Carlsbad/ $3.4 Million Technology Bond Would Replace Lost Funding for Carlsbad Schools
By Ben Gibson
Carlsbad Current-Argus
September 17, 2012
The $3.4 million technology bond proposed for Carlsbad Municipal Schools would replace a budget shortfall caused by the district's failure last fall to apply for state funding, according to school officials.
The board failed to renew the state's Public School Capital Improvements Act, more commonly referred to as SB-9, which allows districts to raise funds through a property levy over a six-year period.
- "It was an oversight. We had some staff changes and we looked over it. We were supposed to have an election for it but we failed to get it done in time," Superintendent Gary Perkowski said.
The SB-9 levy should have been voted on earlier this year since it was last approved in 2006. After failing to have residents vote on the bond, CMS has been forced to find alternatives to make up for the funds.
The technology bond being considered at a special CMS School Board meeting today (Sept. 18) will be used to pay for a number of technological upgrades officials say are needed, including a number of updates to schools' computer labs as well as the wiring within the schools.
While the technology bond will cover a number of hardware and software upgrades, CMS will look for other ways to cover other expenses until SB-9 can be voted on again in February 2013.
- SB-9 funds can be used for building improvements, property purchases, maintenance, vehicles and classroom hardware and software. The levy assesses a fee attached to property in the county which is then matched by the state.
Perkowski said the bond will be paid for by October of next year, meaning that if SB-9 is renewed, it will be after the current technology bonds are paid off.
If the proposed technology bond passes, Perkowski said that a local bond will be financed at a 0.2 percentage rate, costing the city only $6,252.22 in financing.
CMS is also looking to build $60 million in a separate bond for four new elementary schools, prompting CMS board president Steve West to speak to concerns that the technology will go to soon-to-be-unused schools.
West said the concerns were warranted, but there is no guarantee that some of the older schools won't be needed.
- "We can't just say to students, 'You'll have to wait a few more years and you can go to a nicer school.' That just isn't fair," West said. He said that due to Carlsbad's growth and this year's addition of 160 students, some of these older schools may still be in use as the city expands.
- "We have to be careful about what we do with these schools. We may not be tearing them all down. Some of them are in bad shape, but some of the other schools we may need," West said.
West also pointed out that, although he has no desire to increase the rate at which CMS uses the bonds to generate revenue, Carlsbad has one of the lower bonding rates throughout the state.
In the end, CMS will have to consider how to fully replace the SB-9 money if it isn't renewed next year.
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Santa Fe/ Outsiders Pushing Charter Schools
By Hailey Heinz
ABQ Journal Staff Writer
September 18, 2012
Among the nine proposed charter schools to be considered this week by the Public Education Commission, two applications come from an El Paso group, one would be fully online and use curriculum from a national, for-profit company, and one would be based on a model that began in Arizona.
That is troubling to Rep. Rick Miera, who co-chairs the Legislative Education Study Committee.
- "Charters are supposed to be all about local people getting involved and doing something very specific for their community," said Miera, D-Albuquerque. "It's community-oriented, community-driven. I think we're crossing the line on what our law is very specific in saying."
New Mexico's charter law spells out that charters are meant to give parents and communities an avenue for creating new schools and says they may not contract with for-profit companies to manage the school.
Bruce Hegwer, director of the New Mexico Coalition for Charter Schools, said New Mexico should be open to successful charter school models from other states.
- "Some of the applications from out-of-state organizations have been very successful in other states, so they're looking to replicate their model here in New Mexico," he said. "And so I think if they've been successful elsewhere, they stand a good chance of being successful here."
According to a report by the LESC staff this summer, this is the first time multiple out-of-state organizations have applied to open multiple schools in New Mexico. This year, many applicants began with a bid to open schools in several districts but then dropped the applications in all but the most welcoming communities.
The report has caught attention from public education advocates in Albuquerque, as well as officials at Albuquerque Public Schools, who have voiced concerns about privatization and loss of local control in public education.
The Public Education Commission is to meet Wednesday and Thursday to decide whether to approve the applications. The charter schools division of the PED has recommended the commission deny five of the nine applications, but not for the same reasons that concern Miera and others. Their objections stem from concerns that the charters don't have solid, research-based plans in place.
The LESC report highlights some particular applicants:
- Academic Opportunities Academy applied to open charters in five New Mexico districts, but since has withdrawn three of them. That leaves two applications, one for a school in Anthony and the other in Deming.
Mark Casavantes, one of the school's founders, emphasized he and several other would-be board members have ties to New Mexico and currently live in El Paso. He and his partners ran a private school in El Paso with about 20 students, but closed it this year to focus on charter start-up efforts. They originally looked at Indiana and Oklahoma, but instead are focused on Texas and New Mexico. The group has recently been designated a nonprofit, and Casavantes said it would establish a local board in New Mexico. Their school would track students' progress and allow them to work at their own pace, with a combination of online and in-person teaching. The PED's charter school division has recommended denial of both Academic Opportunities applications.
- New Mexico Connections Academy would be an online school for students statewide. Teachers would be certified in New Mexico and would work out of Santa Fe. The school would purchase curriculum from the for-profit Connections Academy, which provides online courses around the country.
Paul Gessing, a founder, is president of the Rio Grande Foundation, which advocates for free markets and limited government. He emphasized the school is not a foundation project. He said using curriculum from Connections Academy is akin to schools buying textbooks and other materials from for-profit companies, and the school can switch providers in the future. The PED's charter division has recommended approval of Connections Academy.
- StarShine Academy Lisa Law Peace School, proposed in Santa Fe, is part of the StarShine Academy line of schools, headquartered in Phoenix. StarShine, a nonprofit with a for-profit parent company, has two charters in Arizona and related "outreach schools" in Africa. The school's focus would be creating a small school environment, targeting those who have struggled in traditional schools or dropped out.
Trish McCarty, of StarShine in Arizona, said her husband is from Santa Fe, and she has ties to the city. She said there would be a local governing board. Her application was denied last year, and the state charter school division is recommending denial this year.
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Farmington/ New Mexico Virtual Academy: Virtual Charter School Questioned
By Hailey Heinz
ABQ Journal Staff Writer
September 18, 2012
Most of the students enrolled in Farmington's newest charter school don't live in Farmington.
