Santa Fe/ New Mexico School Superintendents' Association's Letter to State Schools' Boss
By Hailey Heinz
ABQ Journal Staff Writer
September 29, 2012
A testy letter from the New Mexico School Superintendents' Association to state education chief Hanna Skandera claims she has excluded them from decision-making on an "ongoing and systematic" basis, and expresses "deep concern" about changes to the A-F school grading formula.
Skandera was dismissive of the letter, saying she has made ongoing efforts to communicate with superintendents and to travel around the state visiting districts in person.
The letter, dated Sept. 21, is signed by NMSSA president David Atencio, Superintendent of Jemez Valley Public Schools.
Atencio writes that the letter is specifically on behalf of the New Mexico Superintendents Council, which is a sub-group of the NMSSA that has traditionally met with state education chiefs to advise them.
According to the letter,
- the group has made itself available to meet with Skandera, but she has "conveyed that your preference is not to meet with the elected Council but instead prefer to appear before Superintendents as a group or meet on an individual basis.
- The Council strongly contends that it is the responsibility of Superintendents to represent our students, families, communities, and school boards in matters of public education."
Skandera said she has met with the council often but acknowledged her preference is to travel the state and meet with a variety of superintendents.
- "I've spent a fair amount of time with all the superintendents," Skandera said. "There are times when - and I've heard this out in the field - there are some voices that are louder than others, and it's important that everyone has a voice at the table."
The letter also raises concerns about the formula used to assign letter grades to New Mexico schools.
- Initial school grades were released in January, and new grades came out in July with another year's worth of test data and some changes to the formula.
- According to the letter, the PED was slow to release the technical manual that explained the changes.
"The Instructional Leaders of New Mexico have been trying to explain to our communities and staff the meaning of the school grades, only to learn that they were operating from PED-provided information that was no longer valid or accurate," Atencio wrote.
Skandera said she did multiple Web-based seminars about the grading system, along with numerous memos and documents. She said concern about the details of the process misses the point.
"I think we lose sight sometimes, this is once again an adult oversight, when we focus on the process versus the outcomes for our kids," Skandera said.
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Santa Fe/ NM's Chances for $25 Million Federal "Race to the Top" Grant Touted
By Hailey Heinz
ABQ Journal Staff Writer
September 29, 2012
If New Mexico succeeds in getting a $25 million federal "Race to the Top" grant, new assessments and data systems could soon be in place, intended to improve education in preschool through third grade.
New Mexico is one of five states eligible for the second round of the federal Early Learning Challenge.
- In the first round of the competition, New Mexico was ranked 10th and awards were given to the top nine states.
- State education chief Hanna Skandera said this means New Mexico is "next in line" for the second round, and she is optimistic the state will receive funds.
Public Education Department policy analyst Leighann Lenti said the PED would use grant money to work with the Children, Youth and Families Department and the Department of Health to ensure the quality of preschool programs is more consistent across the state and across agencies.
"So when we look at child care programs, are the kiddos safe and provided for, but also given learning opportunities so they can be learning their alphabet and early counting skills?" Lenti said.
- She said grant money would also be used to coordinate student data systems across the state, so preschool data on a student would be connected to their K-12 information, and the PED could look at student progress over time.
- Lenti said the money would also be spent on additional kindergarten assessments, to determine what students know when they enter kindergarten and help teachers target their teaching accordingly.
- The PED has already moved toward a statewide reading assessment for kindergartners, but Lenti said the grant could help pay for assessments of students' math and social skills.
Skandera said New Mexico's eligibility for the grant is a good sign for the state, pointing out New Mexico has also received a waiver from several elements of the No Child Left Behind Act.
"Time and again, we're getting acknowledged," she said. "We're starting to lead the challenge."
New Mexico's application is due Oct. 26, and officials will know in December whether they will get the funds. The other eligible states for this round of funding are Colorado, Illinois, Oregon and Wisconsin.
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Santa Fe/ SFPS Superintendent Joel Boyd's Public Forums Continue
By Robert Nott
The New Mexican
September 30, 2012
In early September, Santa Fe Public Schools Superintendent Joel Boyd started a series of public forums designed to let parents, students and district personnel sound off to him about how they see the district working (or not). He has three such forums scheduled for this coming week, so if you haven't yet attended one, you still have a chance.
- The next forum is slated for 6 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 3, at El Dorado Community School on Avenida Torreon, followed by
- another school appearance at 6 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 4, at Wood Gormley Elementary School on Booth Street.
- Boyd's final public forum takes place at 10 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 6, at the Nancy Rodriguez Community Center on Prairie Dog Loop off Agua Fría Street.
The events usually last about two hours and are generally introduced by the school's corresponding board members. Spanish-speaking translators will be on hand, and child-care will be available for kids ages 4-12.
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Santa Fe/ Online-Only Schools: Next Flashpoint in Education Reform
By Joey Peters
Santa Fe Reporter
September 25, 2012 [posted online 10/1/12]
Virtual charter schools, which allow kids to learn online from home, may be the wave of the future in a rural state like New Mexico.
But they're also unproven and politically contentious, as a recent decision by the state's Public Education Commission illustrates.
Last week, the PEC-an elected body that essentially serves as a statewide school board-rejected the application of New Mexico Connections Academy, which would have been New Mexico's first state-chartered virtual K-12 school.
- "[It was] a political decision, a political issue," says Paul Gessing, a board member for the Santa Fe-based NMCA and the executive director of the Rio Grande Foundation.
