Santa Fe/ Superintendent Joel Boyd: New Plan to Address Proficiency in District Schools

 

By Robert Nott

The New Mexican

September 8, 2012

 

Santa Fe Public Schools Superintendent Joel Boyd told the school board Saturday that the district plans to gauge leadership and academic proficiency of all the schools, and then give the schools more autonomy, more resources or possibly both in an effort to create a systematic strategy for improving schools.

 

During a seven-hour board retreat held at Santa Fe High School Saturday, Boyd also shared with the board some of his own key findings regarding the district since taking office some 40 days ago.

• He said the district is not doing enough to engage parents and the community at large, and noted that many parents and school communities believe that the district does not treat them all equally.
• He also said the district is failing to use accessible data - or has failed to even compile data - to address problems and move the district forward.

"High-performance work has been happening in pockets," he told the board, but this work is often being performed "by people who in some ways have found a way to work around the system."

 

Within a month or so, he and his team plan to designate each school as one of three in-need models:

• transformational, meaning they need support, guidance and some input on decision-making;
• acceleration, meaning they can use some help moving up the academic ladder; and
• innovation, meaning they are already meeting mid-to-high level expectations and can benefit from more autonomy.

Boyd said it is too early in the process to say more about his plan, and acknowledged that these school designations may not necessarily follow the state's new A-F grading system ratings.

 

Not all of the necessary resources to help schools will require financing, he said, but the district will continue to look for ways to free up operational funds and leverage federal money to address the issue.

 

This news followed about four hours of discussion about building and maintaining a strong superintendent/school board relationship in the retreat moderated by Joseph Wise, a former school superintendent and the co-founder of Atlantic Research Partners, Inc., a Florida-based institute that provides support services to educators. Wise is also one of six members of Boyd's transition team charged with helping him create a 100-day entry plan.

 

Much of Saturday's time was taken up with lengthy discourse about communication between both individual board members and board members and the superintendent. Boyd stressed that he expects the board to support his policy recommendations during board meetings, given they will have advance time to review pertinent materials and express any concerns or doubts to him before, as he put it, "We get out there on television."

 

He said he realized he would not always garner a unanimous 5-0 vote of support on all issues - a point that was emphasized by board member Barbara Gudwin, who cautioned Boyd that he would not always expect full backing when it comes to board votes.

 

But he said it is "offensive to staff" when board members extensively question report findings or operational decisions that may not be immediately within board jurisdiction and he noted that such actions often lead to repetitious conversation and lengthy board meetings.

 

Board member Steven Carrillo probably put it best when he said, "We don't micro-manage. We mico-inquire."

 

Boyd also raised the issue of the need for confidentiality at times, and urged the board members to not give off the perception that they, and not he, are the bosses of district personnel. The board's responsibilities primarily rest with hiring a superintendent, approving the budget, and making policy, though they are expected to respond to their constituents' concerns and queries.

 

Wise said boards working within a "comfort" zone, unwilling to encourage and entertain disagreement and debate, often fail both a superintendent and a school community. He said based on his experience dealing with Santa Fe's five board members - known as one of them put it, for "spirited discussion" - they have the making of a great board.

 

Gudwin noted that two of the board members' tenures are up come next March and that new board members may well be sitting in those seats. Wise said the best thing the district can do is hold a similar retreat almost immediately to ensure that those members are on board with both Boyd and the remaining members.

 

Boyd said the retreat was designed to make sure that he and the board are on the same page as he takes on the task of turning the district's schools around.

 

"I think highly of all five of them, and I hope they think highly of me," he said.

 

The retreat was open to the public, although only one person - educator/parent Yvette Martinez - showed up to speak at the public forum. She thanked the assembly for putting time into the process of building a relationship but urged immediate intervention in the schools to help teachers and parents. She also asked the board to not close down any more small schools, as it has done in the past.

 

Boyd noted later that there is already a growing misperception that he is for closing small schools and said there is no truth to the rumor that he or the board plans to close either Tesuque Elementary School, which is dealing with declining enrollment, or Atalaya Elementary School, which was recently approved for infrastructure improvements.

 

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Farmington/ State's 1st Virtual Academy Opens Amid Questions

 

By Robert Nott

The New Mexican

September 8, 2012

            

Although she is enrolled in a public school, Monica Jackson may not go any farther than her living room to take classes in history, science and math this school year. And she may decide to go to school on Thanksgiving - when most schools are closed - and take a weekday off instead.

 

Jackson, who just relocated from Belen to Farmington, is a virtual student in the newly opened New Mexico Virtual Academy, a statewide public charter school authorized by the Farmington Municipal School District that offers online individualized education courses to 500 students in grades six through 11.

• The school, the first full-fledged charter virtual school in the state, started classes in August and will add grade 12 next year.

"I love it; I can get ahead of my classes," Jackson said by phone recently. "I can pick my own schedule, my own electives. I can pick which class I want to go to. I can start school at noon if I want. It's not centered around everyone; it's not centered around the whole class or the whole school. It's centered around me."

 

Jackson said she has been a straight-A student. Her mother, Deborah Jackson, doesn't want to call her daughter an overachiever, but said of her, "She was looking for something that would challenge her more, something more technological. I worked on both my master's degree and doctorate online, and she watched that and developed an interest in trying to do that too. It's online - students are more engaged. I don't think brick and mortar [schools] will go out of business. But brick and mortar is not the best option for every student."

 

Nor is online the best option for every student, Deborah Jackson is quick to emphasize. And yet, as educators stress utilizing technology to engage students via iPads, laptop computers, and such interactive Internet sites as the Khan Academy, more students are moving toward an entire online curriculum.

• A Center for Educational Reform study notes that about a quarter of a million students nationwide were enrolled full time in virtual academies in the 2010-11 school year.
• The International Association for K-12 Online Learning suggests that online charter schools have increased in number from about 50 in 2000 to more than 200 in 2011.

Some New Mexicans want a second virtual charter school in the state. Two weeks ago, members of the founding board of New Mexico Connections Virtual School appeared before the state's Public Education Commission - which authorizes state-chartered schools for New Mexico - to ask for the OK to open their school for the 2013-14 year. Its initial operating budget is in the $2.4 million neighborhood; it aims to attract 500 students its first year and, by the fifth year, some 2,000 students.

 

Among that school's supporters is Sen. Mark Boitano, R-Albuquerque, who helped spearhead the state's charter-school law in 1999 (and who is stepping down from office at the end of his term this year). He told the commission members that he was initially skeptical of the notion of virtual schools, but changed his mind after researching and discovering satisfactory answers to his biggest concerns: accountability, leadership and the unorthodox method of delivering instruction.

 

Virtual schools, he told the committee, are ideal for mobile students, rural residents, kids who are victims of bullies, students engaged in sports competitions that require them to travel a lot, advanced students and slow-learning students. In short, he painted a portrait of just about every type of student in the school system.

 

Speaking by phone last week, the senator acknowledged that technology is moving so quickly these days that some people may either be afraid of the notion of virtual schooling or simply not understand its potential. "Traditionally, education occurs in a bricks-and-mortar setting," he said. "In a virtual school, education occurs in a virtual environment. You may have a student with a laptop who may be in a conference room at Intel with other students, learning at home, learning at a coffee shop - it's learning in a mobile and virtual classroom. What I love about virtual schooling is students get to learn at their own pace."

 

For now, such schools are relying on national organizations to provide curriculum and operational support.

• In Farmington, the New Mexico Virtual Academy relies on the International Association for K-12 Online Learning. That company's senior vice president of school services, Mary Gifford, said by phone Thursday that
• the majority of that academy's students reside in the Albuquerque region; 26 are from the Santa Fe area. She said
• the school has hired teachers who live in the areas where the students come from to ensure some face-to-face contact during the school year.
• The school is providing desktop computers to all of its students, although she's sure many have their own computer as well. It is
• also sending four to six boxes of materials to each student - microscopes for seventh-grade science students and hardbound world history textbooks to eighth-grade history students, for example. "We believe public schools need to provide what is necessary - the teacher, the computer, the materials, the textbooks," she said.

In the case of the proposed New Mexico Connections, Boitano said the charter includes a provision that the school would provide computers at the five-year mark of its existence. Until then, he said, "That's something parents and students need to figure out."

 

Updating state laws

In 2007, under then-Gov. Bill Richardson and Veronica Garcia, his secretary of education, the state formed the New Mexico Cyber Academy Plan to give all New Mexico students the chance to enroll in online e-learning courses. That plan did not, however, give the state the right to authorize virtual learning academies and schools - which is something the Public Education Commission is trying to figure out.

 

At a recent Legislative Education Study Committee meeting, Secretary of Education-designate Hanna Skandera told the assembly that the state has to decide whether its laws are up to date. In late August, department spokesman Larry Behrens said via email, "If there is one thing that is abundantly clear in this issue it's that New Mexico's laws on this subject are not that up-to-date. The laws are not specific and they need to be."

 

A report commissioned by and presented to the committee in July noted that in 2009, the commission fielded and denied three applications from virtual charter schools. Two of those applicants appealed those denials to the secretary of education, who stood by the commission's original decision. Both of those applicants then took their case to District Court. One, the Sen. Dennis Chavez Academy, is still awaiting a decision. The other, Sandia Academy, lost its court appeal.

 

According to that report, the department's charter school counsel advised at that time that New Mexico law stipulates schools must be of the "brick-and-mortar" variety in a set place tied to attendance and walk zones, and therefore, "the PEC could not legally authorize charter schools." Several commissioners cited this quote when discussing New Mexico Connection's 84-page application, though one commissioner, Millie Pogna of Albuquerque, quite logically asked her colleagues why the commission was even considering virtual-school applications if it does not have the authority to approve them.

 

The commission will make its final decisions on all 14 of the proposed state charters in mid-September. While Chairman Andrew Garrison is reluctant to discuss specifics of New Mexico Connections until then, he did note in an interview last week, "The Cyber Academy Plan was created to address some oversight issues [for virtual schools], but they were not addressed. That's where the state needs to catch up, so instead of saying 'no' to virtual education, we can figure out how to best accept it and do the right thing in terms of oversight."