Last month, the New Mexico Virtual Academy began offering online classes to 500 students in grades six through 12, most of whom live in Bernalillo County. The school was approved last year by the Farmington school board, but has raised eyebrows because its curriculum was purchased from K-12 Inc., a for-profit company based in Virginia.
- K-12 Inc. is under investigation in Florida, based on allegations its online courses were taught by teachers who weren't qualified to teach those classes.
- Spokesman Jeff Kwitowski said a company internal investigation found no evidence to support the allegations.
- K-12 Inc. schools also have come under fire in some states for low test scores.
But even before news broke of the Florida investigation, the Farmington charter was regarded with suspicion by public education advocates, who say tax dollars are leaving the state and going into the hands of private companies.
Robert Baade, who founded Robert F. Kennedy charter high in Albuquerque, is an advocate of public school choice, but he is concerned about Virtual Academy and others like it. An application for a similar virtual school is now before the Public Education Commission. He said such schools are "Trojan horses."
- "You wheel it in and say 'This is a charter.' You open it up and it's a charter management organization giving iPads to students to work from home, and then charging that charter school per class, and then taking that money out of state. That's an issue for me," he said.
Baade is involved with Albuquerque Interfaith, a nonprofit that advocates for public education, among other issues. The group has spoken against new charters, citing concerns about privatization and education funding being unduly strained by new charters.
Kwitowski contended private companies have been serving public education for decades, in the form of textbooks and other contract services.
Lawrence Palmer, Virtual Academy board president, said he is aware of the Florida investigation. He said he has seen documentation showing all teachers live in New Mexico, are New Mexico certified and are qualified for their classes.
Palmer said K-12 Inc. is providing an important and necessary service.
- "Are we paying K-12 Inc. more than we would to buy textbooks? Absolutely. Because we are paying them to manage a virtual school," Palmer said. "It is highly complex, and we needed to have someone with expertise in this area."
It is unclear how much of Virtual Academy's budget will be paid to K-12 Inc. because the contract does not specify dollar amounts.
A contract between the charter governing board and K-12 Inc. specifies the company will get certain percentages of the school's budget, after teacher salaries and other expenses have been covered.
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ABQ/ EDITORIAL: APS Wired Into Smart Online Credit Controls
ABQ Journal Staff Writer
September 18, 2012
Albuquerque Public Schools is getting ready to unplug the insta-credit.
That's the one where you log on, enter your credit-card number and pay $200 to re-take senior English over a weekend so you can walk the line at graduation.
In the wake of the state Public Education Department signing off on an Albuquerque High School student who did just that via an online course at Southwest Secondary charter high school, the APS board is working on getting an online-credit policy in writing.
Preliminary discussion has it complete with administrative rules that set out benchmarks that can ensure not only that the course meets APS curriculum standards but that the student has actually absorbed the content. A final vote is scheduled Oct. 9.
The key will be in spelling out who reviews the potential courses and subsequent coursework.
It's that specificity - which PED says every district has the right to implement - that will help maintain academic credibility in district grades and diplomas, and keep online courses from becoming the quick-and-dirty way to graduate or maintain academic eligibility for a sport.
Conversely, allowing credit for acceptable online courses not offered by APS, or any other traditional district for that matter, will help expand students' learning opportunities.
APS Superintendent Winston Brooks says the district doesn't want to discourage online learning but needs to ensure that learning is high quality.
That's a smart approach to online learning, one that should be replicated not only across all districts but all courses offered in New Mexico's classrooms.
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Santa Fe/ 3 LETTERS: Dollars for Executives, None for Teachers
The New Mexican
September 17, 2012
1. Margaret Sears, Santa Fe
The Sept. 16 article, "Raises for top administrators rile teachers," announcing huge salary increases for five Santa Fe Public Schools administrators disturbs me greatly. The administrators named in the article will receive an average of $5,000 annual pay raises. What did the teachers receive? Nothing!
These administrators' salaries range between $92,000 and $105,000. How many classroom teachers are so generously rewarded? To quote the article, the raises "were targeted at keeping high-value employees in place." The message I take from that is that teachers, whose salaries are far below that range, are not "high-value." Also, two members were added to the superintendent's team. How many additional teachers have been hired this year?
Learning is what happens in the classroom between teacher and student, not in the front office. In a capitalist country like the U.S., salaries matter. They often determine respect. How much respect does $40,000 or less earn? Is anyone listening?
2. By Mike Gross, School board member, 1985-91, Santa Fe
Regarding "Raises for top administrators rile teachers" (Sept. 16): The remarkable thing about the article on Santa Fe Public Schools teacher anger at executive pay raises is not the inevitable tug of war between teachers and administrators over money. It is the job descriptions of those receiving the raises. One administrator went from $99,530 to $105,099, a $5,569 bump of about 6 percent, while another went from $75,383 to $92,718, a stupendous 23 percent raise in one year.
What's really shocking is that the former is responsible for "technology and operations" as well as "finance"; the other is "director of technology information." If anyone can tell me the difference between the two, I'd be grateful. Don't they overlap significantly? I bet their job descriptions are written in the vague pseudo-professionalese that characterizes so much of educational discourse.
3. Result of findings
By James Ball, Santa Fe
Those who are currently working on a new teacher evaluation system for New Mexico teachers might be confusing a comprehensive evaluation with the findings of that evaluation.
"Meets competency" or "does not meet competency" are the findings of a comprehensive evaluation. They are not, and never were intended to be, the comprehensive evaluation itself.
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Palo Alto CA/ Startup Hopefuls Test Ideas with Educators
By Jason Tomassini
Education Week, Vol. 32, Issue 4 [Edweek.org]
September 17, 2012
Mandela Schumacher-Hodge, a former public school teacher and Ph.D. candidate in urban schooling, stood on the stage in a small auditorium in the America Online offices here one recent afternoon as three Silicon Valley investors told her how to best communicate with teachers.
It was a dress rehearsal for the next day, when the auditorium would be filled with 100 teachers and school administrators. They would watch Ms. Schumacher-Hodge pitch the education company she recently founded-Tioki, a LinkedIn-style professional network for educators-along with 10 other entrepreneurs.
