little Oscar or Shaniqua started out their essays with "a topic
sentence" but would also tell us whether they wrote something with the
slightest hint of authenticity and charm or simply stamped out insincere
placebos. (A child gets no credit for originality or authenticity under No
Child Left Behind. Sincerity gets no rewards. Endearing stylistic eccentricity,
needless to say, is not rewarded either. That which can't be measured is not
valued by the technocrats of uniformity who have designed this miserable piece
of legislation.)
On a separate battlefront, I've also tried to win support for an amendment to
the law that will take advantage of one of the loop-holes in the recent
segregation ruling, an opening that Justice Kennedy has offered us by his
insistence that criteria that are not race-specific may be used in order to
advance diversity in public schools.
There is a provision in No Child Left Behind that permits a child in a
chronically low-performing school to transfer to a more successful school. Up
to now, it hasn't worked because there aren't enough successful schools in
inner-city districts to which kids can transfer. The Democrats, I've argued,
have the opportunity to make this option workable if they are sufficiently
audacious to require states to authorize a child's right to transfer across
district lines, and provide financial means to make this possible, so that
children trapped in truly hopeless schools could, if their parents so desired,
go to school in one of the high-spending suburbs that are often a mere
20-minute ride from their front door.
I was surprised that none of the senators with whom I spoke rejected this
proposal as too controversial or politically unthinkable. More than one made
clear that they enjoyed the notion of helping to "improve" a flawed
provision that the White House had included in the law for reasons that most
certainly were not intended to enable inner-city kids to go to beautiful
suburban schools with 16 or 18 children in a room, instead of 29, or 35, or 40,
as in many urban systems.
It was, however, on the testing issue that I received the most explicitly
unqualified and positive response. Several of the senators made a lot of time
available to think aloud about the ways in which to get rid of that sense of
siege so many teachers had described and to be certain that we do not keep on
driving out these talented young people from our schools.
The only member of the Democratic leadership I have been unable to get through
to is the influential chairman of the education panel, Senator Ted Kennedy,
who, one of his colleagues told me flatly, will ultimately "call the
shots" on this decision. I've asked the senator three times if he'll talk
with me. Each time, I have run into a cold stone wall. This has disappointed
me, and startled me, because the senator has been a friend to me in years gone
by and has asked for my ideas on education on a number of occasions in the
decades since I was a youthful teacher and he was a youthful politician.
Senator Kennedy is, of course, a very busy man and has many other issues of
importance he must deal with. But it's also possible, aides to other senators
suggest, that he does not wish to contemplate dramatic changes in the law
because he co-sponsored the initial bill in a deal with the Republicans. He is
also renowned as a gifted builder of consensus in the legislative process.
Lending his support to either of the two proposals I have made would almost
surely guarantee a knockdown battle with conservative Republicans and, perhaps,
with some of the Democratic neoliberals as well.
Still, Senator Kennedy has displayed a genuine nobility of vision in defense of
elemental fair play for low-income children many times before. Is it possible
that he may rise to the occasion once again? If he does, I may finally listen
to the worries of my friends and decide it's time to bring this episode of
fasting to an end. If not, I'll keep slogging on. It's a tiny price to pay
compared to what so many of our children and their teachers have to go through
every single day.
TOP OF PAGE
Business Leaders Urge U.S.
House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor to Maintain Strong
Accountability in Reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act
Business Wire Release, 9/10/07
WASHINGTON - John J. Castellani, President of the Business Roundtable,
expressed business leaders’ support for reauthorizing a strengthened No Child
Left Behind Act and urged Congress to maintain the law’s accountability
measures to ensure that the nation meets the goal of all students being able to
read and do math on grade level by 2014. Mr. Castellani testified today before
the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor on behalf of
the Business Coalition for Student Achievement (BCSA), a coalition that
represents business leaders from every sector of the economy.
Mr. Castellani’s testimony addressed the Committee’s staff discussion draft for
reauthorization of Title I of the law. Along with calling for continued
accountability for achievement in reading and math, Mr. Castellani urged that
the reauthorization legislation maintain a transparent accountability system
and funding for and access to public school choice and supplemental educational
services.