Gessing says the PEC has been reluctant to support charter schools because they shake up the education establishment. If the PEC supported new educational models, he says, it would be like "a McDonald's being sponsored by a Wendy's."
But Public Education Commissioner Jeff Carr, D-Colfax, has his reasons for voting to reject NMCA's application.
- "I don't want a physician working on me who's gone to a virtual school," Carr, a history teacher at Taos High School, tells SFR. "A computer is never going to replace a teacher."
Gessing and Carr represent two sides of an increasingly politicized debate over virtual charter schools.
- K12 Inc., a corporation that partners with public schools to operate virtual charters, opened its first location in New Mexico this school year.
- Already, the state has provided more than $400,000 in funding for that school, the Farmington-based New Mexico Virtual Academy, and advocates are working to replicate the model elsewhere.
NMCA board chairman and outgoing state Sen. Mark Boitano, R-Bernalillo, says virtual charter schools expand education options, employ licensed teachers and help students who need to learn at a different pace.
- "That's the whole point," Boitano, who helped write the state's charter law in 1999, tells SFR. "We're supposed to be change agents. [There's] supposed to be disruption to the status quo."
But critics say disruption may not be a good thing. So far, virtual charter schools' effectiveness is unproven at best.
- "They raise a whole host of questions," David Harrell, deputy director of the Legislative Education Study Committee, says. "They create educational opportunities in circumstances that the state's never imagined."
New Mexico has already experimented with virtual learning through its Innovative Digital Education and Learning program, which provides online courses to public schools.
- Virtual charter schools like NMVA take it to the next level by transferring the classroom almost completely to the web. (NMVA does have a community building in Farmington, but many of its students live elsewhere.)
- Across the nation, more than 200,000 students log in to school from a computer each day.
- Santa Fe Public Schools Superintendent Joel Boyd says SFPS is also looking into having an online school.
The idea is controversial.
- A study released in July by the National Education Policy Center found that only half of the students at schools operated by K12, the largest virtual charter school company in the country, graduate on time. (New Mexico's graduation rate is 66.1 percent.)
- The study also found that, in 2011, just over 27 percent of K12's schools met the performance standards mandated by No Child Left Behind-far below the nationwide average of 52 percent.
- In other states, K12-associated schools have endured criticism for poor student performance and racking up too much debt.
But Gessing says virtual schools have other advantages. A Rio Grande Foundation study found that virtual charter schools operate at a lower per-student cost than traditional public schools and cited efforts in states like Ohio and Hawaii that successfully combined traditional classroom schooling with online education.
"I wouldn't say there's a clear-cut illustration that these schools are failing," Gessing says.
Regardless of educational performance, K12 is reaping profits. In the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2012, the company reported $170.4 million in revenues-a 32.8 percent increase over the previous year.
Had NMCA's charter application been approved, however, it would have sourced curriculum and material from a different company: Baltimore-based Connections Education, LLC. Boitano, who says he was at first skeptical about virtual education, says Connections' accountability system helped convince him.
But there's another link: Until July, Connections was a member the American Legislative Exchange Council, the corporate-backed, right-wing nonprofit-for which Boitano serves as an education task force manager. Boitano says any impression that ALEC convinced him to back virtual charter schools is "not going to fly," adding that he's only been to two or three ALEC conferences in his 15 years as a legislator.
But questions also linger about the legality of virtual schools in New Mexico.
- PEC Vice Chairwoman Carolyn Shearman, D-Eddy, says she supports online education but voted against NMCA's application because of a 2008 Attorney General's Office advisory and a 2009 charter schools division opinion saying the PEC cannot approve schools that aren't "brick-and-mortar."
- She says charter laws need to be updated to address virtual schools.
NMCA board members say they plan to appeal the PEC's decision to Public Education Secretary-designate Hanna Skandera, who helped push similar reform efforts in Florida, whose agency recommended approval of NMCA, and who has the authority to override the PEC. Whatever happens, Harrell expects the debate to continue.
"It's a fundamental issue the Legislature will wrestle with next session," he says.
Editor's note: A previous version of this story stated that K12 schools had been "shut down" for failing to improve student performance; no K12 school has been shut down for that reason. SFR regrets the error.
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El Rito/ Mesa Vista School District Receives $399,946 for Counseling
The Associated Press
Alamogordo Daily News
October 1, 2012
Northern New Mexico Mesa Vista Consolidated School District has been awarded a $399,946 federal grant to bolster guidance and counseling programs for students.
The funding from the U.S. Department of Education will go toward addressing high rates of behavioral referrals, violence, suspension and drops outs at El Rito and Ojo Caliente elementary schools.
U.S. Rep. Ben Ray Lujan announced the funding. The New Mexico Democrat says getting students on the right track at a young age is critical to helping them avoid negative conduct in school.
As part of the Mesa Vista school district's plan, a counselor will be provided to serve the two elementary schools and a social worker will help coordinate community training and collaborate with local social service providers.
The Mesa Vista district is based in El Rito, about an hour northwest of Santa Fe.
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Clovis/ Cyber Bullying Probe
By Susan Montoya Bryan
Associated Press
ABQ Journal
September 29, 2012
Postings on a new Facebook page have prompted police and school officials in Clovis to launch an investigation into online bullying.
Authorities described comments on the page as belittling and embarrassing, saying they're being used to "harass and terrorize" some students at Clovis High School.
Clovis police Chief Steve Sanders declined to provide specifics about the page Friday for fear of encouraging more online traffic and "causing more heartache."