 

He, and others, still have a lot of questions.

• How will physical education classes be conducted online? Boitano, Gifford and student Jackson all maintain that alternative guidelines can be established in which kids study about health and nutrition online and then take part in some community sports activities near the student's home that is monitored by an authority figure.
• Attendance? Everyone agrees that both parents and teachers can and will keep close track of not just how much computer time each student logs, but how much effort that student is giving to each class.

"Let's say I am a science teacher and I notice that Johnny is not doing his assignments," Gifford said. "It turns out Johnny logged into the biology lesson and went to the landing page and checked out the syllabus and then went to Lesson 1 but never moved past that. I put in a call to him and his parents. Or maybe Johnny is completing every quiz and unit assessment but failing science class because he spends 22 seconds on each assessment before moving on. I will put in a call to the parents." Such students will be required to check in personally for direct instruction with that teacher for 90 minutes at least two days a week.

 

Parents, she stressed, must take part in the unpacking of this virtual curriculum, a point Boitano makes as well. Deborah Jackson puts it this way: "As a parent, it's my responsibility to keep an eye on her. Parents need to be a little more involved in what their kids are learning online and how fast they are learning it." Still, she said, that doesn't mean parents have to become stay-at-home types.

 

Virtual questions remain

How virtual education pays off come test time remains unclear. Some studies show that virtual students are outperforming their in-class colleagues; others maintain that it's too early to selectively compile such data and make fair and accurate comparisons.

 

Gifford said her company's internal data proves that students who stay in the virtual-school setting outdistance traditional students when it comes to achievement.

 

Conversely, she said, a lot of students are withdrawing from schools under the umbrella of The International Association for K-12 Online Learning.

 

"There are students who try this and discover it is not the right match. There are kids who hide out, and we have an obligation to not let them hide out. Some find that they spend six hours on a computer and they go crazy. That is why engagement early on is so important. But kids who stay in our schools do very well over time."

• How will virtual learning impact the special-ed student, teacher evaluation systems, New Mexico's new A-F grading system, social promotion and the training of virtual-academy teachers?

Behrens, who said virtual learning can be a game-changer for some students, acknowledged that the state has to work out the answers to these questions (among others) in order to ensure that virtual education becomes an effective reality.

 

But teachers should be tech-savvy and passionate about connecting with kids via computers, Los Lunas elementary school teacher Heather Cummings said. (She wants to get in on the New Mexico Connections gig if the school garners approval.)

 

And Gifford said the virtual-school movement needs teachers who are "willing to be creative when things don't work out, teachers who are not afraid, who are comfortable poking and prodding and trying things out and who can develop relationships with adults - parents - as well."

• Dana McArthur, director of the distance-learning-oriented Center for Learning Excellence at the Santa Fe Community College, said no one should consider distance learning as a panacea: "It's another method to give students more access to and more variety in learning, and that's always good."

She said students need to realize that this kind of educational approach will require just as much time and input (if not more) to be successful. She, like everyone else interviewed for this piece, said virtual learning is definitely the wave of the future.

 

"Virtual education has arrived," Garrison said. "It is now starting to organize itself in the form of charter school applications. And children need to learn how to navigate that cyberworld and virtual world just as much as they need to learn how to navigate the real world."

 

Asked if she foresaw any challenges being a virtual learner today, Monica Jackson cited only one concern: "If my Internet were to crash."

 

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Rio Rancho/ Clarification of High School Students' Use of Cell Phones

 

By Elaine D. Briseño

ABQ Journal Staff Writer

September 8, 2012 

 

Not too long ago, Rio Rancho High English teacher Leslie Keeney noticed her students covertly using their cell phones in class, not to text or talk, but to help them with their work. It was then the 22-year veteran said she realized it was time to start incorporating personal electronic devices, such as cell phones and electronic tablets, into her instruction.

 

"I had students who would hide their phones under the desk looking up the answers," she said. "Then I realized I need to be letting them do this."

 

Keeney said Rio Rancho Public Schools' newly revised Personal Electronic Devices policy, which was adopted Aug. 27, makes it easier for her to do just that.

 

Tonna Burgos, executive director of student services for RRPS, said although the use of personal electronic devices was allowed in the classroom before, the revision clarifies how teachers can incorporate them into their lesson plans.

• *     "The original policy did not say you could not use them," Burgos said. "It just did not say how (they) could be used. The new policy elaborates and gives more detail."

Keeney, who is head of the English department, said she has started encouraging other teachers to do the same. She started doing it last school year.

 

On Friday afternoon, she started class by displaying multiple questions about a piece of literature the students were reading. One of the questions involved five one-word answers, but taking a quick poll, it was clear some of her students didn't understand the meanings of some of the words.

• *     "I want you to take some time today to understand these words," she said. "If you don't know them, you are not going to be able to answer the question correctly."

She then asked the students to take out their cell phones and other personal devices. They even joked about the lonely, single dictionary sitting at the front of the class on top of a metal cabinet.

 

"Some of you have devices, some of you don't," she said. "Feel free to share. There's also this dictionary up here."

 

The majority of students had their own phones or other device.

 

"I'm glad they (school board members) realized we were moving in this direction and changed the policy," she said.

 

Burgos said the second major change in the policy is that the district's ninth- through 12th-grade students are now allowed to use their phones during passing period and lunch. The policy used to require students to leave their phones off and in their bags while they were at school. That still applies to the younger students, but the high schoolers are free to text during non-instructional times.

 

Rio Rancho High Principal Richard VonAncken said he was glad to see the change. He said the policy will improve the relationship between staff and students.

 

"We used to spend an inordinate amount of time enforcing the policy," he said. "The worst part is we are trying to develop these positive relationships with students, but when you are put in a situation where you have to constantly badger kids, it builds resentment."

 

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ABQ/ Computer Games Get Students Into Math

 

By Hailey Heinz

ABQ Journal Staff Writer

September 10, 2012  

 

It's not every day that Cheryl Leung's students do more homework than they are assigned each night, and keep doing that homework over the summer.

 

But when Leung assigned them to play "The Lure of the Labyrinth," a math and problem-solving game developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for middle school students, the students spent far more time playing than the assignment called for.

 

"The homework was 15 to 30 minutes a night. Emily went home and did it all night Friday, all day Saturday and Sunday. Her mother had trouble peeling her away from it to eat dinner," said Leung, who teaches math at Desert Ridge Middle School.

 

When Leung says Emily, she means 12-year-old Emily Smart, who was playing the game on a recent weekday during math class. Smart, who described the game as "really addicting" was doing math puzzles that involved scaling recipes up and down and getting the right proportion of each ingredient into a cauldron. Ingredients included eyeballs and puréed ladybugs.

 

Adding to the challenge, students have just three containers for measuring ingredients. So if a recipe calls for 14 units of ladybugs, students might only have containers that hold 18 units, 7 units, and 2 units, respectively. Students would have to fill the 18-unit container, then pour out enough to fill the 2-unit container twice. But Smart is on to tougher versions of the puzzle, where the measuring containers have fraction values.

 

The premise of Labyrinth is that the player's pet gets off its leash and wanders into a toxic-looking tunnel inhabited by monsters. To get the pet back, players must infiltrate the monster culture and complete tasks - like accurately mixing recipes. As they complete more puzzles, they can rescue pets. When students struggle, they can send messages to classmates for guidance or help.

 

In the world of educational gaming, "The Lure of the Labyrinth" is a well-known effort. The game is familiar to Barbara Chamberlin, director of the Learning Games Lab at New Mexico State University.

 

Chamberlin said the game is successful because it invites students to learn in a meaningful way.

• "The most relevant kind of learning, whether it's frosting a cake or rebuilding an engine, is when we solve a problem, can collaborate with other people learning the same things and are given an opportunity to dig in deeply," she said.
• "Labyrinth welcomes that. So, of course, they played for longer than they were assigned. When you're given genuine problems to solve, that is always going to keep you engaged for longer periods of time."

Education through gaming is a relatively new field of study, and the research on how well it works is inconclusive. However, Chamberlin and other academics believe games can engage students in their learning, and that games are often misunderstood - especially by older people.

• "I think people have a misunderstanding of games. They tend to think of games as a quiz to see what you know," she said. "They either think of games as a dressed-up quiz or a waste of time."

Chamberlin cautioned that even the best games can't take the place of thoughtful teaching. She said games should be used like any other tool, within the context of a classroom where teachers are guiding the experience. Part of what makes "The Lure of the Labyrinth" so strong is that it was developed for classroom use and comes with suggested lesson plans and teacher resources, Chamberlin said.

 

Leung has a whole binder of materials related to the game.

• She said that in addition to having students play the game in their own time, she can project specific puzzles onto her classroom's interactive Promethean board and work through them as a class.
• She also monitors the students' messages to each other, to see what they may be struggling with.

Last year, MIT challenged schools across the country to use the free, online game in a competition to see who could solve the most puzzles or free the most pets.

• Brandon Limary, now a 12-year-old Desert Ridge seventh-grader, freed the fourth-highest number of pets among the 26,000 students who played nationwide. He won a ThinkPad tablet for his efforts.

Limary said he likes saving animals, so he was motivated by the game's premise. He also said the game is more fun than a simple math test or problem set.

 

Recently, Limary was working through a puzzle in which his character was working in a monster cafeteria and had to place food items on monsters' trays in the right proportions. He started the game with a few clues: one monster might have slop labeled 20 and sushi labeled 24. This could be a clue that all the other monsters need to have their slop and sushi in a five-to-six ratio.

 

The game doesn't provide explicit instructions for students. In the cafeteria game, students are told only that the monsters are picky about how much they'll eat of each food item. Students must figure out for themselves that the puzzle is based on ratios and proportions.

 

Leung said this is closer to real life than classroom math, where students are often told what technique to use to solve a problem. "The whole idea is problem-solving and deep mathematical thinking," she said. "In the real world, you have to frame the problem yourself."