“As employers, we understand the important role the U.S. business community
must play in ensuring that the American education system prepares our youth to
meet the challenges of higher education and the workplace. It is for this
reason BCSA has been a staunch supporter of education reform and continues to
stand firmly behind the principles underlying the No Child Left Behind Act,”
said Castellani.
“The fact is that too many students – many from economically disadvantaged
backgrounds – are not getting a high-quality education and are moving through
our schools without the basic skills necessary to be successful and productive
citizens,” said Arthur Rothkopf, senior vice president for the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce.
The BCSA believes that improving the performance of the K-12 education system
in the United States is necessary to provide a strong foundation for both U.S.
competitiveness and for individuals to succeed in our rapidly changing world.
BCSA is also part of a campaign – NCLB Works! – supported by business,
education, community and civil rights groups working to strengthen and
reauthorize the Act.
Mr. Castellani’s testimony comes less than one week after BCSA hosted NCLB:
Moving Forward, an event highlighting the importance of the No Child Left
Behind Act that included U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, Arthur
F. Ryan, chairman and CEO of Prudential Financial, Inc. and co-chair of BCSA,
Representative George Miller, chairman of the House Education and Labor
Committee and Representative Howard P. "Buck" McKeon, Senior
Republican member of the Committee.
TOP OF PAGE
Teachers attack education
law
Renewal of No Child Left Behind will only worsen situation, union officials say
By Neil Gonzales, San Mateo County Times Staff Writer, 9/11/07
BURLINGAME — The state's largest teachers' union on Monday launched a campaign
decrying the 5-year-old No Child Left Behind Act as a failure and criticizing a
proposal to renew the plan as only making the situation worse.
NCLB is "hurting our students, our schools and our teachers,"
California Teachers Association President David Sanchez said during a news
conference at the association's headquarters.
He said proposed changes to the law by U.S. Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez, and
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, would do "nothing to improve
student learning and would place even more undue emphasis on test scores,
createnew sanctions for struggling schools (and) make it harder to attract and
retain teachers."
The CTA's campaign launch came the same day as congressional debate began over
reauthorizing the law.
The association is mobilizing teachers to call on Capitol Hill leaders to vote
down the law's reauthorization and is placing advertisements on the Web
denouncing NCLB and the proposed changes, CTA spokeswoman Sandra Jackson said.
"The CTA will be doing what we need to do to stop reauthorization as it
currently is written," Jackson said. She did not immediately estimate the
campaign's cost to the union, describing it as a grass roots effort.
A key CTA concern is a proposal for giving teachers additional pay based partly
on how well their students improve.
Tying student scores to teacher pay "is a bad idea," said Bonnie
Shatun, CTA board member and educator in the Burbank Unified School District.
This proposal will "drive teachers out of the profession and discourage
others to become teachers" when the state needs 100,000 new instructors in
the next 10 years, she said.
CTA leaders also said test scores don't fairly measure student achievement and
cannot be used to accurately evaluate and pay teachers.
But Miller said in a statement that the "proposal for performance pay (is)
based on several fair and proven factors."
The proposal "would consider achievement gains along with other measures,
like principal and master teacher evaluations," Miller said.
Miller said that contrary to what CTA implies about him, he does support
class-size reduction, professional development and mentoring programs for
teachers.
Such measures "are included in the bipartisan discussion draft of NCLB
reauthorization legislation that we have circulated," he said.
Miller has also recommended adding elements to help measure student achievement
such as high-school graduation rates and test results of other subjects besides
language arts and math.
"Throughout our schools and communities, there is a concern that the No
Child Left Behind law is not fair, not flexible and not adequately
funded," he added. "I share this concern."
In a brief statement, Pelosi said she agrees with Miller and will look to his
leadership on improving NCLB.
In 2001, Congress gave broad bipartisan support to NCLB, and President Bush
signed the act into law January 2002.
A major provision requires schools to test students every year in math and
language arts from third to eighth grades. Schools that fall short of federal
benchmarks such as making "adequate yearly progress" face severe
sanctions including administrative changes and campus closure.
The law also seeks to have all students reading and doing math at or above
grade level by 2014.
Federal education officials maintain that the law is working overall.