At least 10 victims have come forward, and police suspect there are more.
No threats of violence have been made on the page, but Clovis officers are looking into whether the posts violate New Mexico's harassment statutes.
The other concern, if the bullying escalates, is student well-being, the chief said. In recent years, the incidence of cyber bullying has increased and some cases in other states have resulted in suicides.
"That is a concern of ours. That's the reason we are being extremely proactive," Sanders said in a phone interview.
"We don't want to see something like that take place here in our small little city of Clovis," he added. "We're going to use every tool and every avenue available to look into this to see if we can stop it, and if there's been some violation of the criminal statutes, then we're going to seek justice."
- The investigation started Monday after the school resource officer learned that some students didn't want to come to school because of the comments being posted on the Facebook page.
- Investigators have spent the past week conducting interviews and tracking down documents and other information that might lead to whoever is administering the Facebook page.
- Sanders said students have posted comments on the site, but it's not clear whether any adults are involved.
Police have electronically preserved the Facebook page with the names of the posters and their identities for possible prosecution. Sanders said Friday the investigation was ongoing and no arrests had been made.
Officials with the police department and the school district said they want to put an end to the online bullying to ensure public safety.
According to statistics from the U.S. Department of Education, about 6 percent of students, ages 12-18, reported being victims of cyber bullying in 2009. That same year, nearly a quarter of public schools reported that bullying in general occurred among students on a daily or weekly basis.
New Mexico law requires public school districts to have policies addressing bullying. At Clovis High School, students found in violation anti-bullying and harassment policies can face up to three days' suspension for a first offense.
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Santa Fe/ COLUMN: Music Helps Teen Overcome Bullying
By Robert Nott
The New Mexican
September 30, 2012
Even after Mariah Romero was no longer being bullied by her peers, she said it hurt when she saw a male friend of hers receiving that same kind of treatment at school.
Looking to express her feelings about being on the receiving end of mean comments and cruel actions, the Santa Fe High School teen wrote the ballad "Sometimes" ("Sometimes you don't know what you are saying, but I'm the one who's going to pay") while taking part in Summer Rock Camp 2011 in Santa Fe. She and her band for that camp, ICU, performed the song live at the camp's final concert.
Her participation in that event, sponsored by The Candyman Strings & Things store - as well as her back story of overcoming feelings of depression and lack of self-worth via music - netted Candyman national recognition with a Wanna Play? Music Makes a Difference award from the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) this year.
The NAMM also honored Candyman with awards for Best Rock School and Summer Rock Camp and Best Merchandise and Display.
For Romero, music has served as a savior. "I wouldn't have made it through the tough times without it," she said in an interview last week. "Music helped me continue to grow with life. It helped me to help myself."
Her father, Alfred, agreed, noting, "Music is in her." (Her mom, Yvonne, works as the secretary at Salazar Elementary School.)
Mariah, who is 15, said her family still has old videos of her singing and dancing to what she calls "toddler music" when she was just 3 years old. Her grandparents both loved music, and her grandfather gave his old guitar to Mariah's older brother, James. Though she began playing the violin as a kid, she got hooked on the guitar after her brother taught her how to play it.
She said today's teens probably face a lot more pressures and problems than their parents did: "There's easy access to drugs; I know a lot of kids whose parents do drugs or sell drugs and that influences their choices." And teens aren't always successful in getting their voices heard by adults, she said. She's getting her voice out there via music.
She wrote what she calls a response song to "Sometimes," titled "She Will Not Bend," during the 2012 Summer Rock Camp at Candyman. She and her new band, Black Jett 77, also play covers. The band's name refers in part to rocker Joan Jett, and it's no surprise that of Mariah's favorite cover tunes is Jett's old hit "I Love Rock 'n' Roll."
Mariah said she's keeping B's and A's in her Santa Fe High School classes - a point her father confirmed. She will definitely graduate from high school and go to college, she said. And where will she be 10 years from now?
"I'm going to play music for the rest of my life, whether it's professional or as a hobby," she said. "My father is right. It's in me. It's who I've become."
You can catch a roughly 20-minute video clip of Mariah Romero and ICU playing some tunes, including "Sometimes," from the 2011 Summer Rock Camp on YouTube at http://tinyurl.com/8bbpre5.
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Washington DC/ More Than $21 Million Awarded to School Districts to Expand Counseling Programs
U.S. Department of Education Release [Ed.gov]
September 28, 2012
The U.S. Department of Education today announced the award of more than $21.2 million to 60 recipients in 24 states across the country to establish or expand counseling programs. Grantees will use funds to support counseling programs in target elementary or secondary schools.
The new awards will specifically aid schools in hiring qualified mental-health professionals with the goal of expanding the range, availability, quantity and quality of counseling services. Parents of participating students will have input in the design and implementation of counseling services supported by these grants.
- "School counselors are a vital resource for students and educators, and play a key role in creating safe and productive learning environments," said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
- "These funds will help expand those services to help more students lead healthy, happy and successful lives."
Grantees will also use funds to help increase the number of available and qualified counselors based on a school's student population.
- Research shows that having adequate counseling services can help reduce the number of disciplinary referrals in schools, improve student attendance and academic performance and enhance development of social skills.
Funds may also be used to support parental involvement, counselor and teacher professional development and collaboration with community-based organizations that provide mental health and other services to students.
Below is a list of the awards for the Elementary and Secondary School Counseling Program. For more information about the program, log onto http://www2.ed.gov/programs/elseccounseling/index.html.