 

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ABQ/ Sierra Vista Elementary School Adds Pre-Kindergarten Class

 

By Glen Rosales

ABQ Journal

September 8, 2012  

 

Although Diana Sanchez already had three children attending Sierra Vista Elementary School, the thought of adding 4-year-old Luke Sanchez to the student body was a compelling one.

 

And when Sierra Vista became the first Albuquerque Public Schools elementary school in the northwest quadrant to add a pre-kindergarten class, Sanchez was among the first to get on board.

• "It's a big opportunity for them to go to school for a half day before they start kindergarten," she said. "It's more than just learning your ABCs and 1, 2, 3s at home. It's a different environment and it's more structured."

Sierra Vista is the 13th elementary district-wide to add pre-K.

• All are Title I schools and had to be approved and funded by the state Public Education Department, said Heather Vaughn, APS early childhood program developer.
• Sierra Vista principal Monica Garciasalas has been working on establishing the program at the school since she took over after a stint at La Mesa Elementary, where a similar program already existed. She finally got the go ahead this summer, and the class started in August.

"I had to beg, borrow and plead," she said with a chuckle, explaining the travails of the program's establishment. "It's actually a long process."

 

It helped that first-grade teacher Stacey Maley specialized in early childhood education and eagerly accepted the challenge to take on the task of teaching the class.

• "This is my dream job," Maley said as she handed a small girl a crayon and led her to an art easel that served as the children's writing station. "This is what I wanted to do, we just never had the funding. And most people who get in the pre-K program, the teachers stay."

The curriculum is mandated by the state and APS, requiring a certain amount of free play time in the classroom each day, as well as outside time daily. But that time, while spent playing, is actually helping the children learn, Maley said.

• "It's a brand new program so there's a lot of work," she said. "And there are a lot of little issues that we're coming up with, but it's a lot of fun. I'm enjoying it. This is a little different than a normal classroom because we get to go off of the kids' interests."

And that means lots of reading stories and singing songs, Maley said.

 

It also means actively encouraging the children to interact with each other to build socialization skills, as well as fostering imagination through a map station and a puppet area.

• "They rotate through the different centers that we've got," Maley said. "There are things for large motor (skills), small motor (skills). Writing areas. Pre-writing type activities. And play. Pre-reading skills in the library. And then as we start getting into different things, we'll integrate different things into each center. They're learning through play and exploration."

Studies have shown that children who participate in pre-K programs are more prepared for kindergarten and in general perform better in school, Vaughn said.

 

And it's not just in reading and math, she said, but the children have "learned to learn" more readily.

 

Garciasalas said she could see the benefits of early education at her prior school and wanted to bring those advantages to Sierra Vista.

 

"Early education for them is so high stakes now when they are entering kindergarten," she said.

 

"Knowing their beginning letters. Knowing how to write their name. Another big one is socialization. We have a lot of students that come to us in kindergarten that have never been in a school setting and it presented a lot challenges for them that first year in school."

 

Kindergarten has changed over the years, Garciasalas added, making more demands upon the youngsters.

 

"Once they get to kindergarten, it's no longer the kindergarten we knew as children," she said. "It's a lot more rigorous. There's a lot more academics involved."

 

Although her other three children went through private pre-K programs, Sanchez said she's quite happy that something is finally available at the school.

 

"They'll know where everything is, where the cafeteria is, where the gym is," she said. "They'll know the other children. And now I have all my children in one place, so I don't have to take them all over the place."

 

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Fruitland/ Ojo Amarillo Elementary School: Little School Showing Big Success

 

By Leigh Irvin

Farmington Daily Times

September 9. 2012

 

With the abundance of press centering on Central Consolidated School District controversies, a positive light needs to be shed on one little-known CCSD school.

 

Ojo Amarillo Elementary School is tucked deep into the heart of the Navajo Agricultural Products Industry area, south of the San Juan River and not far from Kirtland. Its new principal, Abena McNeely, not only wants people to know that the school exists, but that its students and teachers are moving in a positive direction.

 

McNeely has been duplicating many of the strategies she brought to Newcomb Elementary School, where she served as principal for 10 years prior to coming to Ojo Amarillo last year. Newcomb Elementary was recognized many times for academic achievements.

• While McNeely was principal, Newcomb Elementary received more Adequate Yearly Progress ratings than any other school in the county, and
• received the highest state Public Education Department score last year of all three CCSD schools that earned an "A" grade.

Like Newcomb, Ojo Amarillo, which serves 407 students from pre-K to sixth grade, is in a remote location on the Navajo Reservation, and many of its students lack the advantages afforded students in larger communities.

• "I've tried to level the playing field for these kids. They are intellectually the same as any other kid, but they sometimes lack opportunities, so I'm trying to make sure they get a lot of the same benefits as more economically advantaged kids who go to the better' schools," said McNeeley.

McNeeley, who is originally from Ghana, believes she achieves this leveling by raising expectations of what the kids and educators can achieve, and by building a sense of community in the school.

• "One of my goals is to have high expectations, but also to know how to effectively communicate this to teachers, parents and kids," she said. "But besides the expectations, we have to show that we believe they can achieve them, and that's what we do. We give the kids opportunities for success."

Using a system of incentives such as "Bobcat Bucks" that the kids can earn to spend at the school's store, as well as having a "Student of the Month" and giving out key chains and throwing class parties for good attendance, McNeeley and other faculty members have noticed a change in the student's attitudes.

 

"I feel like we won the lottery getting (McNeeley) here," said kindergarten teacher Lisa Madera, who has taught at the school since 1994. "The climate of the school has changed tremendously by instigating so many new programs and incentives. She's also so supportive of the teachers, and there's so much more school spirit."

 

Second-grade teacher Amy Taylor agrees that the atmosphere at Ojo Amarillo has changed since McNeely's arrival.

 

"The main influence she's having is motivational, and I'd say the incentive programs for kids to earn rewards is the biggest change," said Taylor. "Morale is much better, and the school hasn't had that in a long time."

 

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Artesia/ Central Elementary School: Only NM 2012 National Blue Ribbon School

 

US Department of Education [Ed.gov]

By Aba Kumi [Director of the National Blue Ribbon Schools Program]

September 7, 2012

 

"Great schools don't happen by chance. Great schools happen by design," Secretary Arne Duncan said earlier today as he recognized the 2012 National Blue Ribbon Schools from the campus of Arlington Traditional Elementary School in Arlington, Va.

 

Secretary Duncan was joined at the announcement by U.S. Congressman Jim Moran (D-Va.) and Arlington Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Patrick Murphy.

 

• "The National Blue Ribbon Schools are the best of what our country has to offer," Secretary Duncan told the assembled students, parents, teachers, and dignitaries. "They are models for schools across the country."

 

Arlington Traditional Principal Holly Hawthorne noted that the school's focus on academics, behavior, and character is the foundation of its success. "Behavior and dress standards help create a safe and inviting learning environment, and strong partnerships with families and the community foster each child's whole development," Hawthorne said. "Our students leave Arlington Traditional School as lifelong learners and future caring and contributing citizens."

 

The 269 schools, out of the more than 100,000 schools in the US, recognized this year represent 40 states, the District of Colombia and the Department of Defense Education Activity.

 

National Blue Ribbon Schools are the "best in their class," public and private elementary and secondary schools that produce outstanding results for all students.

 

While all National Blue Ribbon schools have one thing in common-high or improving academic achievement -each great school has an inspiring story to tell about excellence in teaching and learning.

 

Read the list of this year's winners: http://www2.ed.gov/programs/nclbbrs/2012/index.html

 

 

Contact information Central Elementary School:

 

405 South Sixth

Artesia, NM 88210-1826

Phone: (575) 746-4811

Principal: Ms. Tammy Davis

School District: Artesia Public Schools

 

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Taos/ Sustainability: Students Grow with School Gardens

 

By Tina Larkin

Taos News

Nature's classroom

September 8, 2012

 

At Enos García Elementary School, nonprofits are coming together to educate Taos youth on sustainability.

 

Two separate gardens are currently in operation at Enos García, thanks to the collaboration of two agriculture-minded nonprofits:

• Bob Pedersen's Tierra Lucero and
• Miguel Santistevan's A.I.R.E.

Constructed and planted in the spring, the Parr Field garden, one of two on campus, features a rolling greenhouse built to work with the program's goal: to provide a constant supply of edible foods to students.

 

For the fall planting, one patch of spinach will be grown in the greenhouse while another spinach patch lies dormant outside. When the first patch matures, the rolling greenhouse will be moved to the dormant patch, for another cycle of spinach.

 

Jason Weisfeld, a teacher at Enos García who is also on the board at A.I.R.E., says the idea for the garden came together as a way of taking family agriculture and adding an educational program.

• "I saw that field as a great opportunity for us to start reintroducing, in some cases, and working with families who are already grow a lot of food in Taos, to kind of bring that experience to kids right on school property," he said.

Weisfeld points to former principal Lucille Gallegos and Superintendent Rod Weston for their support of the fledgling program.

 

For the younger students, another garden is maintained on the other side of campus, which caters to entertaining children in the lower grades. The garden features a worm bed filled with rotten apples (which worms love), pumpkins to be carved, and small, fun foods like cherry tomatoes and strawberries.

 

At this past spring's field day, over 500 students - every student at the elementary school - planted a seed in the Parr Field garden.

 

The budding program at Enos García benefits from the support of the Kindle Project and the McCune Foundation, two education based foundations.

 

While the plan is to have the children eat the food they grow in their cafeteria meals, government regulations are currently preventing that from being the case, for the most part. Weisfeld says, though, that the education is what really counts.

• "(We're) working towards having kids grow a portion of their own salad bar and a portion of their own meals," he said. "If not, if government regulations and stuff gets in the way of that, then if nothing else just going out and planting and working the garden and eating fresh vegetables right off the plant.

In the youth agriculture programs championed by Santistevan at several area schools, the emphasis is always on the youth. "We want to make this a tradition ... embed it within the school's calendar, so people can expect it," said Santistevan. "I'm training my students now to be agriculturalists and youth mentors."

 

Santistevan's plan is to broaden the scope of the program by teaching older student leaders to act as educators and mentors to younger students.