According to a report by the U.S. Department of Education, the reading skills
of 9-year-olds improved more between 1999 and 2004 than in the previous 28
years combined.
The report also said the achievement gaps in reading and math between
African-American and Latino 9-year-olds and their white counterparts have
narrowed "to all-time lows."
The president's 2007-08 budget proposed increasing total funding for NCLB by
$1.2 billion to $24.5 billion — a 41 percent increase since 2001, according to
the Education Department.
But department officials acknowledge changes to the law are needed in certain
areas.
Their report said a reauthorized law would include science in determining
school accountability. A renewed NCLB would also require states to develop
standards for two years of English and math that prepare high-school graduates
to succeed in college or the workplace, the report said.
Other possible changes include increased funding for high schools serving
low-income children and support for campuses undergoing reorganization to open
as charter schools, the report said.
The CTA, which represents 340,000 educators, contends that NCLB has been
underfunded by $56 billion nationwide and more than $7 billion in California.
CTA leaders also say the law has not sufficiently narrowed the achievement gap
among students of different races.
A 2006 study by the Harvard Civil Rights Project found that the law has
shortchanged schools that serve mostly disadvantaged, minority students with
its overemphasis on sanctions rather than assistance, said Mignon Jackson, CTA
board member and teacher in the Los Angeles district.
The CTA said NCLB "should restore and enhance the federal class-size reduction
program with priority given to our schools of greatest need. Research shows
that smaller class sizes improve student learning and significantly close the
achievement gap."
NCLB should also provide resources for quality teacher training, mentors for
new educators and programs that encourage family involvement in schools, the
CTA said.
TOP OF PAGE
Teachers and Rights Groups
Oppose Education Measure
By Diana Jean Schemo
WASHINGTON — The draft House bill to renew the federal No Child Left Behind law
came under sharp attack on Monday from civil rights groups and the nation’s
largest teachers unions, the latest sign of how difficult it may be for
Congress to pass the law this fall.
At a marathon hearing of the House Education Committee, legislators heard from
an array of civil rights groups, including the Citizens’ Commission on Civil
Rights, the National Urban League, the Center for American Progress and Achieve
Inc., a group that works with states to raise academic standards.
All protested that a proposal in the bill for a pilot program that would allow
districts to devise their own measures of student progress, rather than using
statewide tests, would gut the law’s intent of demanding that schools teach all
children, regardless of poverty, race or other factors, to the same standard.
Dianne M. Piché, executive director of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil
Rights, said the bill had “the potential to set back accountability by years,
if not decades,” and would lead to lower standards for children in urban and
high poverty schools.
“It strikes me as not unlike allowing my teenage son and his friends to score
their own driver’s license tests,” Ms. Piché said, adding, “We’ll have one set
of standards for the Bronx and one for Westchester County, one for Baltimore
and one for Bethesda.”
Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, who is chairman of the
committee, countered that district tests would have to be approved by the
federal Education Department, which he said would safeguard against any
watering down of standards.
The law, a signature initiative of the Bush administration that passed in 2001
with bipartisan support, requires schools to test all students annually in
reading and math in grades three to eight and to show all students progressing
toward 100 percent proficiency regardless of background. Schools in high
poverty areas that fail to show sufficient gains face potentially harsh
penalties, including possible closing.
The proposals for changing the law, which has so far tagged 10,000 high poverty
schools for state and district intervention, move away from relying solely on
test scores in math and reading as a gauge of school progress. They would allow
schools to include test results in other subjects, as well as indicators like
attendance, promotion, performance in advanced placement courses and graduation
rates to demonstrate academic strength.
The draft has also come under criticism from Education Secretary Margaret
Spellings and Congressional Republicans.
Mr. Miller said he was not discouraged by the opposition, and indeed, many
witnesses praised the proposals as offering much-needed flexibility to the law.
“I think we’re doing well,” Mr. Miller said after the hearing. “It’s not easy,
but that’s not a surprise.”
Leaders of the teachers’ unions — Reg Weaver, president of the National
Education Association, and Toni Cortese, executive vice president of the
American Federation of Teachers — told the committee that they would not
support the bill in its current form and that they objected to a proposal to
count student test scores in granting pay bonuses.