The event, called "educator day," is one of the most important and nerve-racking for the people taking part in Imagine K12, the biggest incubator program in the United States specifically for education technology startups.
Many entrepreneurs in K-12 believe technology can solve education's problems, but don't work to understand those problems before prescribing technology to solve them. That frustrates educators and can be a recipe for failure for fledgling companies.
The founders of Imagine K12-Tim Brady, Alan Louie, and Geoff Ralston-made their fortunes working for some of Silicon Valley's star companies, like Yahoo and Google. But they're trying to change that dynamic by helping people who start education businesses understand what educators truly need and then create products to meet those needs.
- Twice a year, for three months, Imagine K12 offers a handful of companies seed money, business guidance, and connections to major investors.
- Some of those companies have gone on to raise millions of dollars in funding, riding an influx of venture capital into education that resembles, on a smaller scale, the consumer-technology boom that's produced such companies as Facebook and Twitter.
Ms. Schumacher-Hodge, through her own experience and interviews with dozens of educators, believes her company could help teachers. But her pitch would soon need to convince a room full of skeptics, and the three Imagine K12 partners critiquing her work specialize in speaking to end users.
At the practice session on this August day, her argument for Tioki centered on a hypothetical story about a teacher who wanted a way to showcase her skills to admiring education bloggers. But the partners wanted her to change it.
"Great voice, great enthusiasm; just get us cases that resonate more with the audience," Mr. Brady said. Ms. Schumacher-Hodge stood with her hands folded at her waist, wearing a headset microphone, forcing a smile and nodding.
The feedback continued. They recommended making the pitch about helping teachers get jobs; Ms. Schumacher-Hodge thought that would give the company's other services short shrift. But the partners countered that it's not actually about whether the user needs a job or not, it's how the product makes him or her feel.
"The profession of teaching needs to be thought of on the same level as everything else," Mr. Brady said, pointing to a need for services that empower teachers. "And there's nothing that does that."
Identifying a Disconnect
Imagine K12 started a year and a half ago after Messrs. Brady, Louie, and Ralston, looking for a mid-career change of pace, decided to turn their shared interest in education into their primary focus.
- "The availability of knowledge and information has expanded to places never known before, and yet we teach children like we did a hundred years ago," Mr. Ralston said. "That's a disconnect we know has to change."
Rather than start an education company themselves, they decided to use their money to finance others.
- For each company accepted into Imagine K12-about 250 applied for the three-month summer program, and 11 were accepted-
- the partners take a 6 percent stake in exchange for $10,000 to $20,000 in seed money.
- All of the Imagine K12 companies are for-profit, as is Imagine K12 itself.
The companies receive counseling, guest speakers, introductions to investors, and a "curriculum" on everything from accounting to education policy to the art of setting up display tables at conferences. Partners hold weekly office hours with each company and organize group dinners, parties, and poker nights. The program culminates in "demo day," at the end of October, when each company pitches a functioning product to a group of investors.
- "Imagine K12 is our best pipeline," said Jennifer Carolan, a co-leader of the NewSchools Seed Fund.
- NewSchools recently participated in a $1.6 million round of funding for ClassDojo, an online behavior management tool, and a $2.2 million funding round for Educreations, a whiteboard lesson creation tool.
Both are former Imagine K12 companies.
In education, there are pitch contests, grassroots organizations that support startups, and conferences that showcase new companies, but no other education incubators that offer the kind of seed money in exchange for equity that Imagine K12 does.
Such initiatives have emerged as education becomes more hospitable to technology-minded entrepreneurs. More teachers are entering the workforce as digital natives, a generational shift helping to prompt the often slow-to-adapt field to embrace technology.
Venture capital is picking up as well.
- In 2005, $10 million in venture capital was invested in the K-12 market, a major drop-off from the years of the dot-com bubble.
- In 2011, venture capitalists put $334 million into K-12, according to GSV Advisors, a Chicago-based education investment bank. That money also now goes further. Web hosting is cheaper, bandwidth is becoming faster, and cloud-based applications, which are run through remote servers instead of costly on-site servers, are proliferating.
- Now smaller investments, or seed investments, can transform promising ideas into actual companies within weeks.
"It's now so inexpensive to start a new venture that you don't need to have a bunch of connections to billionaires to get off the ground," said Kevin Carey, the director of the education policy program at the New America Foundation, a nonprofit think thank based in Washington. "You just need to be a teacher with a good idea."
Among the 11 companies participating in Imagine K12 this summer, there are four people who have taught in K-12 classrooms. The rest are a mix of computer programmers, Web designers, business strategists, and people with experience in quantitative finance. They range in age from 18 to 51.
Mr. Brady said applicants were considered only if they had "a compelling tie" to education. But the entrepreneurial community also realizes the importance of attracting talented technologists to education.
- "Great technology is really hard to find," said Laurie Racine, the co-founder of Startl, a New York City-based incubator currently reconsidering its format. She added: "Great teachers are not so hard to find."
That view can be a point of contention. Organizations like 4.0 Schools and Startup Weekend Edu focus on fostering entrepreneurship among local communities of educators, instead of the national, technology-centric approach of Imagine K12.
- "Imagine K12 has really struggled with a lack of educators in the pipeline," said Matt Candler, the founder and chief executive officer of 4.0 Schools, based in New Orleans. His nonprofit organization distributes small amounts of seed money and holds classes, contests, and fellowships to equip educators with entrepreneurial skills and match them with technologists.
Imagine K12 "can outcode anybody in the pipeline," he said, "but a lot of the [entrepreneurs] that we met, they don't understand the pain points, or the landscape."
In response to such criticism, Mr. Brady stressed that in the current landscape, technologists are necessary for great teacher-led ideas to come to fruition. And to aid those new to education, Imagine K12 brought on its first "teacher-in-residence," Jennie Dougherty, who taught at a high school in Massachusetts for several years, to offer a consistent classroom perspective for the participating teams.
- "Until you get to a school or a classroom and see what the challenges are, it's really difficult to start a business in education," said Preston Silverman, a former technology strategist and high school teacher in India who founded Raise Labs, an online platform for financing scholarships that is currently participating in Imagine K12
- For Kasey Brown, a 51-year-old Imagine K12 participant who has taught for 19 years and before that worked for Hewlett-Packard, there are still blind spots on topics like marketing.