 

The Parr Field garden has two distinct sections.

• The first, inspired by Tierra Lucero's intensive, green-house agriculture, educates the students in modern methods of extending growing seasons, while
• the other side is filled with corn, beans, and squash, to educate the students in the traditional, historical traditions of the region.

This weekend, the students who have taken part will participate in their first real harvest.

 

As a celebration of the first successful chapter of agriculture at Enos García, the school and the nonprofit organizations will host an open house Friday (Sept. 7), 4 p.m. at the Parr Field garden.

 

All are invited to support the students as they harvest the corn that will be eaten on Saturday at an event for the kids and their relatives.

 

"At this point we're working out how all those vegetables can go to Taos Schools kids and their families," said Weisfeld.

 

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Santa Fe/ EDITORIAL: Changing Ways, Reaching Parents

 

The New Mexican

September 7, 2012

 

With a new superintendent of schools, naturally, comes a new way of doing things in the Santa Fe Public Schools.

 

Several immediate changes deserve praise, especially the district's move to bring in Spanish-language translators for community meetings. Starting this week, for example, Superintendent Joel Boyd is beginning a series of forums all across the city to ask parents and families what they need and want from their schools. Spanish-language translators will be there. The district also is working to bring translators to Board of Education meetings. Nothing will make parents feel more welcome than hearing the actions of the evening in a language they can understand.

 

Also intriguing is the notion of a district-wide Parents Academy to support parents as the first teachers of their children. Just discussed at the Board of Education last week, details are few right now. We like the concept of the public schools as a place for lifelong learning - for parent and child alike. It's essential, though, that the district take advantage of the many existing programs - high school equivalency and vocational certificate programs could be offered in cooperation with Santa Fe Community College, so as to avoid duplication. We don't need another community college (which started, incidentally, through classes in the public schools decades ago).

 

What we do think especially important for the district to offer is this: programs to help parents understand the ever-changing education reforms. Even a college graduate might wonder what a Common Core Standard is and how best to help her child adjust to new expectations. Because of what seems a failure to communicate from the state Public Education Department, the recent graduation tests for high school juniors caught everyone off guard. Santa Fe's failure rate was unacceptably high, and parents would benefit from training to help their children pass the first time around. Going further, assistance in helping students prepare for the all-important college entrance tests is another place where parents could become more involved. At private schools, it's common for ACT and SAT prep courses to be part of the curriculum, while public school students are left to navigate the maze of college applications and testing on their own.

 

Another important outlet for parental involvement - parent teacher associations, whatever their configuration or name - should be a part of every school, especially at middle and high schools, where support for students and teachers is so important. School principals also need to be held to account for how parents are welcomed and engaged once they set foot on campus. At many schools, for whatever reason, staff might pay lip service to the notion of parents becoming involved, but programs and systems do not exist for parents to help out. We also would love to see the school district partner with city libraries and start a citywide reading awareness campaign - but for grown-ups, not kids. It's clear that if parents are not reading, children won't be reading, either. Emphasizing the joy of books would be a fun task for this fledgling Parents Academy, one that would pay dividends not just in better test scores but in a better education for children.

 

Making parents welcome, helping parents learn how to help their children and involving more parents in their children's schools are all steps forward in improving education for Santa Fe's children. We look forward to hearing more details - especially where the money will come from to pay for a Parents Academy - in the weeks ahead. Even in this preliminary form, though, we like seeing parents encouraged as essential to their children's education.

 

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Santa Fe/ COLUMN: Superintendent Boyd Reaches Out to Parents

 

By Robert Nott

The New Mexican

September 9, 2012

 

[Visit www.sfps.info and click on the "Community Forums" link to see a full list of forum dates, times and sites - in both English and Spanish]

 

Some six weeks into his new job, Santa Fe Public Schools Superintendent Joel Boyd said he is already pinpointing a number of obvious challenges:

• "It's becoming readily apparent that no strategy exists around supporting our lowest-performing schools," he said Friday.
• "There's also a lack of an overriding strategy to engage parents."

He will uncover more challenges, to be sure, but he's taking a step to readily identify them so he can address them by reaching out to parents, staffers, students and interested parties in a series of community forums, with the first one scheduled from 6 to 8 p.m. Tuesday at Capshaw Middle School on West Zia Road.

 

Nine forums in all are scheduled through early October at various sites around the city, and, to the district's credit, both child care (for kids ages 4-12) and Spanish-speaking translators will be available for parents during these events.

• "The idea here is it's more about me listening than speaking," Boyd said. "I want to listen to parents and hear from them what is working and what is not working, what they want changed and what they want the same."

Boyd said he held one such informal session last Wednesday at Zona del Sol, moderated by members of the district's Adelante Program for Homeless Students, with parents of immigrant children. Gail Herling, Adelante's executive director, said by phone Friday that it was a "specific listening session with the immigrant families in our program.

 

Generally speaking, people walked away from that meeting very excited because the superintendent was respectful of our families and what they are going through. He really listened to people who recounted extreme problems, and he said, 'If you don't get the response you need from your teacher and principal, come to me - that's what I am here for.' "

 

Herling said she was also impressed with the way Boyd acknowledged that he has to take time to learn, comprehend and respect the various cultures within the district. "He said we have to work together to end institutionalized racism," she said.

 

Boyd said the community forums are part of his 100-day entry plan, designed to gather data and get a strong sense of what is working within the district and what needs attention and work. His aides will keep detailed notes from each session and then analyze public response for trends.

 

He is aware that many parents may not trust the district or simply don't believe that any investment in such forums will pay off. "I've been here 30 days, and I am perceived to be part of the system, a system that has failed many families," he said. "The work of changing that perception relates to my actions and not my words. It has less to do with what I say than what I do after these sessions."

 

These forums will also allow Boyd and his new chief of staff, Latifah Phillips (who worked with Boyd in The School District of Philadelphia), to recruit parents to participate in planning for the pilot of the Parent Academy set to open in the spring. The idea is to find out what parents and families want and build programming around those needs. Potential courses include some that would show parents how to better help their children in school, GED programs for parents, and arts and entertainment enrichment. (These are the sort of programs that Santa Fe's Ramirez Thomas Elementary School, aided in large part by a federal Turnaround grant, has been building into its community-school model.)

 

Boyd said the district is working on providing trained Spanish-speaking interpreters at all school board meetings, too. "Many of our parents speak Spanish, so it is our job to communicate with them in Spanish," he said last week. (Phillips speaks English, Spanish and, for the record, Japanese.)

 

Visit www.sfps.info and click on the "Community Forums" link to see a full list of forum dates, times and sites - in both English and Spanish.

 

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Santa Fe/ OPINION: A to F School Grades Not Ready for Prime Time

 

By Stephen M. Barro [Doctorate in economics (public finance), retired economist and policy analyst with more than 30 years experience in education research and policy studies]

The New Mexican

September 7, 2012

 

The recent release of New Mexico's second set of A-to-F grades for schools was accompanied by lavish praise for the grading effort by the state officials who initiated it: Gov. Susana Martinez, who last year induced the Legislature to write school grading into law, and Public Education Department Secretary-designate Hanna Skandera, under whose direction the grades were produced. Not only are the grades valid, both contend, but the reported grade changes between 2010-11 and 2011-12 show real improvements in education performance.

 

In fact, they show nothing of the kind. The claims of "improvement" reflect nothing more than the tactic of citing hand-picked positive results as evidence of progress. When one examines grade changes for all New Mexico schools (as this writer has done), a very different picture emerges:

• Of the 821 schools that PED graded for both 2010-11 and 2011-12, 510 schools did not receive the same grade for both years. The grades of 232 schools went up; those of 278 schools went down. The grades of 112 schools changed by two levels or more, that is, from A to C or F to B.
• Of the 73 schools graded A for 2010-11, only 17 also received an A for 2011-12. The grades of 39 schools initially rated A dropped to B, 15 to C and 2 to D.
• Within the larger group of 264 schools graded either A or B for 2010-11, only 140 schools also were rated A or B for 2011-12. Of the remaining 124 schools, 88 were downgraded to C, 31 to D and 5 to F.
• Only 23 of the 88 schools graded F for 2010-11 also received an F for 2011-12 (though they were joined by 45 other schools previously graded B, C, or D).

What these results mainly demonstrate is not that schools got better or worse between the two years but rather that the grades are highly unstable and hence of dubious reliability. This finding raises doubts about the soundness of the underlying methodology and points to the need for a full, independent review.

 

Unfortunately, much of the information needed for a thorough review remains under wraps. PED's "Technical Guide" is opaque, cryptically written and seriously incomplete. Conspicuously missing, for example, are the numerical results PED statisticians obtained when they applied value-added models to data on test scores and student characteristics. Those results are essential for assessing the explanatory power of the VAMs and the adequacy of PED's adjustments for inter-school differences in student characteristics.

 

Instead of unveiling their methodology, PED officials have claimed, absurdly, that "only a few people in the world" would be able to understand it. In fact, PED's approach is neither new nor esoteric. Value-added models, some considerably more complex than PED's, have been applied in education for over a decade.

 

The limited information now available does suffice, however, to identify many questions that a full review would address. Most concern technical aspects of statistical procedure, but others are broader questions about what is being measured.

• Why, for example, has PED based grades partly on a proficiency indicator not adjusted for student characteristics, knowing that this will make some schools look like poor performers simply because their students come from less advantaged backgrounds?

Finally, examining PED's methodology is important because school grading foreshadows another item on the Martinez/Skandera agenda: the use of value-added models to grade individual teachers.

 

School-level modeling, its complexities notwithstanding, is simple compared with teacher-level modeling. Until PED can demonstrate mastery of the former, it should not attempt the latter. The stakes, if it proceeds, will be high: teachers' jobs and salaries might depend on the results. The scrutiny being given to school grades would pale in comparison to what PED can expect when teachers become the statisticians' targets.