Mr. Weaver’s testimony produced the sharpest exchange of the day, when Mr.
Miller accused the unions of reneging on an earlier agreement to support the
measure when it was incorporated into a 2005 bill proposed by Democrats and
that was never adopted by Congress, which was then controlled by Republicans.
But Mr. Weaver and Ms. Cortese disputed that account, saying that while they
supported the 2005 bill over all, they had expressed concerns about any
provisions that would mandate test scores be included in determining pay.
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Draft Retains Quality
Rules for Teachers
By David J. Hoff and Bess Keller, Education Week, 9/12/07
The federal government would invest billions in improving the nation’s teaching
corps by offering professional development to teachers, recruiting new ones,
and providing incentives to draw good teachers to the schools that need them
the most, under the latest House proposal for reauthorizing the No Child Left
Behind Act.
The draft proposal also would keep intact most of the current NCLB law’s
reporting requirements on whether teachers are “highly qualified” and add new
requirements that states identify the districts and schools most in need of
highly qualified teachers.
U.S. Reps. George Miller, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Education and
Labor Committee, and Howard P. “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif., the panel’s senior
Republican, released the “discussion draft” on Sept. 6, about a week after they
unveiled a preliminary proposal to reauthorize the NCLB law’s core Title I
program. ("Draft NCLB Bill Intensifies the Discussion," Sept. 5,
2007.)
The additional draft provisions address a myriad of programs in the rest of the
5½-year-old law, including teacher quality and professional development,
Reading First, services for English-language learners, and impact aid.
The latest draft would include several new efforts to attract new teachers into
the profession, offer them competitive salaries, and give them incentives to
work in schools with the lowest student achievement.
Salary Supplements
Rep. Miller first proposed the programs in a bill he introduced in May with the
support of both major teachers’ unions and several other education groups. U.S.
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., the chairman of the Health, Education, Labor,
and Pensions Committee, introduced a companion bill in the Senate on the same
day.
“My bill addresses this need by helping school districts to pay more
competitive salaries and by offering upfront tuition assistance to talented
undergraduates committed to a career in education, to established teachers
working in fields like math and science, where the teacher shortage is most acute,
and to retirees with math and science expertise who would like to join the
ranks of our nation’s teachers,” Rep. Miller said in a statement when he
introduced the bill, called the Teacher Excellence for All Children—or
TEACH—Act.
Under the draft provisions released Sept. 6, large portions of the TEACH Act
would be added to Title II of the NCLB law, which now focuses on
teacher-quality issues.
The new section would offer bonuses of up to $12,500 for outstanding teachers
who transfer to schools with high poverty and low achievement and stay there
for four years. It would give similar bonuses of up to $15,000 for principals
who move to such schools.
The bill also would supplement the salaries of so-called master teachers with
up to $10,000 a year if they help new teachers transition into their new jobs.
Such teachers would be eligible for another $4,000 a year in performance pay
based on students’ test-score and classroom observations by other teachers and
administrators.
Another section would create a pilot project on performance pay for teachers.
The project would be based on the results of a study required under the law
that examines a correlation between teachers’ certification and student
performance.
“The TEACH Act creates common-sense incentives to attract qualified individuals
to the teaching profession and to keep teachers in the classroom,” Reg Weaver,
the president of the National Education Association, said in a statement in May
when Rep. Miller and Sen. Kennedy introduced the bill, elements of which have
now been incorporated into the proposed NCLB measure.
The new NCLB proposal also would keep current rules requiring all Title I
schools to provide teachers deemed highly qualified, but it would add new
requirements for states to report on the quality of their teaching corps.
The current law calls for states to ensure that children in high-poverty
schools are not disproportionately taught by teachers who don’t meet the highly
qualified standard or are inexperienced. States are required, for instance, to
report on the proportion of classes in both high-poverty schools and
low-poverty schools that are taught by highly qualified teachers.
The draft would require states for the first time to pinpoint districts with
the most severe teacher needs, publicly reporting, for instance, the number of
first-year teachers and average teacher turnover within each district. States
would be further required to come up with a plan describing how Title II money
would be used to address those problems. Local districts, too, would need to
identify schools that are hard to staff.