"The downside is: You don't know what you don't know businesswise," said Ms. Brown, who, along with a 25-year-old programmer, Elliot Feinberg, co-founded DigitWhiz, an online math gaming program. "That can be a challenge."
Feedback Is Critical
In the hours leading up to "educator day," the traditional entrepreneur garb shifted slightly, from jeans and T-shirts to jeans and dress shirts. Teams set up tables in the auditorium, each with laptops for demonstrating their products, but also an array of pens and highlighters for email signups, and a wide selection of snacks to help attract users.
One startup, SmarterCookie, an online, video-based professional development tool, brought containers of cookies from Trader Joe's grocery store, while the co-founders of Raise had a detailed conversation about whether to stack pieces of chocolate on their table or lay them out in a circle.
As teachers, who were bused in from around the area, filed in, the teams started schmoozing. SmarterCookie showed a woman how to comment on a video of a teacher in class. The woman later left her email address. On a large sheet of paper that asked, "What's the best advice a teacher gave you?" she wrote, "Take a deep breath."
'Educator Day' Begins
When designing Imagine K12, the partners closely followed the format of Y Combinator, a renowned incubator for consumer technology, also based in Silicon Valley. But they added "educator day" because they believe teachers should be a larger part of the software-development process.
- "Feedback from the people actually using the product is critical," Mr. Louie said during his remarks to the audience of about 100. "Times have changed, and you educators no longer have to be on the receiving end of bad technology."
Typically, new products in education require extensive research, costly focus groups, and lengthy sales cycles that prevent innovation, Imagine K12's partners believe. In the new technological climate, teachers can test products through the Web, and they're directly reachable by cell phone, Skype, Facebook, and Google Chat. Companies can enter the market with early versions of products-or, in startup parlance, "minimum viable products"-and quickly get feedback from teachers on what works and what doesn't.
"Take a pile of dirt, and add one feature to it. That's your first product," said Mr. Candler, of 4.0 Schools. "And then you ship it to a teacher."
As the educator-day audience visited the Imagine K12 companies' display tables, Ms. Brown hoped to gather feedback on DigitWhiz.
Lorin King, a 5th grade math teacher at a charter school in East Oakland, Calif., said she was looking for a fractions lesson for her students. DigitWhiz doesn't have a fraction game, Ms. Brown said, because, by learning fundamental skills like multiplication, students can learn more complex concepts, like simplifying fractions. So she showed Ms. King a beach-themed game for sorting like terms.
"If they nail these down, everything else is an application," she told Ms. King. Then, perhaps remembering the spirit of educator day, she added: "But if you think we should consider it ..."
Educator day began with presentations from the partners and Ms. Dougherty and then pitches from each of the 11 companies. Most of the tension and nerves from the practices and reiterations seemed to prepare the entrepreneurs, who hit their marks without any major flaws.
As recommended, Ms. Schumacher-Hodge did not use the blogger story. She instead listed a number of hypothetical scenarios that would cause a teacher to need a professional profile, including presenting herself to bloggers, but also networking and passing along a project-based-learning portfolio. Feedback from teachers that day eventually led Tioki to integrate other social networks into its own and to change its interface for posting teacher video.
In a recent interview, Ms. Brown said, based on Ms. King's feedback, DigitWhiz is developing a game on prime-number factorization that can further support fraction learning.
Changing the System
Overall, the pitches were well received, and teachers stayed long after to try the companies' products and meet the entrepreneurs. But amid the optimism and even idealism of the presentations, it was not lost on the entrepreneurs that starting an education company can be harder than some other ventures.
For founders of consumer technology companies like, say, the photo sharing application Instagram, customer adoption can be driven by being a "passive onlooker," said Bharat Madhusudan, a co-founder of current Imagine K12 company Securly, a Web-security system for schools. In education, he said, "you need to be in the field, in the trenches, meeting superintendents, decision-makers, and convincing them yours is the best way to go."
The difficulty of selling to schools is a common refrain among the companies.
- Many purchasing decisions are made by people who are not the products' end users, teachers, they point out.
- The sales process can be slow and tinged with politics, and
- because authority often rests with local agencies, there are, in many ways, different markets for each of the 50 states, or even for each of the roughly 14,000 school districts.
"Every person we talked to in ed tech said find a way to make money without selling to schools," said Mike Gerson, 25, who co-founded SmarterCookie, along with Tess Brustein, 25, a former teacher in New York City. The alternative is selling to teachers, parents, and students, which some Imagine K12 companies intend to do.
But still, the Imagine K12 entrepreneurs hope that not only will they succeed in a tough marketplace, but they can make it less challenging for those looking to innovate.
Mr. Silverman, of Raise Labs, wants to give students who can't afford college more access to financial aid. Jeremy Keeshin and Zach Galant, 22-year-old Stanford graduates who were also teaching assistants, decided to start CodeHS, an online computer-science curriculum, to help teachers and students develop better programming skills and, ultimately, become more modern citizens.
"That's what's exciting about a lot of ed-tech companies," Mr. Keeshin said. "Instead of trying to make a small change to a bad system, we are trying to come from a new angle."
The frustration among Ms. Brustein and her friends in trying to get meaningful feedback and professional development led her to start SmarterCookie. An alumna of Teach For America, she considers herself a teacher at heart, and one who is taking a risk in leaving the classroom to start a company.
"I wouldn't want to go into any other area of entrepreneurship," Ms. Brustein said. "This is where I come from. I come from education. This is what I care about."
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Washington DC/ Arts in Education Week: Let's Celebrate and Get to Work!
By Doug Herbert [Herbert is a special assistant in the Office of Innovation and Improvement and works on issues of national arts education policy and practice]
US Department of Education Press Release [Ed.gov]
September 17, 2012
As Arts in Education Week concludes, it is a time to recognize the importance of the arts a well-rounded education for all students. Through dance, music, theatre and the visual arts, young children explore the world through sight and sound, creative movement and drama.