 

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Santa Fe/ OPINION: Evaluations Would Lift, Not Punish, Teachers

 

By Hanna Skandera [Secretary-designate, NM Department of Education]

ABQ Journal

September 9, 2012 

 

When it comes to the teachers of New Mexico, many are so much better than "meets competency." Even though the hard work of New Mexicans created our current three-tiered licensure and teacher evaluation, it does not provide a way for those teachers who deserve to be recognized as the exemplary professionals they are.

 

We all remember our greatest teacher. The teacher who saw each of us not as we were, but as the person we had the potential to be. Our teachers who committed extra hours, extra credit and extra attention gave each of us a learning experience we still benefit from today. Each of those teachers deserves more than "meets competency" when they are evaluated.

 

Today, more than 22,000 teachers across New Mexico take on the challenge and the opportunity to educate over 330,000 students across the state. They answer the call to help our children and enter a system that can measure their efforts in only one way: either a teacher "meets competency" or they don't. What about the teacher who inspires greatness in our children?

 

Shouldn't they be acknowledged? What about the teacher who, though struggling, can become exemplary with the right help and professional development? We need a system that both protects teachers' basic rights under New Mexico law and provides targeted help.

• Studies place New Mexico's student achievement and overall child well-being near the bottom of national rankings.
• Standardized test scores show that half our students are not on grade level when it comes to reading and math.

Beyond the effect of parenting and the home environment, few factors affect a student's chances of success more than the skills of an effective and dedicated teacher. While a multipronged approach is necessary to ensure success for all students, maintaining a teacher and school leader evaluation system that recognizes their impact on students is vital.

 

Many teachers are apprehensive about a new evaluation system. The constant stream of misinformation designed to throw a wrench in the efforts doesn't help anyone. Honest disagreement can be discussed with reason and respect, but political posturing delivers results like the ones our students witness now.

 

From our point of view, a reasonable evaluation system contains the following multiple measures and feedback opportunities:

• Classroom observations that are objective and fair.
• District-selected evaluation measures best suited to address local concerns.
• Student input regarding the quality of education at their school.
• Feedback on performance and to be provided structured targeted professional growth opportunities.
• Place a priority on student learning.

The notion that 50 percent of the proposed evaluation is based on a single standardized test is false.

 

Rather, the rule requires that 50 percent of an evaluation be based on valid and reliable data and indicators of student achievement growth assessed annually.

• Of the 50 percent, 35 percent of an evaluation will be comprised of three years' worth of data based on the growth in achievement of students in each teacher's classroom as measured by the New Mexico statewide assessment system.
• Additionally, 15 percent of the evaluation allows flexibility at the school district level to choose selected achievement measures.

All of these factors were present in a proposal that passed the New Mexico House of Representatives with overwhelming bipartisan support.

 

The proposal, also supported by the New Mexico Business Roundtable and the National Education Association, is the common sense answer for our teachers, principals and students. It's time to support this approach for the sake of our students today and our state tomorrow.

 

This opportunity is nothing short of extraordinary. For the first time, perhaps in the history of New Mexico, we can finally honor those who work so hard to shape our future.

 

The choice is ours. Do we want the future that is best for our teachers and students? Or are we happy to just "meet competency"?

 

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ABQ/ OPINION: The Good and Bad in Schools, as in Life

 

By Mitchell Stucker [Retired APS Teacher]

ABQ Journal

September 10, 2012  

 

I would like to personally thank Sujata Bhatt [Los Angeles Times] for her insightful examination of school environments. (1-5 September 2012 PSFA Digest)

 

As a now-retired, 15-year veteran of teaching at Highland High here in Albuquerque, I have had similar experiences. I would add that over the course of my tenure, I have experienced what I thought were outstanding and abysmal principals and teachers. In the abysmal cases, it is difficult to remove them because they, for excellent reasons, develop allies within the educational community. No matter how bad they might appear, their supporters pour out of the woodwork with wonderful anecdotal reasons why such people were personal saviors for individual students or programs.

 

I would agree, though, that good principals, like any good manager, can be the critical reason that teachers feel comfortable and often rise to the occasion rather than duck another top-down policy. The best principal I had made me feel like part of the solution, supported me when I needed it, and delegated responsibility when "we" decided to go forward with programs.

 

Most importantly, we were protected from the top-down environments fostered by most school systems (and bureaucracies in general). Good principals supported the good programs and used the best parts of the bad programs to support our school goals. The best principals had a vision that we developed and was supported.

 

I might add that, being retired from the Air Force, I never saw a "failing" base criticized because of the pilots; the commander was replaced. Good commanders and good principals never complained about the rules and regulations; they got the job done and followed the rules to get rid of those not with the program. It is always hard to do things the right way, but there is always a way!

 

I would add that most teachers, in particular, and principals in general are not intrinsically "bad," they just don't fit the particular times or programs. As a supervisor, I never failed to find what my subordinates could do and use and support them, not dwell on what they couldn't do. It's amazing what a little support will buy; it takes a lot of work, but the results are outstanding! Everyone wants to be part of a winning team.

 

As a statistician, I would take exception to the "26 percent of high-performing teachers being offered leadership opportunities as opposed to 31 percent of low-performing teachers having similar opportunities."

 

I suspect that the differences are statistically insignificant and that most teachers at one point or another are offered such opportunities. I would add that most good teachers are reluctant to take leadership or mentoring positions because their strengths are in the classroom and they take immense pleasure in "making a difference." Losing seniority and leaving your comfort zone is a gamble many don't choose to risk. Why wouldn't less-successful teachers want to try something different? Unfortunately, the way teacher education is structured, it leaves few opportunities outside the profession for those who, after five to 10 years, decide it isn't working! Most find out much earlier and decide with their feet, hence the high teacher dropout rates.

 

I always reminded students who complained about particular teachers that it's only one hour a day for a year, and learning to deal with it was also a life skill. Try telling your boss "out there" that he or she is incompetent. In the case of the classroom, no one ever told students they couldn't read the books!

 

Schools, like life, offer a buffet of experiences; the selections won't all taste good. What is important is that students have mentors at school and at home who support them - support, not make excuses!

 

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Washington DC/ New Breed of Community Partnerships Aiding Schools

 

By Nora Fleming

Education Week, Vol. 32, Issue 03 [Edweek.org]

September 7, 2012

 

New kinds of agreements between school districts and their neighboring communities to share space and assets are on the rise.

 

These symbiotic "joint use" partnerships enable districts and entities such as cities, nonprofit organizations, and businesses to maximize the use of facilities and money, while meeting the needs of children and others in the community.

 

But from joint land-development initiatives to the shared use of building space and playfields, those involved in these relationships are finding their navigation can be tricky. Without the money-saving measures, though, many districts and communities are struggling financially to stay afloat.

• "Joint use or shared use as a strategy is taking off across the country because it's an approach that embodies common sense and good governance," said Manel Kappagoda, the vice president of ChangeLab Solutions, a public-health-focused nonprofit based in Oakland, Calif., that has helped districts devise and sustain joint-use agreements. "The promise [in joint use] is rooted in the realization that even the most poorly designed and underserved neighborhoods include schools.

In an era of budget shortfalls, maximizing access to existing facilities-rather than trying to construct new ones-is the most efficient and economical use of public resources."

 

Sharing a Vision

School districts have long entered into joint-use agreements.

• Traditionally, they consisted of a formal or informal relationship between a district and a municipal agency, such as a parks department, that enables the community to use school facilities when classes aren't in session or the school to use the community's.
• Use and maintenance costs are typically shared.

These days, though, the portfolio of joint-use partnerships, and the reasons districts pursue them, are evolving.

• In the past, they were often driven by limited finances, lack of recreational space, and social-service needs.
• While those needs remain, many newer partnerships are focused on both parties sharing a vision for community improvement with the local schools as a focal point.

No one has put estimates on the number of such arrangements nationwide. At the local level, however, in 2011, the school board for the 640,000-student Los Angeles district approved joint-use projects amounting to $120 million of school bond funding, as part of the district's large joint-use program.

 

States have also fostered joint-use arrangements.

• Since 2009, for example, Arkansas's excise tax on tobacco has provided funding for a $500,000 annual, competitive-grant program that gives money to districts for new or existing joint-use agreements that promote physical activity by improving the quality of and access to shared recreational space.

Districts or communities in areas with high child-obesity rates and high percentages of students from low-income families receive extra points in the application process, said Jerri Clark, the school health-grant manager at the Arkansas education department.

 

Recipients can get up to $10,000 per project to jump-start their efforts, and some 75 grants to 25 to 30 districts have been awarded each year since the program began. One recipient, the Cabot district, about 30 miles northeast of Little Rock, is considered a 100 percent joint-use district. All facilities and spaces are shared between the district and the municipality.

 

Currently, the Arkansas education department is drafting guidelines to help districts write and adopt official contracts to move them to more sustainable formal relationships, Ms. Clark added.

• "There's been a change of mind-set in the way we think about healthy kids, with a focus now on the 'whole child,' which isn't directly related to education, but still impacts education," she said.
• "We've learned that schools can't do it alone and communities can't do it alone. The emphasis is now on partnerships and how important they are."

Successes and Failures

While such agreements are increasing, so are the challenges associated with them.

 

In Colorado Springs, Colo., the 28,600-student district has found both success and failure implementing joint-use agreements.

• On the positive side, a national nonprofit group, the Space Foundation, uses office space inside a middle school in exchange for providing math- and science-curriculum support to teachers and students.
• The district has also sold and converted vacant schools into municipal resources, such as a community center now under construction in a former elementary school. It will house a community garden, coffee shop, and bakery, and host community classes, all developed by a local brewery that will also use part of the space for brewery expansion.

But other relationships haven't been as successful, said Kristine Odom, the district's executive director for procurement and contracting.

• In one, because of limited finances, the partnering organization was not able to provide services to district students and still cover its share of costs after the recession hit, she said.
• Disagreements also emerged with the organization over what space was to be used for, in this case, inviting outside partners to host evening activities on contraception and other topics the district did not feel comfortable having take place on school premises.

Districts and communities are often hesitant to enter into joint-use agreements, according to Jeff Vincent, the deputy director of the Center for Cities & Schools at the University of California, Berkeley.