Addressing the teacher pipeline for urban schools, the draft would provide
grants for high-need districts to set up programs that certify teachers after a
year of apprentice teaching and coursework in exchange for five years of
teaching in those districts.
Reading First, ELLs
The draft also would reauthorize the Reading First program, but it would
require the Education Department to change the way it reviews states’ plans
under the $1 billion-a-year program. The department would be required to
provide guidance to the committees that review state applications, explaining
the criteria committee members should use.
Over the past year, the department’s inspector general issued several reports
on the implementation of Reading First, saying in one that department officials
set up review panels that favored specific particular teaching methodologies
and may have violated a federal prohibition on federal officials’ imposing
curricular decisions on states and districts. ("Scathing Report Casts
Cloud Over ‘Reading First’," Oct. 4, 2006.)
The draft stipulates that the Education Department would develop guidance to
help federal employees comply with federal prohibitions against directing
curriculum choices and provide technical assistance for the Reading First
program that is “balanced in presenting eligible products or services and shall
not in any way endorse or appear to endorse any particular product or service
that might be purchased” by states or districts.
The draft also makes changes to the programs serving English-language learners.
The proposal for Title I outlines changes to the ways ELL students are assessed
under the law, but the new draft suggests changes to the programs under Title
III.
The draft would require the Education Department to develop a method for
identifying English-language learners across the nation that could be used to
distribute funds to the states for ELL students. The addition would address
recommendations contained in a report by the Government Accountability Office
about problems in the accuracy of data sources used to give out funds for ELLs.
The December 2006 report by the watchdog arm of Congress pointed out problems
with the two allowable sources for data—the U.S. Census Bureau and the states
themselves—and recommended that the Education Department clarify instructions
to the states on how to collect data on ELLs and also develop a method for
determining if the data from either source were accurate.
The discussion draft contains a couple of new requirements for what states
would have to include in their plans submitted to the Education Department
concerning programs for English-language learners. States would need to
describe how they would ensure that such children have “access to the full
curriculum in a manner that is understandable to and appropriately addresses
the linguistic needs of such children.” Also, states would have to describe how
they would ensure that all teachers are fluent in English and any other
language used for instruction.
The discussion draft gives a nod to bilingual education by spelling out that
the development of “instructional programs that promote academic proficiency in
more than one language” are authorized for funding.
Rep. Miller said he plans to bring an NCLB bill before the House Education and
Labor Committee for consideration this month, with the hope of winning passage
of such a bill from the House by the end of the year.
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The good and bad of NCLB
Washington Times Editorial, 9/13/07
As Congress debates the complexities of reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind
Act, a proposal from Rep. George Miller, California Democrat, runs the risk of
watering down the intent and spirit of the program, which both Republicans and
Democrats agree should be renewed before its expiration Sept. 30.
While certainly not without serious shortcomings, NCLB maintains an admirable
goal of bringing all K-12 students to proficiency in math and reading by 2014.
Unfortunately, a proposal from Mr. Miller and his fellow Democrats would muddy
the waters of these standardized measures of student progress by throwing
non-academic factors into the mix.
Including such non-academic factors as graduation rates and the availability of
Advanced Placement courses, while undoubtedly important elements of a child's
education, convolutes the program's premise: ensuring our children are literate
and can perform basic math computations.
The proposal from Mr. Miller, chairman of the House education panel, would also
result in many failing schools escaping needed overhaul and monitoring. Instead
of forcing them to address academic failings, it gives them the option of
garnishing their lack of substance with extracurricular window dressings to eke
past federal standards.
Press reports indicate Rep. Carol McCarthy, New York Democrat, hopes to insert
into NCLB a laughable proposal — though a somber waste of taxpayer money if
enacted — that would divert taxpayer dollars for state grants to schools that
try to stop bullying on their campuses. Not only is this idea an absurd
expansion of the nanny state that Democrats love to peddle, it also takes
responsibility away from parents, not government bureaucrats, who should be the
ones instilling the values of cooperation and civility in their children.