FY 2012 New Grant Award in NM: Mesa Vista Consolidated School District: $399,946
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Seattle WA/ Fostering Tech Talent in High Schools
By Nick Wingfield
New York Times
September 30, 2012
Leandre Nsabi, a senior at Rainier Beach High School here, received some bluntly practical advice from an instructor recently.
"My teacher said there's a lot of money to be made in computer science," Leandre said. "It could be really helpful in the future."
That teacher, Steven Edouard, knows a few things about the subject. When he is not volunteering as a computer science instructor four days a week, Mr. Edouard works at Microsoft. He is one of 110 engineers from high-tech companies who are part of a Microsoft program aimed at getting high school students hooked on computer science, so they go on to pursue careers in the field.
In doing so, Microsoft is taking an unusual approach to tackling a shortage of computer science graduates - one of the most serious issues facing the technology industry, and a broader challenge for the nation's economy.
- There are likely to be 150,000 computing jobs opening up each year through 2020, according to an analysis of federal forecasts by the Association for Computing Machinery, a professional society for computing researchers.
- But despite the hoopla around start-up celebrities like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, fewer than 14,000 American students received undergraduate degrees in computer science last year, the Computing Research Association estimates. And the wider job market remains weak.
"People can't get jobs, and we have jobs that can't be filled," Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel who oversees its philanthropic efforts, said in a recent interview.
Big technology companies have complained for years about a dearth of technical talent, a problem they have tried to solve by lobbying for looser immigration rules to accommodate more foreign engineers and sponsoring tech competitions to encourage student interest in the industry.
- Google, for one, holds a programming summer camp for incoming ninth graders and underwrites an effort called CS4HS, in which high school teachers sharpen their computer science skills in workshops at local universities.
But Microsoft is sending its employees to the front lines, encouraging them to commit to teaching a high school computer science class for a full school year.
- Its engineers, who earn a small stipend for their classroom time, are in at least two hour-long classes a week and sometimes as many as five.
- Schools arrange the classes for first thing in the day to avoid interfering with the schedules of the engineers, who often do not arrive at Microsoft until the late morning.
- The program started as a grass-roots effort by Kevin Wang, a Microsoft engineer with a master's degree in education from Harvard.
In 2009, he began volunteering as a computer science teacher at a Seattle public high school on his way to work. After executives at Microsoft caught wind of what he was doing, they put financial support behind the effort - which is known as Technology Education and Literacy in Schools, or Teals - and let Mr. Wang run it full time.
The program is now in 22 schools in the Seattle area and has expanded to more than a dozen other schools in Washington, Utah, North Dakota, California and other states this academic year. Microsoft wants other big technology companies to back the effort so it can broaden the number of outside engineers involved.
This year, only 19 of the 110 teachers in the program are not Microsoft employees. In some cases, the program has thrown together volunteers from companies that spend a lot of their time beating each other up in the marketplace.
- "I think education and bringing more people into the field is something all technology companies agree on," said Alyssa Caulley, a Google software engineer, who, along with a Microsoft volunteer, is teaching a computer science class at Woodside High School in Woodside, Calif.
While computer science can be an intimidating subject, Microsoft has sought to connect it to the technologies most students use in their everyday lives. At Rainier Beach High recently, Peli de Halleux, a Microsoft software engineer, taught a class on making software for mobile phones.
The students buried their faces in the phones, supplied by Microsoft. They were asked to create programs that performed simple functions, like playing a random song when the phones were shaken.
Leandre, who took Mr. de Halleux's mobile programming class last year and is in Mr. Edouard's Advanced Placement computer science class this year, proudly showed off a simple game he had created, Sun Collector, in which players tilt the phone to dodge black balls and hit big yellow ones.
"I never really understood what was behind these games," he said. "Once you start getting it, it's pretty easy to understand."
One of the most alarming trends for the technology industry has been students' declining interest in computer science over the last decade.
- While the number of undergraduate degrees granted in computer science has been growing for the last several years, last year's figure was still 34 percent lower than at its peak in 2004, according to the Computing Research Association.
- Student interest in the field began to fade after the dot-com implosion a decade ago. It has picked up again in recent years, but slowly.
Most educators believe that for students to be excited about computer science, it is critical to introduce them to it at an early age. Yet support for the subject at cash-short K-12 schools has faded. In almost every state, computer science is taught as an elective, rather than a core requirement.
- The percentage of graduates who earned credits in high school computer science classes fell to 19 percent in 2009 from 25 percent in 1990, making it the only subject among science, technology, engineering and mathematics courses to experience such a drop, according to a report by the Education Department.
Those numbers are all the more surprising considering how attached teenagers are to their smartphones, tablet computers and Facebook accounts. But that fascination in most cases is with social communications and media, rather than the technology itself. Today's easy-to-use gadgets have also concealed programming tools from users that were once far more prominent in computers.
Finding capable computer science teachers is also hard. Few other industries are as good as the technology business in its ability to divert would-be educators into far more lucrative corporate jobs. Mr. Edouard graduated from the University of Florida in 2011 and considered enlisting in Teach for America, but he also had multiple offers from technology employers.
"In today's day and age, with so many college loans, it's tough to go into teaching," he said.
One of the biggest concerns about Microsoft's effort is that most of its volunteers have little teaching experience.
- To comply with district licensing requirements and to help engineers with classroom challenges like managing unruly teenagers, a professional teacher is also in the room during lessons.