• "I've talked with a lot of principals who believe schools are community assets that should be welcoming to community leaders, but sharing and coordinating the use of space comes with a lot of challenges," said Mr. Vincent, who has studied joint-use arrangements.
• "Determining who gets priority of use, how you pay for wear and tear, how you clean up after uses, and guard yourself against liability-those are big challenges, but they can certainly be overcome."

For smaller districts with limited central-office personnel, navigating differing governing rules between public entities is even more difficult. School administrators have also complained that they lack the incentive and vision from their school boards to move forward with these agreements, he said.

 

Planning Together

Most states have legislation that supports community use of school facilities, and many municipalities address those ventures in official land-use or community plans, but successful implementation of sustainable agreements hinges on local leadership, according to ChangeLab's Ms. Kappagoda.

• "Champions of the concept" at the school or community level, regular communication between parties, and well-developed, formalized agreements that spell out the logistics tied to maintenance, funding, and scheduling are essential, she said.

"Joint-use agreements hinge on relationships," said Cliff Johnson, the executive director of the Institute for Youth, Education, and Families at the National League of Cities in Washington.

• "When there's a solid relationship between city and school leaders, they often can get past the knee-jerk reaction that joint-use agreements can't or won't work, identifying new and creative ways of collaborating so that everyone comes out ahead."

Tempering the challenges associated with joint use has taken a variety of forms.

 

In Portland, Ore., and surrounding Multnomah County, for example, six districts have separate agreements with their respective municipalities as part of an initiative, managed by the county, that involves 67 schools.

• Students and their families receive wraparound health, academic, social services, and enrichment provided by local organizations and businesses.
• Most of those groups use space inside the building during school and nonschool hours.
• Coordination of the providers, from the nonprofits that operate food pantries for families to the local Boys & Girls Clubs that run after-school programs, is overseen by a full-time, on-site manager.

San Diego's 132,000-student district uses a boilerplate document for all agreements that spells out obligations between the school system and the city.

• Seventy-six 76 arrangements are currently in place.
• Staff members from the district and city meet monthly to go over agreements and renewals.
• They also discuss future endeavors, such as a recently proposed bond measure that would install turf fields at all elementary and middle schools and secondary fields at the high schools for joint use.

And in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district in North Carolina, an area that covers seven municipalities, representatives from the school system, city and county governments, parks and recreation and police departments, and other public agencies sit on a joint-use task force that meets monthly. They discuss upcoming capital-planning projects and where they might be able to partner on new or existing projects to "get the best value for our taxpayers," said Mike Raible, the head of planning and project management for the 140,000-student district.

 

While challenges still arise, such as dealing with differing district and city bond referenda schedules that provide project funding, the task force has made joint-use agreements much easier for the district to craft, he said. To date, it has 69 active agreements, including one with the county's light-rail line; an elementary school playground sits atop a rail station's parking garage.

Building Relationships

 

Advocates of joint-use agreements hope the arrangements are also fostering relationships between schools and their neighbors, promoting a notion that schools are an essential part of the community, even for residents who don't have children in them.

 

By providing broader access to schools, a district makes it more likely that the community will be motivated to pass local bond measures and tax increases for school needs, many say, given that their tax dollars are paying for resources they can also use.

 

Others, however, also point to the cost effectiveness of building relationships between schools and communities.

 

Marty Blank, the president of the Washington-based Institute for Educational Leadership and the director of the Coalition for Community Schools, says joint-use partnerships have become part of a growing movement to improve the connections between schools and their communities, leveraging assets that can improve both.

 

"In a world where everyone wants results," Mr. Blank said, "joint use about efficiency is important, but not enough. It has to also be about joint purpose."

 

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Washington DC/ Education Department Disables Access to Full-Text Documents on ERIC

 

By Kimberly Shannon

Education Week [Edweek.org]

September 7, 2012

 

The U.S. Department of Education has disabled access to many full-text documents in its digital research library after officials discovered a security breach that made personal information for individuals associated with some of the published studies available on the site.

 

The breach to the Education Resources Information Center, or ERIC, was discovered in early August, according to a notice on the site.

• "Sensitive personally identifiable information," including social security numbers, was released in multiple documents.
• The documents had been available in microfiche for years, but "the advent of Internet search engines has made it easier to find this information," said the notice.
• The ERIC website was revamped this year to allow for search optimization.
• The library has over 400,000 full-text documents, all of which have been taken down.

The center hopes that none of the documents will be taken down permanently, according to Ruth Neild, the new commissioner of the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, which oversees ERIC.

 

IES had "no way" of knowing that private information was contained in the documents until one of the affected individuals found a problem and alerted a staff member there, she said.

 

ERIC will assemble a team, expected to be ready by late September, to search through every full-text document for private information. Much of this will be done by hand, the notice states.

 

Officials are hoping to allow access to some documents again by the end of October, and will continue releasing others "on a rolling basis," according to the statement on the site.

 

Documents will be made available by priority, starting with those requested by users, and then by publication date from newest to oldest. The center has already been getting several requests for documents, said Neild, which may take several weeks to put back online. "We're trying to be both responsible and responsive," she said.

 

ERIC provides access to more than 1.4 million bibliographic records of education-related materials, dating back to 1966, and is used frequently by education researchers, school leaders, education policymakers, and the media.

 

Over the past seven months, ERIC has averaged 577,523 full text downloads a month.

 

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New York NY/ Teacher Grading Off to Uneven Start

Evaluation systems vary widely by District, most have not yet reached agreements with unions on how to do it

 

By Lisa Fleisher

Wall Street Journal

September 9, 2012

 

New York state's first system to grade teachers using students' standardized test scores is turning out to be anything but standardized.

 

More than two years after a new law required a complete overhaul of teacher and principal evaluations, the state Education Department has begun approving dozens of agreements hammered out between local districts and unions.

 

Of the state's roughly 700 school districts, only75 had plans approved as of Friday. New York City and its teachers union, which accounts for by far the largest portion of the state's educators and students, have not reached a deal.

 

A review of the first approved plans shows a hodgepodge of methods for determining which teachers deserve to stay and which don't.

• While the law outlined a broad framework for the job-performance reviews-40% based on tests or other gauges of student learning, and 60% based on principals' observations and other subjective measures-
• the details were left to the local districts and unions.

Teachers unions are pleased that they retained collective-bargaining power over the negotiations, which means the evaluation systems cannot be imposed without union consent.

 

"These teacher and principal evaluations honor local control and the ability of local communities to decide what's best for their teachers," said Carl Korn, spokesman for New York State United Teachers.

• In places such as Schenectady, state math and English tests will count for 40% of a fourth-grade teacher's final rating, but
• they'll only count for 20% in Binghamton.
• Teachers in upstate Odessa will be visited seven times by administrators for classroom observations, which will count for a full 60% of their final rating.
• But in nearby Newfield, principals will observe teachers just twice a year, and those visits will make up 35% of their ratings.
• In Syracuse, 6% of teachers' evaluations are up to students, who will fill out surveys.

That means teachers could receive very different grades than if they were teaching the same students in the same school setting in a different district. Some fear there will be little way to distinguish effective teaching across the state.

 

"The potential here is for the entire idea of recognizing great teaching in New York state to be watered down to the idea that it's meaningless," said Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, a national group that pushes for tougher teacher evaluations.

 

"If you cross the border from one town to another, the definition of great teaching shouldn't be all that different."

 

State Education Commissioner John King, whose office vets all plans, said the system allows districts to maintain local control. Mr. King, who is fond of baseball analogies, said it's as if one team were looking for a home-run hitter, while another needed a player with a solid batting average.

 

"The notion that teachers might be highly effective in one setting and only developing in another, that actually makes sense to me," he said. "It may be that the districts have different priorities. It doesn't trouble me."

 

State lawmakers guaranteed there could be wide variation in districts' plans when they passed the requirements for new evaluations in 2010 as part of an effort to get federal funding. With only a general framework in place, and a requirement to negotiate with unions, state officials said they expected differences. Advocates of judging teachers more stringently said New York was on track.

 

Joel Klein, former chancellor of New York City schools, said Friday that a single evaluation system statewide would be a big, easy target for unions to go after and pick apart.

 

"As long as they're meaningful systems that have effective criteria for evaluation that are transparent and will lead to meaningful accountability, that's where we learn from each other," said Mr. Klein, who now works for News Corp., which owns The Wall Street Journal.

 

In 2011, however, when Mr. King tried to give more weight to state standardized tests, the union sued and slowed implementation across the state as districts waited for courts to decide the matter. In February, after Gov. Andrew Cuomo put a spotlight on the issue and threatened to push through an alternate resolution, the state and the New York State United Teachers settled. Meanwhile, Mr. Cuomo set a deadline of January 2013 for districts to have their local plans in effect or lose up to 4% of their state aid.

• Carol Burris, a principal in Rockville Centre who is an outspoken opponent of standardized testing, said her district was working on a system that included some school-wide averages to blunt the effect of a single test score and recognize that children are influenced by all of their teachers. That is a pattern popping up in other districts, too.
• In the Long Island hamlet of Bellmore, state English exam scores will be factored into the performance reviews for sixth-grade science teachers.

"Science teachers do contribute to literacy in English," Ms. Burris said. "Even the phys-ed teacher who keeps kids fit and healthy...in a sense affects the performance of that child on other exams."

 

Meanwhile, the appeals process for poor ratings-which had been a major sticking point between city officials and the union in New York City-also varies from district to district.

• In Kings Park on Long Island, the superintendent has the final say.
• But in Schenectady, the superintendent doesn't have as much power. Appeals go to a four-person panel, with two members chosen by the superintendent and the other two by the union.

Distinguishing good teachers from poor ones is no easy task.

• Research in the field is in its infancy.
• Administrators and district officials say any method is better than the one it replaces in most districts: a simple thumbs up or thumbs down on job performance, with nearly all teachers receiving a "satisfactory" rating.
• In New York City, less than 1% of teachers were rated "unsatisfactory" in 2005-06.

There is agreement that effective teaching can best be measured through several different methods, such as pairing analysis of student test scores with principals' observations.