Through the arts, young persons acquire invaluable cognitive abilities and social skills - problem solving and perseverance to name only two - that prepare them for the rigors of college, careers, and life in the 21st century. We also know through research that arts-rich schools make for quality learning environments, heightening student engagement and correlating with increases in attendance and decreases in behavior problems, as well as short and long-term academic achievement, including pursuing higher education and college completion.
Despite all this, a recent Department of Education survey tells us that for far too many students, the arts don't play a role at all in their K-12 experience. Here are some disconcerting facts as of the 2009-10 school year:
- More than 1.3 million elementary students attended schools where no music learning occurred and
- 3.9 million students, in nearly 20 percent of America's elementary schools, lacked the opportunity to paint, sculpt or draw a picture.
Since 2000, when an earlier survey occurred, the availability of theater and dance in elementary schools went from bad to worse -
- 20 percent of elementary schools offered these arts disciplines in 2000;
- in 2010, only one out of every 33 schools offered dance and one out of every 25 offered theatre.
- In more than 40 percent of our nation's secondary schools, students can graduate without taking a single arts course.
What's more troubling is the opportunity gap - the differences in access to the arts for advantaged students (in schools with less than 25 percent of students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch), and disadvantaged students (in schools with more than 76 percent of students eligible for subsidized meals). For example:
- While nearly all (97 percent) of the lowest-poverty elementary schools offered music instruction in 2009-10,
- music instruction was available in only 89 percent of the highest-poverty elementary schools.
- And the opportunity gap was similar for elementary visual arts instruction.
At the secondary level, the opportunity gaps for both music and visual arts instruction actually increased to 15 percent, with only 81 and 80 percent of high-poverty schools offering instruction in music and visual arts, respectively.
In his remarks at the April 2nd survey report release, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan declared these gaps a "bad news story" for disadvantaged students.
- They constitute "absolutely an equity issue," he said. "All children should have arts-rich schools," according to Secretary Duncan, but "it is clear that our public schools have a long way to go before they are providing a rich and rigorous arts education for all students."
OII Grants Help to Innovate and Disseminate
The Office of Innovation and Improvement supports a number of competitive funding programs to improve arts teaching and learning, better understand the effects of arts education, and disseminate effective programs and practices, including:
- OII's Arts in Education Model Development and Dissemination (AEMDD) grants are developing, implementing and evaluating innovative practices in arts teaching and learning, particularly in arts integration. [http://www2.ed.gov/programs/artsedmodel/index.html]
- Professional Development for Arts Educators (PDAE) grants are combining the efforts of school districts with the resources of arts and cultural organizations to improve the quality of both standards-based arts instruction and arts integration at all grade level. http://www2.ed.gov/programs/artsedprofdev/index.htm
- Several i3 projects are exploring promising approaches to arts teaching and learning, using federal support and technical assistance to increase their understandings of why and how their efforts result in high levels of achievement in the arts and other subjects, as well as increases in engagement, teamwork, and other byproducts of quality arts education programs. [http://www2.ed.gov/programs/innovation/index.html]
- A majority of our Promise Neighborhoods grantees have made the arts an integral part of their plans and actions. Both planning and implementation projects are involving museums and performing arts centers, film festivals, and local arts groups as well as teaching artists and folklorists in urban, suburban, and rural communities. They are making the arts a vital part of a cradle-to-career commitment to children and youth in our most distressed communities. [http://www2.ed.gov/programs/promiseneighborhoods/index.html]
Now is the Time to Act
Use this week to take stock of how the arts are doing in your schools, districts, and states. Where the arts are available and thriving, celebrate that and bring more awareness, both in the school and community, to the importance of the arts in a well-rounded education. But where arts courses and learning opportunities are in short supply or don't exist at all, take action now. To get started, visit the website of the Arts Education Partnership [http://www.aep-arts.org/] and within it, the Toolkit for Arts Access in U.S. Schools [http://www.aep-arts.org/2012/01/home-grid-2/]
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New York NY/ ESSAY: The Machines are Taking Over
By Annie Murphy Paul [Author of "Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives"]
New York Times Magazine
September 14, 2012
Neil Heffernan was listening to his fiancée, Cristina Lindquist, tutor one of her students in mathematics when he had an idea. Heffernan was a graduate student in computer science, and by this point - the summer of 1997 - he had been working for two years with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University on developing computer software to help students improve their skills. But he had come to believe that the programs did little to assist their users. They were built on elaborate theories of the student mind - attempts to simulate the learning brain.
Then it dawned on him: what was missing from the programs was the interventions teachers made to promote and accelerate learning. Why not model a computer program on a human tutor like Lindquist?
Over the next few months, Heffernan videotaped Lindquist, who taught math to middle-school students, as she tutored, transcribing the sessions word for word, hoping to isolate what made her a successful teacher. A look at the transcripts suggests the difficulties he faced. Lindquist's tutoring sessions were highly interactive: a single hour might contain more than 400 lines of dialogue. She asked lots of questions and probed her student's answers. She came up with examples based on the student's own experiences. She began sentences, and her student completed them. Their dialogue was anything but formulaic.
Lindquist: Do you know how to calculate average driving speed?
Student: I think so, but I forget.
Lindquist: Well, average speed - as your mom drove you here, did she drive the same speed the whole time?
Student: No.
Lindquist: But she did have an average speed. How do you think you calculate the average speed?
Student: It would be hours divided by 55 miles.
Lindquist: Which way is it? It's miles per hour. So which way do you divide?
Student: It would be 55 miles divided by hours.
As the session continued, Lindquist gestured, pointed, made eye contact, modulated her voice. "Cruising!" she exclaimed, after the student answered three questions in a row correctly. "Did you see how I had to stop and think?" she inquired, modeling how to solve a problem. "I can see you're getting tired," she commented sympathetically near the end of the session. How could a computer program ever approximate this?
In a 1984 paper that is regarded as a classic of educational psychology, Benjamin Bloom, a professor at the University of Chicago, showed that being tutored is the most effective way to learn, vastly superior to being taught in a classroom. The experiments headed by Bloom randomly assigned fourth-, fifth- and eighth-grade students to classes of about 30 pupils per teacher, or to one-on-one tutoring. Children tutored individually performed two standard deviations better than children who received conventional classroom instruction - a huge difference.