- One of the program's tenets is that Microsoft engineers need to teach the teachers, alongside students, so that those instructors can eventually run an engaging computer science class on their own.
- "We are taking the kids farther than I could do," said Michael Braun, a teacher at Rainier Beach High who is working with Microsoft volunteers.
There are still hiccups, including tensions between some of the professional teachers and the Microsoft engineers assigned to work with them, according to several people involved in the program, who did not want to be named for fear of seeming critical of Microsoft.
Sarah Filman, a program manager at Microsoft, completed the intensive summer training that the company offers volunteers, preparing a lengthy PowerPoint presentation for the class she taught at a Seattle high school last year. "That's the Microsoft way," she said.
But as soon as she dimmed the lights in her classroom at the start of the year, her students had trouble focusing on the slide show, forcing Ms. Filman to change her methods. "I had to throw away a lot of what I had done," she said.
For students in the Seattle area, Microsoft tries to drum up excitement in technology by organizing field trips to its campus and discussing the lucrative careers that await them. The students from Rainier Beach High who visited Microsoft last year were buzzing about their trips for days afterward.
"To me, that was an 'aha' moment," said Dwane Chappelle, the principal of Rainier Beach High. "I said, we've got to find a way to get more kids involved."
Mr. Wang, the program's founder, said a professional from the tech industry who stands at the head of a class for a full year can be a powerful role model. "Kids can see themselves in their shoes," Mr. Wang said. After all, he added, "their chances of going to college and majoring in computer science are exponentially better than getting into the N.F.L."
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Sacramento CA/ Free Digital Textbooks Offered as Gov. Jerry Brown Signs Bills
Los Angeles Times Report
September 27, 2012
California college students hit with tuition increases in recent years will get a little financial help after Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation Thursday to create a website on which popular textbooks can be downloaded for free.
Twin bills by Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) will give students free digital access to 50 core textbooks for lower-division courses offered by the University of California, California State University and California Community College systems. Hard copies of the texts would cost $20.
- "Many students are paying more than $1,000 every year on their textbooks, sometimes having to choose between buying the books they need or paying for food and other living expenses," Steinberg said in a recent statement.
Steinberg hopes the first free books will be available by the start of the 2013-2014 school year, said spokesman Mark Hedlund.
- Brown signed SB 1052, which provides for the development of digital textbooks and creates the California Open Education Resources Council, made up of faculty members, to develop the list of targeted courses and create and oversee the approval process.
- The governor also signed SB 1053, which creates the California Digital Open Source Library to house the digital open source textbooks and related materials.
The governor met with students as he signed the bills, including a measure requiring the UC and Cal State systems to consult with student representatives before increasing fees in the future and provide them with adequate advance notice of increases.
Assemblyman Paul Fong (D-Sunnyvale) authored AB 970.
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Denver CO/ Despite Slim Savings, More Colorado Districts Opt for 4-Day Week
By Kevin Simpson
The Denver Post
October 1, 2012
For the last 40 minutes of each day, Vickie Seivley and every other teacher at Gilcrest Elementary works with students on "authentic literacy" - an intense focus on reading and writing designed to squeeze the most out of an abbreviated, four-day school week.
Last spring, the 1,800-student Weld County RE-1 school district decided to follow a strategy born of the energy crisis in 1980 and embraced by dozens of Colorado districts - and lately, by still more amid budget-slashing economic times.
By stretching the school day and shortening the week, districts balance their budgets with cost savings on support staff, maintenance, food service and transportation. They face inevitable push-back from parents with day-care concerns but avoid tough cuts in other areas.
- "You have to change your mind-set on how you teach and instruct," said Seivley, whose second-graders come largely from low-income homes in the district just south of Greeley. "My top challenge was to make sure that I was still able to meet their needs as I would in a traditional calendar."
Since the recession hit in 2007, 18 Colorado districts have switched to four-day school weeks - a nearly 30 percent increase. The state jumped from 62 to 80 districts with schools that won state approval for a shift from the traditional 160-day calendar.
Most cited financial reasons for the change.
While research on the academic impact of the four-day week is sparse, both national surveys and a Colorado Department of Education study released this year point to similar student performance in four- and five-day weeks.
- The savings, though, are less than you might think. A 20 percent reduction in school days seldom nets more than 2.5 percent slashed from the overall budget, according to a national study by senior policy analyst Michael Griffith of the Denver-based Education Commission of the States.
- The vast majority of school spending goes to educator pay and benefits.
- None of the districts surveyed reduced those because instructional staff was required to work the same number of hours across the school year.
- Despite relatively meager savings, percentage-wise, some districts jumped at the chance to avoid losing teaching positions.
So far, there's optimism in Salida, whose school district is a little more than one year into a three-year commitment to the schedule that saves it about $150,000 against a total budget of roughly $19 million.
"We were getting down to whether we were going to cut teaching positions or try the four-day week," said Superintendent Darryl Webb, noting that in the first year of the new schedule, test scores ticked up.
He doesn't credit the new schedule for that, but he does think that a heightened sense of academic urgency in the four-day week has led to an increase in attendance among both students and staff.
- "As we suspected, it's a lot easier to adjust for middle and high school parents and not near as easy for elementary school parents," Webb said. He has scheduled an October workshop to address lingering parent issues.
Critics of the four-day week, while acknowledging that even minimal savings can mean a lot to a district, see the practice as adding to an already troubling summer learning loss and flying in the face of trending reform efforts aimed at expanding instructional time.