Members on both sides of the aisle considering the revamping of NCLB would do
well to look at the success of D.C., where a voucher program has allowed
thousands of students to escape failing public schools for private or charter
schools under grants and laws authorized by Congress. Studies have indicated
parents are happy with the program, their children are performing better and
student bodies are more diverse and integrated because of it.
A bill introduced by Rep. Buck McKeon of California, the ranking Republican on
the House education panel, would give children in low-performing schools up to
$4,000 to leave a failing school and enroll in a private school of their
choice. The measure rightfully has been endorsed by Education Secretary
Margaret Spellings.
Amid all the din surrounding NCLB, we urge lawmakers to select the best of the
proposals and shun the frivolous and superfluous. Our children deserve it.
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No Question Left Behind
Monsters in the law
By Chester E. Finn Jr., senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and
president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, National Review Online, 9/12/07
With every passing week, the 110th Congress looks less likely to reauthorize
the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the fate of which will therefore hinge on
the 2008 election. This contentious law cannot be revamped absent a fairly
broad and bipartisan consensus. George Miller and Nancy Pelosi could
conceivably bring a bill before the House and possibly ram it through on a
near-straight party-line vote (though such a move would provoke more Democratic
defections than GOP supporters), but it would come unstuck in the Senate, where
it’s essential nowadays to have 60 firm votes for anything controversial. Which
this would surely be.
The truth is, despite all the fuss and feathers about NCLB, there’s little
agreement on exactly what ails or what might cure it — which is not to say
there’s a shortage of advice. A five-foot shelf of books, studies, reports,
commission recommendations, etc. is rapidly accumulating. (I plead guilty to
having helped contribute a few inches.) Its very amplitude attests not only to
the length and complexity of the law, but also to the disputed nature of what,
exactly, is awry in NCLB 1.0 and what should be the essential attributes of
version 2.0. Even more important, underlying all the technical specifics are
five immense dilemmas that go to the heart of the matter.
- Is NCLB’s grand goal itself naïve and unrealistic? Politicians pledge that no
child will be left behind, yet I don’t know a single educator who seriously
thinks 100 percent of American children can become “proficient” (according to
any reasonable definition of that term) by 2014 in reading and math. Exemptions
have already been made for seriously disabled youngsters. In truth, raising
American kids from their current proficiency level of some 30 percent to 70 or
80 percent would be a remarkable, nation-changing achievement, yet I can’t
imagine a lawmaker conceding this. The first thing hurled back at him would be
“which 20 percent of the kids don’t matter to you?”
- Is the program upside down? My Fordham colleagues and I think NCLB inverted a
fundamental design principle: Congress opted to be tight with regard to means
and loose with regard to ends. It trusts every state to set its own standards,
but micromanages measurement systems and sets rigid sequences for school and
district interventions. It would be far better to promulgate a single national
standard and assessment system, and then to trust states, districts, and
educators to devise their own means of getting there on their own timetables.
But half of Congress will recoil in horror from the freedom and flexibility
implied therein while the other half will be put off by uniform standards.
- Is the governmental architecture usable for this purpose? In LBJ’s day, it
made sense for Uncle Sam to distribute his new education dollars via the
traditional structures of state education departments and local school systems.
Four decades later, however, the main focus of federal policy is altering the
behavior and performance of those very institutions in ways they don’t want to
be altered. It’s beyond imagining that the old, multi-tiered architecture can
satisfactorily handle the new challenge of making it change its ways. Yet
nobody is thinking creatively about alternative structures by which NCLB’s
goals might more effectively be pursued.
- Can Washington successfully pull off anything as complex and ambitious as
NCLB in so vast and loosely coupled a system as American K–12 education, one in
which millions of “street-level bureaucrats” can ignore, veto, or undermine the
plans of distant lawmakers and regulators? I’m no great fan of local control of
schools but I’m even less a fan of bureaucratic over-reaching.
- Do the likely benefits exceed the ever clearer costs? Boosting skill levels
and closing learning gaps are praiseworthy societal goals. But even if we were
surer that NCLB would attain them, plenty of people — parents, teachers,
lawmakers, and interest groups — are alarmed by the price. I don’t refer
primarily to dollars. (They’re in dispute, too, with most Democrats wrongly
insisting that they’re insufficient.) I refer to things like a narrowing
curriculum that sacrifices history, art, and literature on the altar of reading
and math skills; to schools that spend ever more of the year prepping kids to
pass tests; to gifted pupils being neglected so as to pull low achievers over
the bar; and to the homogenizing of schools — including charter schools — that
crave the freedom to be different and offer parents distinctive choices.