Affluent American parents have since come to see the disparity Bloom identified as a golden opportunity, and tutoring has ballooned into a $5 billion industry. Among middle- and high-school students enrolled in New York City's elite schools, tutoring is a common practice, and the most sought-after tutors can charge as much as $400 an hour.
But what of the pupils who could most benefit from tutoring - poor, urban, minority? Bloom had hoped that traditional teaching could eventually be made as effective as tutoring. But Heffernan was doubtful. He knew firsthand what it was like to grapple with the challenges of the classroom. After graduating from Amherst College, he joined Teach for America and was placed in an inner-city middle school in Baltimore. Some of his classes had as many as 40 students, all of them performing well below grade level. Discipline was a constant problem. Heffernan claims he set a school record for the number of students sent to the principal's office. "I could barely control the class, let alone help each student," Heffernan told me. "I wasn't ever going to make a dent in this country's educational problems by teaching just a few classes of students at a time."
Heffernan left teaching, hoping that some marriage of education and technology might help "level the playing field in American education." He decided that the only way to close the persistent "achievement gap" between white and minority, high- and low-income students was to offer universal tutoring - to give each student access to his or her own Cristina Lindquist. While hiring a human tutor for every child would be prohibitively expensive, the right computer program could make this possible.
So Heffernan forged ahead, cataloging more than two dozen "moves" Lindquist made to help her students learn ("remind the student of steps they have already completed," "encourage the student to generalize," "challenge a correct answer if the tutor suspects guessing"). He incorporated many of these tactics into a computerized tutor - called "Ms. Lindquist" - which became the basis of his doctoral dissertation. When he was hired as an assistant professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, Heffernan continued to work on the program, joined in his efforts by Lindquist, now his wife, who also works at W.P.I. Together they improved the tutor, which they renamed ASSISTments (it assists students while generating an assessment of their progress). Seventeen years after Heffernan first set up his video camera, the computerized tutor he designed has been used by more than 100,000 students, in schools all over the country. "I look at this as just a start," he told me. But, he added confidently, "we are closing the gap with human tutors."
Grafton Middle School, a public school in a prosperous town a few miles outside Worcester, has been using ASSISTments since 2010. Last spring, I visited the home of Tyler Rogers, a tall boy with reddish-blond hair who was just finishing seventh grade at Grafton and who used the program to do his math homework. (While ASSISTments has made a few limited forays into tutoring other subjects, it is almost entirely dedicated to teaching math.) His teachers described him as "conscientious" and "mature," but he had struggled in his pre-algebra class that year. "Sometime last fall, it started to get really hard," he said as he opened his laptop.
Tyler breezed through the first part of his homework, but 10 questions in he hit a rough patch. "Write the equation in function form: 3x-y=5," read the problem on the screen. Tyler worked the problem out in pencil first and then typed "5-3x" into the box. The response was instantaneous: "Sorry, wrong answer." Tyler's shoulders slumped. He tried again, his pencil scratching the paper. Another answer - "5/3x" - yielded another error message, but a third try, with "3x-5," worked better. "Correct!" the computer proclaimed.
ASSISTments incorporates many of the findings made by researchers who, spurred by the 1984 Bloom study, set out to discover what tutors do that is so helpful to student learning. First and foremost, they concluded, tutors provide immediate feedback: they let students know whether what they're doing is right or wrong. Such responsiveness keeps students on track, preventing them from wandering down "garden paths" of unproductive reasoning.
The second important service tutors provide, researchers discovered, is guiding students' efforts, offering nudges in the right direction. ASSISTments provides this, too, in the form of a "hint" button. Tyler chose not to use it that evening, but if he had, he would have been given a series of clues to the right answer, "scaffolded" to support his own problem-solving efforts. For the answer "5-3x," the computer responded: "You need to take a closer look at your signs. Notice there is a minus in front of the 'y.' "
Tyler's father, Chris Rogers, who manages complex networks of computers for a living, is pleased that his son's homework employs technology. "Everyone works with computers these days," he told me later. "Tyler might as well get used to using them now." But his mother, Andrea, is more skeptical. Andrea is studying for a master's in education and plans to become an elementary-school teacher. She is not opposed to the use of educational technology, but she objects to the flat affect of ASSISTments. In contrast to a human tutor, who has a nearly infinite number of potential responses to a student's difficulties, the program is equipped with only a few. If a solution to a problem is typed incorrectly - say, with an extra space - the computer stubbornly returns the "Sorry, incorrect answer" message, though a human would recognize the answer as right. "In the beginning, when Tyler was first learning to use ASSISTments, there was a lot of frustration," Andrea says. "I would sit there with him for hours, helping him. A computer can't tell when you're confused or frustrated or bored."
Heffernan, as it happens, is working on that. Dealing with emotion - helping students regulate their feelings, quelling frustration and rousing flagging morale - is the third important function that human tutors fulfill. So Heffernan, along with several researchers at W.P.I. and other institutions, is working on an emotion-sensitive tutor: a computer program that can recognize and respond to students' moods. One of his collaborators on the project is Sidney D'Mello, an assistant professor of psychology and computer science at the University of Notre Dame.
"The first thing we had to do is identify which emotions are important in tutoring, and we found that there are three that really matter: boredom, frustration and confusion," D'Mello said. "Then we had to figure out how to accurately measure those feelings without interrupting the tutoring process." His research has relied on two methods of collecting such data: applying facial-expression recognition software to spot a furrowed brow or an expression of slack disengagement; and using a special chair with posture sensors to tell whether students are leaning forward with interest or lolling back in boredom. Once the student's feelings are identified, the thinking goes, the computerized tutor could adjust accordingly - giving the bored student more challenging questions or reviewing fundamentals with the student who is confused.
Of course, as D'Mello puts it, "we can't install a $20,000 butt-sensor chair in every school in America." So D'Mello, along with Heffernan, is working on a less elaborate, less expensive alternative: judging whether a student is bored, confused or frustrated based only on the pattern of his or her responses to questions. Heffernan and a collaborator at Columbia's Teachers College, Ryan Baker, an expert in educational data mining, determined that students enter their answers in characteristic ways: a student who is bored, for example, may go for long stretches without answering any problems (he might be talking to a fellow student, or daydreaming) and then will answer a flurry of questions all at once, getting most or all correct. A student who is confused, by contrast, will spend a lot of time on each question, resort to the hint button frequently and get many of the questions wrong.