- "I know some smaller rural districts have been doing it a long while and they have strategies that seem to be working," said Jennifer Davis, president and co-founder of the Boston-based National Center on Time and Learning. "But the policy decision, at a time when we're trying to upgrade our education system in America, is in the wrong direction."
- In Grand Junction, Mesa County Valley School District 51 considered the move to a four-day week to mitigate continued deep budget cuts - and watched as some smaller surrounding districts took the leap.
Although the district noted that there seemed to be no firm evidence of negative effects on learning, its hesitation stemmed from the fact that districts using the strategy tend to be much smaller than its own 21,000-student population.
Several other factors moved Grand Junction to shelve the idea, at least for now. The district's anticipated $12 million budget shortfall didn't materialize due to an improved state funding picture. And the potential savings amounted to only about 1 percent of the $150 million budget, which didn't seem to warrant the possible day-care problems it would create for many families.
"It was something we wouldn't reject permanently - but not this year," said Superintendent Steven Schultz. "We're trying to find ways to add days to the calendar. There could be a four-day week in our future, but with more days than we currently have."
In Weld RE-1, the savings from taking Mondays off amounts to about $360,000 - almost all from support staff salaries - or 1.7 percent of the district's $21 million budget.
But when the announcement came last spring, parents pushed back. Hard.
Amanda Owens, who has two daughters in school and also served on the district finance committee, said some might have been outraged because the budget slashing up to that point - nearly $5 million over three years - hadn't touched them directly.
"There was a firestorm, honestly," said Owens, a work-from-home travel agent and sometime substitute teacher. "We'd been talking about budget cuts for a long time, but now that it's touching you, it's different."
Studies on the effects of the four-day week recount similar dynamics across the country: an initial backlash, powered largely by looming day-care challenges, eventually dissolves into widespread support.
Mike Williams, a math teacher at the district's South Valley Middle School, reacted like many colleagues, with surprise at the decision and uncertainty over what it would mean for students.
"We know kids regress over the summer," he said. "I was wondering how three-day weekends would play into that and what would happen to student learning. I was kind of fearful."
Just seven weeks in, no red flags have been raised on student performance. Teachers find more hours for lesson planning and tend to more finely tune their instructional time. Seivley, the second-grade teacher at Gilcrest, has used the extra off day to visit other districts and learn their strategies for dealing with low-income and minority students.
And Superintendent Jo Barbie has started to hear some parents express appreciation for the additional family time.
"I think we're winning them over," she said. "It's working for us."
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New York NY/ In Film and Union's Ads, Dueling Views of Teachers
By Vivian Yee
New York Times
September 28, 2012
Teachers' unions have come under fire from politicians like Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago and Mitt Romney in recent months. But rarely has opposition to teachers' unions worn a face as sympathetic as that of Maggie Gyllenhaal, the Academy Award-nominated actress who plays a crusading parent confronting a bullying, bureaucratic union in a new movie, "Won't Back Down."
The film was released on Friday amid a flurry of criticism from teachers' unions anticipating a wave of negative publicity, and a chorus of praise from anti-union campaigners recognizing an opportunity. The same day, the union of New York City teachers, the United Federation of Teachers, announced a million-dollar campaign of advertising on NY1, WABC, WNBC and other local channels, starting immediately.
Was the timing more than coincidence?
Michael Mulgrew, president of the federation, said the union had been planning the "back to school" advertising campaign since the spring. "I didn't react to 'Waiting for Superman,' " he said, referring to the 2010 documentary that assigned teachers' unions some blame for the country's educational failings. "I'm not going to react to the movie."
- "The movie," he added, "is what it is - it's a work of fiction."
But Mr. Mulgrew took a dig at the new film, saying no nonfictional attempt by parents to take over a school had worked. Of two efforts to use the California "parent trigger" law, which allows parents to take over collapsing schools, one failed and another, in Adelanto, near San Bernardino, was recently approved by a state court but blocked by the local school board.
In the film, Ms. Gyllenhaal plays a single mother who teams with a disillusioned teacher, played by Viola Davis, to rescue a mismanaged public school in Pittsburgh. Union representatives (Holly Hunter and Ned Eisenberg) try to thwart them.
- "The film is a work of fiction," Mr. Mulgrew repeated. "It's like the Titanic didn't sink."
His union's advertising campaign consists of a 30-second commercial that is scheduled to run on local stations during several high-profile network broadcasts and popular shows, including the presidential debate on Wednesday, "Good Morning America," "Saturday Night Live" and Yankees games. It is also available on YouTube.
In the advertisement, a montage of typical school scenes gives way to teachers speaking about their efforts to help students learn.
"We're ready to continue working with parents and the community," says Lesley-Anne Jones, a fifth-grade teacher in East New York.
The American Federation of Teachers, the parent union of the New York union, has also started a public-relations offensive. Although it has not bought advertising time, its president, Randi Weingarten, issued a 2,025-word statement attacking the new movie as "a false and misleading depiction of teachers and unions." She also appeared Friday morning on CNN to criticize parent trigger laws, which are on the books in seven states, and she noted on Twitter that many reviewers had panned the film.
Ms. Weingarten also jabbed at Michelle A. Rhee, the founder of StudentsFirst, an advocacy group that is frequently at odds with unions, when a StudentsFirst staff member posted a glowing review of the film on the review site Rotten Tomatoes.