 

The new system is supposed to serve two purposes. Unions say it will be more instructive for teachers, giving them insight into what they need to work on and guiding them through required professional development for poorly rated teachers.

 

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and others pushing to remake the system also hope getting rid of bad teachers will be faster and easier. Whether it will work in practice remains to be seen, and it relies on principals and superintendents effectively using the plans they've created, said Sandi Jacobs, a vice president with the National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonprofit organization.

 

"Administrators are going to have to use the system well," she said. "They're going to have to be willing to have hard conversations. It's not just about documenting it on a piece of paper."

 

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New York NY/ State Seeks to Set Up Unit to Oversee Pre-K Contractors

 

By David M. Halbfinger

New York Times

September 7, 2012

 

The New York State Education Department said Friday that it wanted to create a unit to oversee contractors in its program for disabled preschoolers, train the contractors about their financial responsibilities and subject them to rigorous audits on a regular basis.

• The department was responding to reports of soaring costs and brazen fraud in the $2 billion program for children in special-education prekindergarten.
• It also said it was studying ways to eliminate financial incentives that encourage contractors to inflate or even overstate their expenses - costs that are then reimbursed by the state and local governments.

The special-education preschool system serves about 60,000 children a year and is far more expensive, per child, in New York than in other states, The New York Times reported in June. Yearly bills exceed $200,000 a child in some cases. New York City's spending has nearly doubled in just six years.

 

Unlike other states, New York relies almost entirely on private contractors to deliver services to 3- to 5-year-olds with physical, learning, developmental and other disabilities. One factor in the rising costs, The Times reported, is lax oversight, which has been exploited by some of those contractors, nonprofit and for-profit companies alike.

• Audits released this summer by the state comptroller have highlighted contractors who took millions of dollars from the program by giving relatives no-show jobs or reimbursing themselves for things like luxury cars, out-of-state homes and other personal expenses.
• Two companies have been shut down in conjunction with the audits, and at least four contractors have been charged criminally.

In a memorandum, dated Thursday, to a committee of the State Board of Regents, the executive deputy commissioner of the Education Department, Valerie Grey, conceded that the department was failing to scrutinize contractors adequately, but attributed this to a shortage of workers. An internal review, Ms. Grey wrote, "concluded that a significant number of staff needed to be added to perform baseline program oversight duties."

 

For example, the department's rate-setting unit, which reviews detailed expenditure reports and student rolls to calculate tuition reimbursement rates for contractors, relied on 17 workers to set more than 2,700 separate rates for special education programs last year, she wrote. And decreases in the unit's staff over the past eight years have doubled the workload for those who remained, she said.

 

Ms. Grey also said more workers were needed in regional offices, whose responsibilities include making periodic site visits to special education preschools. (In interviews, contractors have said these visits are rare.)

 

Her memo, which did not specify costs, asked the Regents, whose approval would be needed to make the changes, to consider new audit and training requirements for preschool special education companies, much like new rules for public school districts that were enacted in 2005 after the theft of $11 million by district administrators in Roslyn, on Long Island.

 

It also recommended making preschool companies go through a vetting process before obtaining or renewing contracts, publicly releasing some of the vast trove of data that is compiled by the state about each preschool contractor, and reviewing the way the department handles allegations by whistle-blowers about these contractors.

 

Preschool contractors have become an influential lobbying force in Albany, where they have regularly rallied parents of disabled children to protest changes to the program. But one group of contractors, Agencies for Children's Therapy Services came out last month in favor of reforms, including mandatory new audits, a strict code of conduct and tough penalties for violators.

 

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Denver/ EDITORIAL: Public Schools Makes Case for $515 Million Tax Increase

 

By Steve MacMillan [Editor Public Policy/Online Projects]

Denver Post

September 7, 2012

 

Denver Public Schools Superintendent Tom Boasberg believes he can make a compelling case that voters should approve a tax hike in November that will give DPS an extra $515 million.

 

He said in a meeting Friday with the Denver Post editorial board that DPS is the fastest growing school district in the state and has grown faster in the last five years than school districts in any of the largest 50 cities in the country.

• The number of students graduating is up 30 percent since the 2005-06 school year,
• DPS has tripled the number of students taking Advanced Placement courses, and it has had
• double-digit increases in student proficiency in reading, math, writing and science in the past seven years, he said.

"I think we can make a very strong investment case... We are just completely outperforming the rest of the state," Boasberg said. "It's a remarkable growth story."

 

As the political season hits full throttle, Denver Public Schools will be beating the drum for the two tax measures - a $49 million mill levy and a $466 million bond issue - that Boasberg says are "critical for kids."

 

Both DPS measures will be on the Nov. 6 ballot, as will tax hike requests from other metro area school districts, including Cherry Creek, Jefferson County and Aurora.

• The bond money will be used to maintain, renovate and expand aging facilities, construct new buildings to handle enrollment increases in southwest Denver, far southeast Denver, Stapleton and Green Valley Ranch and expand technology for education and operations.
• The mill levy will dedicate $15 million to instructional support, including hiring tutors for students needing intensive intervention, $11 million for enrichment programs such as music, art and physical education, and $13 million for early childhood education.

If approved, the mill levy and bond issue would add about $143 to the annual tax bill for a Denver resident whose home is valued at $225,000.

 

Boasberg said over the last three years, state funding for DPS has been cut more than $800 per student. The district has more than 80,000 students.