"Right now we're able to accurately identify students' emotions from their response patterns at a rate about 30 percent better than chance," Baker says. "That's about where the video cameras and posture sensors were a few years ago, and we're optimistic that we can get close to their current accuracy rates of about 70 percent better than chance." Human judges of emotion, he notes, reach agreement on what other people are feeling about 80 percent of the time.
Heffernan is also experimenting with ways that computers can inject emotion into the tutoring exchange - by flashing messages of encouragement, for example, or by calling up motivational videos recorded by the students' teachers. The aim, he says, is to endow his computerized tutor "with the qualities of humans that help other humans learn."
But is humanizing computers really the best way to supply students with effective tutors? Some researchers, like Ken Koedinger, a professor of human-computer interaction and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, take a different view from Heffernan's: computerized tutors shouldn't try to emulate humans, because computers may well be the superior teachers. Koedinger has been working on computerized tutors for almost three decades, using them not only to help students learn but also to collect data about how the learning process works. Every keystroke a student makes - every hesitation, every hint requested, every wrong answer - can be analyzed for clues to how the mind learns. A program Koedinger helped design, Cognitive Tutor, is currently used by more than 600,000 students in 3,000 school districts around the country, generating a vast supply of data for researchers to mine. (The program is owned by a company called Carnegie Learning, which was sold to the Apollo Group last year for $75 million; Apollo also owns the for-profit University of Phoenix.)
Koedinger is convinced that learning is so unfathomably complex that we need the data generated by computers to fully understand it. "We think we know how to teach because humans have been doing it forever," he says, "but in fact we're just beginning to understand how complicated it is to do it well."
As an example, Koedinger points to the spacing effect. Decades of research have demonstrated that people learn more effectively when their encounters with information are spread out over time, rather than massed into one marathon study session. Some teachers have incorporated this finding into their classrooms - going over previously covered material at regular intervals, for instance. But optimizing the spacing effect is a far more intricate task than providing the occasional review, Koedinger says: "To maximize retention of material, it's best to start out by exposing the student to the information at short intervals, gradually lengthening the amount of time between encounters." Different types of information - abstract concepts versus concrete facts, for example - require different schedules of exposure. The spacing timetable should also be adjusted to each individual's shifting level of mastery. "There's no way a classroom teacher can keep track of all this for every kid," Koedinger says. But a computer, with its vast stores of memory and automated record-keeping, can. Koedinger and his colleagues have identified hundreds of subtle facets of learning, all of which can be managed and implemented by sophisticated software.
Yet some educators maintain that however complex the data analysis and targeted the program, computerized tutoring is no match for a good teacher. It's not clear, for instance, that Koedinger's program yields better outcomes for students. A review conducted by the Department of Education in 2010 concluded that the product had "no discernible effects" on students' test scores, while costing far more than a conventional textbook, leading critics to charge that Carnegie Learning is taking advantage of teachers and administrators dazzled by the promise of educational technology. Koedinger counters that "many other studies, mostly positive," have affirmed the value of the Carnegie Learning program. "I'm confident that the program helps students learn better than paper-and-pencil homework assignments."
Heffernan isn't susceptible to the criticism that he is profiting from school districts, because he gives ASSISTments away free. And so far, the small number of preliminary, peer-reviewed studies he has conducted on his program support its value: one randomized controlled trial found that the use of the computerized tutor improved students' performance in math by the equivalent of a full letter grade over the performance of pupils who used paper and pencil to do their homework.
But Heffernan does face one serious hurdle: any student who wishes to use ASSISTments needs a computer and Internet access. More than 20 percent of U.S. households are not equipped with a computer; about 30 percent have no broadband connection. Heffernan originally hoped to try ASSISTments out in Worcester's mostly urban school district, but he had to scale back the program when he found that few students were consistently able to use a computer at home.
So ASSISTments has mainly been adopted by affluent suburban schools like Grafton Middle School and Bellingham Memorial Middle School in Massachusetts - populated, Heffernan said ruefully, by students who already have the advantages of high-functioning schools and educated, involved parents. But, he told me brightly, he recently received a grant from the Department of Education to supply ASSISTments to almost 10,000 public-school students in Maine - a largely poor, largely rural state in which all schoolchildren nonetheless own a laptop, thanks to a state initiative. Heffernan hopes that by raising the Maine students' test scores with ASSISTments, he will inspire more officials in states around the country to see the virtue of making tutoring universal.
The morning after I watched Tyler Rogers do his homework, I sat in on his math class at Grafton Middle School. As he and his classmates filed into the classroom, I talked with his teacher, Kim Thienpont, who has taught middle school for 10 years. "As teachers, we get all this training in 'differentiated instruction' - adapting our teaching to the needs of each student," she said. "But in a class of 20 students, with a certain amount of material we have to cover each day, how am I really going to do that?"
ASSISTments, Thienpont told me, made this possible, echoing what I heard from another area math teacher, Barbara Delaney, the day before. Delaney teaches sixth-grade math in nearby Bellingham. Each time her students use the computerized tutor to do their homework, the program collects data on how well they're doing: which problems they got wrong, how many times they used the hint button. The information is automatically collated into a report, which is available to Delaney on her own computer before the next morning's class. (Reports on individual students can be accessed by their parents.) "With ASSISTments, I know none of my students are falling through the cracks," Delaney told me.
After completing a few warm-up problems on their school's iPod Touches, the students turned to the front of the room, where Thienpont projected a spreadsheet of the previous night's homework. Like stock traders going over the day's returns, the students scanned the data, comparing their own grades with the class average and picking out the problems that gave their classmates trouble. ("If you got a question wrong, but a lot of other people got it wrong, too, you don't feel so bad," Tyler explained.)
Thienpont began by going over "common wrong answers" - incorrect solutions that many students arrived at by following predictable but mistaken lines of reasoning. Or perhaps, not so predictable. "Sometimes I'm flabbergasted by the thing all the students get wrong," Thienpont said. "It's often a mistake I never would have expected." Human teachers and tutors are susceptible to what cognitive scientists call the "expert blind spot" - once we've mastered a body of knowledge, it's hard to imagine what novices don't know - but computers have no such mental block. Highlighting "common wrong answers" allows Thienpont to address shared misconceptions without putting any one student on the spot.