Ms. Rhee, a former Washington schools chancellor, was an early supporter of the film, hosting advance screenings at the Republican and Democratic National Conventions and attending the film's New York premiere. StudentsFirst has also created a Web site to educate parents about parent trigger laws.
Nancy Zuckerbrod, a StudentsFirst spokeswoman, said in a statement, "Our nearly 2 million members are supporting this film, because it's helping to raise awareness about a critical issue in America today - the frustration of parents whose children are stuck in failing schools."
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Austin TX/ Parents Pitch In to Help Schools Face Budget Cuts
By Morgan Smith
New York Times
September 29, 2012
The space used to be a vacant field, sandwiched between Casis Elementary School and a parking lot.
Now, thanks to diligent fund-raising and a parent who is an architect, it is a state-of-the-art outdoor classroom where pupils get lessons in subjects ranging from math to creative writing. There is an open-air "room" with long green tables and benches, rosemary-filled garden beds and a pond studded with lily pads. A small stone amphitheater nearby also serves as a large-scale sun dial.
The outpouring that produced the classroom is part of a pattern in West Austin, where community members also pooled their resources when Casis's 60-year-old library needed new shelves - and when, down the road at O. Henry Middle School, the campus could not afford to hire the teachers it needed to maintain small class sizes after state budget cuts.
Casis raised $90,000 to install new carpeting along with the library shelves. At O. Henry, parents have raised $350,000 in the past two years to finance seven new teaching positions.
There is a long history of private philanthropy in public schools. But the elimination of more than $5 billion in state financing for public education in the last legislative session has put more pressure on parents to open their wallets.
And while no one says that a community's support of its schools is a negative, the influx of private money concerns civil rights advocates who say it exacerbates existing inequities in the public school system.
- The smaller classes, better facilities and extracurricular activities financed with private dollars attract the best teachers and offer far more opportunity to students in affluent areas, said Jim Harrington, the director of the Texas Civil Rights Project. "It ends up creating a de facto two-tier system," he said.
His organization, which recently released a report highlighting what it called the "vestiges of segregation" in the Austin Independent School District, has filed a lawsuit against a West Texas school district, arguing that its three high school campuses have wide variations in per-student financing.
- Mr. Harrington said he hoped the lawsuit would become a template for other parents around the country who are grappling with such disparities.
Patty Martin, the principal of Casis, has a different hope: that what her school has done with the outdoor classroom will make it easier for other schools to do the same, especially now that the design is in place and a network of willing donors has been assembled.
If that happens, the community may have to export some of the talent and resources that made the project a success at Casis. Burton Baldridge, the architect who designed the outdoor classroom, and whose children attend Casis, found an eager stable of patrons who donated concrete, steel and lumber.
In August, Mr. Baldridge left his office every day at 4 p.m. to labor over the structure with three other volunteers, sometimes working late into the night. More people donated their time on weekends.
Parents managed to raise about $30,000, and a local business put in a little more than that to cover the rest. But Mr. Baldridge said that figure represents just a fraction of the structure's total value when accounting for the donated services, materials and time.
On a warm September afternoon, about 20 first graders filed out of the outdoor classroom into the nearby gardens. Their teacher had just dispatched them with the mission of identifying solids and liquids in their surroundings. Nearly all of the children headed straight for the pond.
One boy bent over and tentatively stuck a finger in the water. Recoiling, he squealed, "There's a frog!"
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Washington DC/ INTERVIEW with Marc Prensky: Quest for 'Digital Wisdom'
By Mike Bock
Education Week, Vol. 32, Issue 6 [Edweek.org]
September 28, 2012
Marc Prensky has written a number of books about the integration of technology and education. In his latest, Brain Gain: Technology and the Quest for Digital Wisdom, he argues that technology can be used to enhance the human brain and improve the way people process information.
In a recent interview with Editorial Intern Mike Bock for Education Week's Digital Education blog, Mr. Prensky talked about what teachers and education leaders can do to get more out of technology.
- Why "Digital Wisdom"? What did you hope to discover when you decided to write this book?
The question is how do we become better people and more able to deal with the problems of our times. In the past, the wisdom of the brain was sufficient; today, it no longer is. And the reason is there are lots of things that the brain is good at, but there are a large number of things that it's not good at. One of them is dealing with large amounts of data, and dealing with the degree of complexity that happens in the world. So the sense is that wisdom, in the future, is putting together symbiotically what the brain does best and what machines do even better.
- What are the main challenges today to bringing educational technology to the classroom? Are they exclusively financial, or are there attitude problems, too?
The main challenge seems to be attitude. I think what it is, if people are afraid of technology, then they will not support it. And if they think that the basics are the same today as the basics in the past, then they won't support it. My sense is that technology is as basic to education today as reading and writing are. So just as we include reading and writing in every single thing that we teach, we need to include technology in every single thing we teach.
That being said, we have to figure out how to use the technology in a way that is powerful and not trivial. One of the problems is that people who don't know how to use technology often look for examples, then copy those examples, and get a lot of trivial uses for them; ... trivial compared to the power of technology.
What we should be doing in classes, teachers and students together should be thinking about, "If we had access to technology, access to a supercomputer, if we each had an iPad or a computer with Web access, what could we do that's very powerful that we couldn't do without those tools?" If we ask those questions, if we think about them and collect the best answers, then we'll start moving toward better use of technology.
- In the first few chapters of your book, you talk about how people's attitudes toward technology are extremely important, and how even a few cases of unreliable technology can turn someone off from technology use. What are some ways to avoid this phenomenon?