 

~~~~~~~~~

 

Washington DC/ BOOK REVIEW: Fire in the Ashes by Jonathan Kozol

 

By Emily Bazelon

Slate.com [Washington Post]

Sept. 7, 2012

The Conscience

 

I recently spent a morning in family court in Brooklyn. In one of several cases over four hours, I watched Judge Daniel Turbow try to figure out whether a 9-year-old in foster care should go home to his mother. She wanted the boy back but admitted he'd missed day after day of school last fall because she couldn't get herself or him up on time. She also blamed him, a little angrily, for dawdling in the bathroom. The boy's teacher testified that she'd tried to help by giving him an alarm clock. Also that when he came to school dirty and smelly, she talked to the whole class about washing and doing laundry, so as not to embarrass him. The boy listened to all of this, looking clean and pressed in a turquoise polo shirt.

 

This wasn't the most alarming case I observed in Judge Turbow's court. But the complicated lives hinted at by the mother's peevishness, the teacher's helplessness, and the boy's quiet attention left me with the feeling that to understand anything about these families, I would have to spend months in that building and, more importantly, outside it, with them.

 

For 45 years, that's what we've had Jonathan Kozol for. He has been an exemplar of precisely this kind of long-term, painstaking reporting. After graduating from Harvard and going to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in the 1960s, he taught school in Boston's mostly black neighborhood of Roxbury-until he was fired for using unapproved texts, including Langston Hughes' poetry.

 

Kozol's journal became his first book, 1967's Death at an Early Age. It won a National Book Award, and began his career as America's conscience. Kozol has stayed resolutely on the poverty beat, the overeducated white guy determined to make the country see what it was like for black people to live in the Martinique, New York's hellhole of a welfare hotel in the 1980s, or, when his reporting embarrassed the city into closing such disaster zones, in the poorest and most crime-ridden pocket of the South Bronx. If you work in an inner city school, you have surely read him. Ditto if you are one of the excellent writers who has followed him into the inner city: Alex Kotlowitz, Leon Dash, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Katherine Boo, David Simon, Paul Tough.

 

What, in the end, has such a distinguished career accomplished? Kozol himself sounds like Eeyore. "I'd say there's a lot to be guilty about," he told the Times in 1995, the year he published my favorite of his books, Amazing Grace. "If I had succeeded in everything I had tried to write, starting in 1965, there wouldn't be a neighborhood like this. Now there are more, and they're worse than ever before. I feel, in the end, as if everything I've done has been a failure." That's a surprising, and staggering, degree of power to imagine for oneself as a writer. But Kozol's intensity and moral rectitude has always been part of his appeal. He is aghast about aspects of American life that most of us can't defend but would prefer not to think about.

 

All of which is to say that Kozol is a particular sort of towering liberal figure, and if his politics have gone out of fashion, well, poverty and social dysfunction have not, as my day in Brooklyn family court reminded me. And so I turned to Kozol's new book, Fire in the Ashes, with great curiosity about what he is thinking these days, at the distinguished age of 76. The book's subtitle, "Twenty-five Years Among the Poorest Children in America," is promising.

 

What became of the children Kozol wrote about decades ago, and what does Kozol make of their experiences? Kozol is congenitally hesitant to answer those questions-the strength and the weakness of his approach. He's reluctant to draw grand conclusions from individual stories, which is commendable enough-but at this late point in his career, also frustrating. If the book is his swan song, it should resound like one. If Jonathan Kozol can't figure this out, who can?

 

Kozol begins with a grim pair of stories about two boys he calls Eric and Christopher (characters' names have been changed to protect their privacy). For more than four years in the 1980s, beginning when he was 11, Eric lived in New York's shelter hotels with his mother, Vicky, and younger sister, Lisette. "He was very much aware of the sordidness of his surroundings, the unscrupulous behavior of the governing officials, the open market for narcotics," Kozol writes in his slightly formal prose. When he met Eric and his family in 1993, the city had moved them to a poor section of the Bronx, Mott Haven. "Eric struck me as a complicated boy," Kozol tells us. "In spite of all he had been through, he had an element of likability and even of good humor. But he found it difficult to be transparent."

 

One day in 1996, Kozol got a call from a doctor in Montana who'd read Amazing Grace and was part of a church that wanted to help a Mott Haven family resettle in their small town. Kozol was uncertain about this idea, but Vicky jumped at it. The social experiment went well for Lisette, who makes it to college and is about to become a paralegal when Kozol catches up with her at 26, but badly for Eric. Wary and suspicious of the adults who reached out to him, he dropped out of school, got a local girl pregnant, ran into trouble with the cops, and probably dealt drugs. When Vicky was evicted in 2000 from the home the church helped provide, the doctor blamed Eric for breaking into her house when she was working at night and blasting music with his friends. Vicky started drinking heavily, and then in 2001, she called Kozol with devastating news: Eric was dead, shot in the head, an apparent suicide.

 

Christopher also grew up in the shelter hotels and also moved to Mott Haven as a teenager. He didn't go to Montana to unravel; he managed that in the Bronx, where he was convicted for attempted murder as part of a group that threw a boy onto the train tracks. Asked to write a letter to support Christopher's bid to reduce his sentence, Kozol did so once, reluctantly, but refused to a second time, because "there was no indication that he felt remorseful or responsible for what he'd done." It's not surprising when Christopher dies of a heroin overdose after he's released from prison. In fact, to be cold about it-in a way that Kozol would never be-Christopher's death comes as something of a relief, because he has become a terrible drain on his much more functional younger sister, Miranda.

 

Kozol hesitates to draw connections between Eric and Christopher, or Lisette and Miranda. Instead of analysis, we get many pages of stilted dialogue between Kozol and Vicky, and then this elliptical semi-conclusion about why these two other brothers fell apart while their younger sisters rallied: "I did not look for 'patterns' but could not escape the sense that there were parallels." For sure, but what do the parallels mean-what can we learn from them? Kozol does not say. He acknowledges the "poor judgment" of Eric and Christopher, terribly disadvantaged boys who turned into terrible men, but he does not want his readers "to see these outcomes as the consequence of circumstances far beyond society's control." I don't either. But when Kozol simplistically asks why any city would house a mother and children in a neighborhood like Mott Haven, without any discussion of cost or context, I found myself getting cranky. It's so much easier to ask the question than to grapple with the answers.

 

In the second half of the book, Kozol tells happier stories about children who in young adulthood have pulled themselves into stability, because they had especially devoted parents or with a major assist from a local priest and a private school education, paid for by a small foundation Kozol created for this purpose. "These children had unusual advantages," Kozol points out. "Someone intervened in every case." True, but again, not much of an explanation. Unlike Tough, for example, whose new book How Children Succeed also tracks the resilience of a few outstanding poor children, Kozol does not dive into social science or brain research, or even much into the debates, old and new, about the end of welfare, the culture of poverty, or education reform. He has been criticized before for "pious moralizing that is short on solutions," in the words of the Times. Racial segregation is an obvious and long-standing villain in his work, but here as elsewhere he doesn't make the empirical case for why integration is his favored solution. Maybe this is too much to ask: It's just not Kozol's thing. But I found myself longing for more of his thinking on the structural forces that drive poverty, given his depth of knowledge and experience.

 

As the book nears its conclusion, Kozol mentions to the child of Mott Haven to whom he is closest, a girl named Pineapple, that he is having trouble finishing his story. "I said I wasn't sure how much had changed back in the neighborhood where she and I had met, but I told her I kept going back and forth on this because I didn't want to end up on a dreary note." She tells him to think positive; she says she and her sister are determined to go back to the neighborhood with their college degrees and "you know? Make little changes that we can? ... Picking battles that we have a chance to win?"

 

It's tempting to read Kozol's doubts as a reflection not just on his book's "dreary note" but as a self-judgment of his own life's work. And Pineapple's response-repeating back to Kozol his own aphorisms, uttered to her years before-is in fact an antidote to his own gloom. OK, Kozol hasn't ended school segregation or convinced middle-class people to live side by side with poor ones. But that's more than any writer, even one who has served for decades as our conscience, can ask of himself. Over his career Kozol has wrought many small changes and won many individual battles. When I'm 76 I hope I can say the same.

 

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New York NY/: OPINION: America Can 'Out-Educate and Out-Compete' Anyone

 

By Sarah Butrymowicz

Hechinger Report [Hechingerreport.org]

September 10, 2012

 

President Barack Obama had barely begun his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention on Thursday before uttering a word Republican nominee Mitt Romney didn't mention until he was three-quarters through: Education.

 

Obama addressed a handful of specific education goals, asking for help in recruiting 200,000 math and science teachers within the next 10 years and in improving early childhood education in the U.S. He also made a clear connection between education and a recovering economy.

 

"Help give 2 million workers the chance to learn skills at their community college that will lead directly to a job," Obama continued. "Help us work with college and universities to cut in half the growth of tuition costs over the next ten years."

 

Later in the speech, Obama touted his record in both k-12 and higher education. "For the first time in a generation, nearly every state has answered our call to raise their standards for teaching and learning," Obama said, referring to the Common Core Standards.

 

That remark was the only allusion to his signature, controversial, Race to the Top program. In a competition for federal grants, states promised a slew of education reforms, including adopting the Common Core.  Race to the Top, Obama's largest k-12 initiative, however, has been missing from convention speeches.

 

The president's speech included a dig at Romney's "borrow money from your parents" advice to students, and continued his argument that education is a gateway to opportunity - and to the middle class - as it was in his own life.

 

"The government has a role in this," he said. "But teachers must inspire. Principals must lead. Parents must instill a thirst for learning. And students - you've got to do the work. Together we can out-educate and out-compete any nation on Earth."

 

The cheering crowd included over 200 delegates who are also members of the National Education Association (NEA), the country's largest teachers union. Despite disagreements with Obama over policies like merit pay and tying teacher evaluation to test scores, both the NEA and the American Federation of Teachers have thrown their support behind Obama.

 

"I really do appreciate how he talks about the value of education, the role it plays not only in the lives of the individuals, the young people who are being educated, but the role education plays in our economic development," NEA President Dennis Van Roekel said in an interview with The Hechinger Report.

 

Vice President Joe Biden did not focus on education, beyond telling his wife Jill - a lifelong educator - how proud he is of her work as a teacher.  And the talk included two quick mentions of college cost and attainment.

 

On the final night of the convention, some speakers slammed Romney's education track record and plans.  Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter argued that "Romney doesn't get it."

 

"He recently visited a school in west Philly and told teachers he knows more than they do about what works for their students," Nutter said. "He said class size doesn't matter.'

 

"Doesn't matter if our teachers can't give our children the attention they need, that doesn't matter?'' Nutter asked.

 

At the school visit, Romney had cited a study that found no difference in class size among different countries as well as his own survey in Massachusetts that found the same thing. "Just getting smaller classrooms didn't seem to be the key," Romney said.

 

Research has demonstrated a murky relationship between class size and student performance; some studies have shown that there is no significant impact. Large class sizes, though, remain a major complaint of parents.

 

Nutter also criticized Romney for vetoing a bill that would provide universal pre-k in the state. (Romney said it was too expensive and he wanted to wait and see the results of a pilot program first).

 

And Montana Gov. Brian Schwietzer charged that Romney cut higher education by 14 percent and sent college cost skyrocketing.

 

"That's okay for those who can afford it," Schwietzer said.

 

As governor, Romney had a plan to consolidate the state's higher education system that was never realized. Fees at state universities did increase from $2,959 to $4,836 during Romney's term. And, during the state's fiscal crisis, the university system was hit with about a 14 percent budget cut, according to the Boston Globe.

 

Overall, higher education was once again given more attention than k-12 issues. For the third time, Democrats brought college students on stage to praise Obama's belief in them.

 

Admiral John Nathman, surrounded on stage by veterans, also took the stage to praise Obama's work to improve veteran access to higher education.

 

Representative Donna Edwards (D-Md.) and the actress Eva Longoria also spoke of college costs, taking out loans to getting grants and working to pay for college.

 

"I did whatever it took and four years later, I got my degree," Longoria said. "More importantly, I got a key to American opportunity. Because that's who we are - a nation that rewards ambition with opportunity."

 

 

~~~~~~~~~

 

London England/ OPINION: Why Would Kids Read Books If Their Parents Never Do?

Children cannot be blamed for preferring computer games to books if they never see their parents engrossed in a novel

 

By Charlie Higson [Author, latest book is The Sacrifice]

London Telegraph

September 10, 2012

 

Charlie Higson, writer of the Young Bond spy series and The Enemy zombie saga, says parents should look at their own reading habits if their offspring rarely pick up a book.

 

His suggestion follows a National Literacy Trust survey which found that fewer children than ever are reading in their spare time, with one in six admitting they were too embarrassed to read in front of friends for fear of being labeled a "geek".

 

Higson said he was taking the findings with a pinch of salt because "surveys are surveys and kids are kids, and they don't always tell the truth".

 

But he advised parents: "The way to deal with it is not to worry about it but to take a gentle approach and read a lot yourself.

 

"It's all, 'Ooh, kids don't read' but how many adults still read in a way that they used to? Adults' lives are full of other things.

 

"Do kids see their dad sitting in the living room reading a book? I should imagine they don't very often. I read a lot but I mainly read at night when I go to bed, or on holiday.

"If adults make books more a part of their lives then they will become more a part of their kids' lives."

 

But parents need not be too worried if their children appear to spend more time online or playing video games than reading books, according to Higson.

 

"When I was a kid, if you wanted to entertain yourself you went out and played or watched TV on the three channels available. If you wanted real excitement, you'd have to go to books to get it. But now you've got computer games and I think they're brilliant," he said.

 

"To say kids aren't reading is not correct. Kids are reading a lot more than they ever did but they're not reading books - they're reading on screens.

 

"If you play computer games, there is a lot of reading involved; if you're talking to people on Facebook, there is a lot of reading and writing. Twitter's the same.

 

"Yes, there's a different way of communicating through screens which is probably less lengthy, but they're still communicating to each other. There is no such thing as 'the English language' - it changes every day."

 

Introducing children to the classics needs to be done with care, Higson believes, because many of those books will strike today's youngsters as old-fashioned.

 

He said: "If you read them to your kids, you can make them work and that's the only way because often the language and behaviour is so different from their own experience.

 

"Roald Dahl still works brilliantly, though. It's amazing how he just had an understanding of what kids wanted to read about. Those books haven't dated at all."

 

Higson, 54, a star of The Fast Show before becoming a successful author, also stressed the importance of school libraries in improving child literacy, saying: "If you go into a school that has a brilliant librarian, you really notice the difference. Books become central to the school.

 

"Losing the libraries is bad enough. What we mustn't lose is the librarians. They are the people who do so much work in this country promoting reading."