So long as these monster questions lack agreed-upon answers, I don’t see much
hope for an NCLB consensus, and I don’t see much hope for NCLB 2.0 anytime
soon.
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A Failed Reform
Let’s look closer to home
By Dan Lips, Education Analyst at the Heritage Foundation, National Review
Online, 9/14/07
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently offered a preview of Democrats’ plans for
No Child Left Behind reauthorization: “So different will this bill be from the
original No Child Left Behind, we’re thinking of changing its name.”
The House Education and Labor Committee recently released draft language of a
new version of NCLB that begins to make good on the Speaker’s promise. Chairman
George Miller’s (D., Calif.) committee draft plan hasn’t changed the law’s name
(yet), but it does propose fundamental policy changes.
The new plan eases up testing requirements, allows many public schools to
escape real school-reform requirements, and further limits school-choice
options for parents. The plan would gut the most conservative elements of NCLB.
In their place, it offers the typical liberal remedies in education policy —
new programs, more regulations, and, of course, big spending increases.
For Republican backers of NCLB, the draft language should come as a harsh
wake-up call. After five years, the Bush administration’s signature law has
failed to accomplish what its supporters intended. The law’s tough
accountability requirements have forced states to focus on testing. But many
states have lowered standards to make tests easier to pass, making public
schools actually less accountable to parents for results. Only a slim
percentage of eligible children trapped in failing schools have benefited from
after-school tutoring or public school choice. The public-school establishment
has once again proven adept at resisting structural reforms.
With liberals now turning the page to a new chapter in federal education
policy, forward thinking conservatives should return to their long-held
principles for education policy. It’s a direction that should appeal to parents
and taxpayers.
The first principle is restoring federalism. For example, conservatives on
Capitol Hill — led by Senators Jim DeMint (R., S.C.) and John Cornyn (R., Tex.)
— have proposed reforming NCLB to restore state and local control in education.
Under their A-PLUS Act, states could choose to opt-out of No Child Left Behind
and enter into a performance agreement with the federal government. The
agreement would free participating states from most federal rules, regulations,
and bureaucracy if they establish academic goals and maintain a transparent and
consistent testing system to track student performance. This approach would
ensure that public schools are accountable to parents and taxpayers for
results, not federal bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.
The second principle is individual choice and personal responsibility. NCLB has
not lived up to the promise of expanded school choice because it depends on the
education establishment to implement it. Conservatives should empower parents
more directly with the ability to give their children a quality education by
looking to areas of federal policy outside of the Department of Education. One
option would be to expand education savings accounts (ESAs) options. Federal
law already offers families multiple tax-free savings options for K-12 and higher
education. Strengthening ESA options for families could bring the forces of
consumer choice and personal ownership to education in the same way that HSAs
and IRAs are transforming health care and retirement policy.
Both of these reforms should appeal to parents and taxpayers concerned about
the state of public education.
Restoring federalism in American education would have many common-sense
benefits. Key decisions about education would be made by local stakeholders —
closer to the parents and students affected. Funds currently spent on overhead
costs, the federal bureaucracy, and regulatory compliance could instead be
spent in the classroom. This approach would also pave the way for further
advances for school choice, since the biggest victories for vouchers and
charter schools have come at the state level.
Strengthening individual choice and ownership by expanding ESAs should also
appeal to parents and taxpayers. Helping families save for college and pay for
K-12 education services (such as, private school tuition, tutoring, summer
school, or home education) will ensure that more children receive a quality
education that prepares them to succeed in life.
Policymakers face a test in the upcoming No Child Left Behind reauthorization
debate: Will they finally recognize the folly of trusting the federal
government to improve America’s schools and offer a bold alternative to the
liberal, big government approach? Those hoping to pass this test would be wise
to study the old conservative principles of limited government, federalism, and
parental choice.
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