I saw another unexpected effect of computerized tutoring in Delaney's Bellingham classroom. After explaining how to solve a problem that many got wrong on the previous night's homework, Delaney asked her students to come up with a hint for the next year's class. Students called out suggested clues, and after a few tries, they arrived at a concise tip. "Congratulations!" she said. "You've just helped next year's sixth graders learn math." When Delaney's future pupils press the hint button in ASSISTments, the former students' advice will appear.
Unlike the proprietary software sold by Carnegie Learning, or by education-technology giants like Pearson, ASSISTments was designed to be modified by teachers and students, in a process Heffernan likens to the crowd-sourcing that created Wikipedia. His latest inspiration is to add a button to each page of ASSISTments that will allow students to access a Web page where they can get more information about, say, a relevant math concept. Heffernan and his W.P.I. colleagues are now developing a system of vetting and ranking the thousands of math-related sites on the Internet.
For all his ambition, Heffernan acknowledges that this technology has limits. He has a motto: "Let computers do what computers are good at, and people do what people are good at." Computers excel in following a precise plan of instruction. A computer never gets impatient or annoyed. But it never gets excited or enthusiastic either. Nor can a computer guide a student through an open-ended exploration of literature or history. It's no accident that ASSISTments and other computerized tutoring systems have focused primarily on math, a subject suited to computers' binary language. While a computer can emulate, and in some ways exceed, the abilities of a human teacher, it will not replace her. Rather, it's the emerging hybrid of human and computer instruction - not either one alone - that may well transform education.
Near the end of my visit to Worcester, I told Heffernan about a scene I witnessed in Barbara Delaney's class. She had divided her sixth graders into what she called "flexible groups" - groupings of students by ability that shift daily depending on the data collected in her ASSISTments report. She walked over to the group that struggled the most with the previous night's homework and talked quietly with one girl who looked on the brink of tears. Delaney pointed to the girl's notebook, then to the ASSISTments spreadsheet projected on a "smart" board at the front of the room. She touched the girl's shoulder; the student lifted her face to her teacher and managed a crooked smile.
When I finished recounting the incident, Heffernan sat back in his chair. "That's not anything we put into the tutoring system - that's something Barbara brings to her students," he remarked. "I wish we could put that in a box."
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New York NY/ OPINION: Can Cat's Cradle Help Save Our Schools?
By James R. Murphy [Murphy is now retired from teaching high-school math, but is currently finishing a book, "Why String Figures," about his educational method. His figures were showcased this past summer at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon (ENSBA) in France] http://www.torusflex.com/
Wall Street Journal
September 17, 2012
We have a crisis in our schools. This is not a new revelation, but it needs to be stated regardless, particularly at the start of another academic year and at a time when America is struggling to compete in the very fields - math, science, technology - that are defining the global economy. Consider that U.S. high school students graduate with just a 32 percent proficiency rate in math, according to a Harvard study - a figure that puts America behind 31 other countries, including Japan, Korea, Switzerland and Canada.
I propose a solution: Let's revolutionize our educational system by teaching our children how to do Cat's Cradle.
I came upon the idea of using string figures - not just Cat's Cradle, but thousands of figures from many sources and cultures - as an educational tool while teaching math for more than 20 years at New York's LaGuardia High School (yes, the "Fame" school devoted to the arts, but an outstanding academic institution in its own right). Eventually, I was given the option of devoting one entire class to strings and was constantly amazed at how much the students benefited from learning this folk-art tradition (I'm a Native American myself) that can bedazzle the eye and challenge the mind. I became interested in replicating this educational approach with younger students and am convinced that the elementary school level is the proper one for introducing string figures - the younger the mind, the more open-minded the student is.
Why string figures? Because man is a hand animal. Humans became smart because our hands allowed us to develop and employ our intelligence. Therefore, the hands should lead the young modern human to learn how best to develop their unique capabilities to prepare for a full and rich life. It's all about forging a connection between brain and hand - you create and discern pattern from your handiwork, so to speak. And you can take that understanding of pattern and apply it in any number of ways, especially in the technical realm. To know how to manipulate string is to know how to solve a complex mathematical equation. Or create a computer program. Or build a bridge.
But what do strings specifically teach in terms of school-age math? It's actually rather obvious: The figures allow students to wrap their minds around the sort of formulas that legions of mediocre math teachers have struggled to explain. Algebra isn't about "A squared plus B squared equals C squared." It's about representation of pattern. With string figures, patterns are made real: One movement of one hand - or even one finger - creates a change in the pattern. Children see the logic because they literally see it - in the interwoven strings that become works of art unto themselves (I always make sure to provide strings of many different colors to students, so as to add to the visual impact).
Moreover, children don't just see - they feel pride in what they've created. It's a sense of accomplishment that can never be derived from simply telling students they've done a good job - or, even worse, by relying on a testing system that has only fostered bitterness and cynicism from students and teachers alike. Children must internalize a respect of self.
How do I know all this is true? Not one of my students failed to perform far above their expectations in all my teaching of string figures. Moreover, there is a joy of discovery that each of my students has talked to me about. It is they who constantly surprised me with new methods of imagining figures. The curriculum represents a unique opportunity to shape a young person's feelings about their intellectual abilities and about their capacity to learn.
And it's a curriculum that is surprisingly simple in scope, based on only five figures. The students begin by learning the basic patterns thoroughly. From there, they investigate introducing differences into the figures - the subtle manipulations of fingers and hands that can lead to complex and daringly different results. Over time, they also learn by teaching - not just teaching those within the classroom about a variation they've stumbled upon, but also teaching those outside the classroom about this brave new vocabulary they now speak. By winning "converts," they reinforce the lessons they've learned.
In the end, every student comes to realize that nothing is too hard to master. I have seen the results as the years have passed: Most of my students - a group that, by the way, included a large number from low-income families - went on to college. Today, their ranks include architects, actors, musicians and even math teachers. I'm proudest when I see them with a string still wrapped around their wrist, waiting to be manipulated into a new figure.