One of the ways is to be a little tolerant. All technology breaks down. When our cars break down, we don't immediately get back on horses. And we don't teach horseback riding in school. When technology breaks down, we fix it and move on.
The frustration level with technology is now getting faster and faster. It's on the way to becoming more transparent, but it's still complex, and it's still going to have frustrations with it.
- What are some ways tech-savvy teachers can implement your ideas in the classroom? Or are they already doing so?
Many are. There's a lot of great stuff out there, but the very best thing we can do is more sharing. I would like to see every teacher who has experienced success, or thought of an interesting idea, make a 30-second YouTube video, so if another teacher wants to figure out "how do I teach X, Y, or Z," they would be able to find it. Sharing is probably number one.
Thinking carefully about how the technology would enhance learning, and take it much further, is another one. Particularly in the realm of connectivity, because that's the element we didn't have before. We had libraries, we could always do research-it might have been a little more onerous, but we could do it. What we couldn't do is connect ourselves around the world. We couldn't read the tweets coming out of the Middle East, and we couldn't tweet back. We couldn't connect with experts with Skype in real time.
All of those things are new, and unless we decide that we're going to include those technologies, we're not going to have the kind of education that our kids need.
- Is there anything else you want to add?
One of the big issues with technology is that teachers think they have to teach everything they covered before, cover their entire curriculum, and then add technology on top of that. Well, if you think of it that way, it's not going to happen.
What has to happen is, technology needs to be integrated in the curriculum in the same ways that reading and writing are integrated. With that, we also have to delete some of the curriculum. Teachers need to take responsibility for looking at the curriculum and saying, "This is worth two weeks, and this is worth two sentences."
So share, imagine, and integrate technology. Oh, and partner with the kids. Teachers that are most successful with technology are not the ones who do it for the kids. They are the ones who partner with the kids and let them do most of it while the teacher takes a supervisory role, in terms of asking, 'Is this high quality? Are these the right questions we should be asking?' And so on. It's very important that teachers reserve the intellectual roles because kids might not need as much help with the technology.
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Washington DC/ OPINION: Educating the World - No More Excuses
By Gordon Brown [Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, UN Special Envoy for Global Education]
Huffington Post
September 28, 2012
This September, five and six year olds in the western world have enjoyed their first day at school. In the developing world, however, a total of 61 million school-age girls and boys around the world will not go to primary school at all.
While if you visited the classrooms of New York, London or Paris you would find happy young children beginning their educational journey, if you visit the mining regions of Mali, West Africa, you'll find children as young as 10 working in tunnels 30 meters underground. Visit the cocoa growing areas of neighboring Côte d'Ivoire and you'll see young boys of primary school age working with machetes.
This tragic picture of child labor repeats itself across the developing world:
- new figures show that 91 million girls and boys are currently engaged in child labor.
- On current trends, there will be as many as 170 million child laborers in 2020, who, instead of acquiring the basic literacy and numeracy skills that we in the western world often take for granted, are engaged in grueling and often dangerous work.
- In Africa alone, the number of children aged between five and 14 involved in child labor is projected to increase by some 19 million.
- Growing numbers of children forced into the workplace, and so denied the opportunity to prosper in the classroom. This endless cycle of poverty begetting poverty through lack of opportunity is ready to repeat itself if nothing is done.
Contrast this with the western world, where education has taken its rightful place amongst the priorities of government, with centuries of investment in teaching and infrastructure. In ten years' time, 800 million of the world's citizens, primarily in wealthy countries, are set to have university degrees.
More than ever our educational qualifications will determine what each of us earns and owns. As low-skilled jobs become computerized and the value of memory, computation and manual dexterity falls, those who have years of education behind them will be at the front of the line in the jobs market.
Indeed, the education gap is now increasingly recognized as the root of economic disparity.
- For centuries the world's most brilliant minds have tried to understand why some countries are rich and others poor; why, for example, Americans are 39 times richer than the Nepalese and 140 times richer than the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
- Attention has focused on whether it is geography, culture, technology capital or poor institutions that spurs us on or holds us back.
This month's Nobel Symposium in Stockholm on Growth and Development emphasized an often-overlooked rationale for a nation's economic prospects: the power of education. As Nobel Prize winner Robert Lucas demonstrated, the wealth of nations will increasingly come not just from their highly educated individuals but from sophisticated interactive learning communities. From now on, no nation can aspire to become a high-income country without education.
Yet just at the point that the world is acknowledging that the creativity and skill of human beings is the key to the future, we have decided to invest less. Out-of-school numbers have stalled as educational aid from rich countries starts to fall, from the already paltry figure of $13.50 per child per year in Africa.
The time for action is now, if we are not to betray the promise we made in the second Millenium Development Goal, of universal primary education. This week, the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon launched his Education First initiative. We will be calling on governments, NGOs, businesses and foundations to rally behind the cause of putting children into school. The business community has already begun to mobilize, with the newly formed Global Business Coalition for Education uniting multinational corporations from across the globe in their commitment to use their resources and expertise.
We will expose the scandal of lost education through child labor; we will show how unacceptable it is that each year ten million girls become child brides instead of going to school; and how it is hypocrisy to say we are a compassionate world when, in 2012, an untold number of children will be forcibly conscripted into armed groups, used by criminal gangs to perform illicit activities or sold into prostitution.
Education across the world must therefore be a priority for us all - an economic and of course a moral necessity. The challenge is not insurmountable; we know how to build schools and how to train teachers. And so the time for excuses is over, and action must begin today.
