PSFA Daily News Digest

13-15 October 2012

www.nmpsfa.org 

Barbara Riley, Editor  ·  Email:  newsdigest@nmpsfa.org 

Santa Fe/ Superintendent's Idea for Reform: Fuse Santa Fe's High Schools

By James Barron and Robert Nott

The New Mexican

October 13, 2012

In a town where Demon or Jaguar pride is central to students' self-definition, even preliminary talk of merging the city's two high schools into one is likely to cause controversy.

But as Santa Fe Public Schools looks to reform its schools - including focusing on improving academic achievement and raising the dismal 56.5 percent graduation rate - Superintendent Joel Boyd and members of the district's Citizens Review Committee (which advises the school board on financial and construction issues) have floated the idea of building a ninth-grade career academy at one site and developing a separate site as a multi-career-pathways high school for grades 10-12.

Though Boyd said Friday that there will be no talk of location until programming is in place, it seems likely that Capital and Santa Fe High would be potential sites for the plan. He said he understands this is a very sensitive issue for parents and students at both schools, and that any such plan would require a multiyear transition period in which, as he put it, "Every student who is at Capital High graduates Capital High."

Boyd plans to specifically discuss some of the district's secondary-reform ideas at Tuesday's board meeting, scheduled for 5:30 p.m. at the Educational Services Center on Alta Vista Street. He, like others involved in the discussion, is emphasizing that this is all just preliminary talk.

• "Our secondary schools are not working well enough for enough children," he said Friday.
•  "We are considering new and different ways to offer secondary education to children. Within that planning process, we have discussed all sorts of possibilities.
• The notion of a use of Capital and Santa Fe High [as one] was presented publicly as a concept during a Citizens Review Committee meeting in August. That was laid out as a concept ... but not in terms of something that we are definitely going to do.

"If we decide to go that route, it has to be with the community," he added.

Boyd said the district must overhaul education at the secondary level, based on hard data that suggest a lot of parents who send their children to the district's elementary schools are opting to send them elsewhere by the time the students reach high school.

• Citing 40-day attendance records for this year, Boyd pointed out that the district's K-6 population is about 1,160, while its population in grades 10-12 is about 670 students.
• A ninth-grade career academy would allow counselors and teachers to better connect with those students, while offering them a taste of the various programming categories to come at a 10-12 site.

School board President Frank Montaño confirmed Boyd's comments Friday, saying, "Nothing at this point has been decided, even as a recommendation; but that is one type of scenario being discussed. I do think it would generate some discussion among the public - both positive and negative."

Rob Wing, chairman of the Citizens Review Committee, said the discussion came up in part because the district has to start planning for facility projects for the next general obligation bond election early next year. He said the committee meeting involved a general talk with a lot of questions regarding how to improve the district's high schools.

"It was all pretty speculative at the time," he said. He also said that the committee will not make any recommendations until it hears the district's initial secondary educational-reform plan later this year.

While the idea is academically charged, there is an athletic impact as well. Consolidation of the two schools would result in just one athletics program, much like it was before Capital opened in 1988. Such an action would move the one school, which likely would keep the Santa Fe High brand, into Class AAAAA. Both schools currently compete at the AAAA level.

Santa Fe Public Schools athletic director Kim Loomis said there have not yet been discussions about how to consolidate the two programs and how coaches would be determined. She added that there could be multiple sub-varsity teams (junior varsity and freshmen) below the single varsity program.

"We would be able to expand our offerings with freshmen and dual JV teams to accommodate the same number of students that we do now," Loomis said.

However, coaches from both schools noted a key problem with one athletic program - specifically that it would limit participation for student athletes in sports they like.

"In wrestling, you've got 14 varsity slots," Capital head wrestling coach Marcos Gallegos said. "Now you go from 28 slots [with two varsity programs] to 14. It's taking opportunities from these kids to be competitive at the varsity level."

Santa Fe High head football coach Ray Holladay said he would like to see what the school district's plan of a single high school system would look like. One thing he would like to see is eighth-graders included in the ninth-grade academy so that a true middle school program could be developed.

As it is now, the three middle schools (Ortiz, Capshaw and De Vargas) have no connection with the athletic programs at Capital and Santa Fe High because none of them is a true feeder school. Students have a choice of going to either high school, which prevents high school coaches from implementing elements of their systems at the middle school level. An eighth-grade athletics program would help accelerate student athletes' development for high school.

"It's really hard right now because of the zoning of our junior highs," Holladay said. "You would think that every kid that goes to De Vargas would come to Santa Fe High by zoning, and every kid that goes to Ortiz would go to Capital. That's not the case."

The other underlying issue is school pride, be it in athletics or otherwise. The two high schools have each developed a sense of community, and that would be difficult for some students, administrators and teachers to see change.

"My wife teaches at Capital, and I know she has a lot of pride in the job she does for Capital, as do the teachers at Santa Fe High," Holladay said. "There has been that rivalry for 20-plus years. It would be hard initially to meld the two schools together because, if I'm a freshman at Capital, I'm a Jaguar - and that's what I am."

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ABQ/ Incredible Kids Day at Edward Gonzales Elementary: Letters for Literacy

By Glen Rosales

ABQ Journal

October 13, 2012  

Tears leaked from the eyes of third-grader Mikaela Santistevan as she hugged her mother Thursday at Edward Gonzales Elementary School.

Santistevan had just finished reading aloud a letter that her mom, Darlene Santistevan, had written as part of an "Incredible Kids Day" celebration at the school on the Southwest Mesa.

"I waited for you for so long, I thought you would never come," Darlene Santistevan wrote. "But God finally brought you into our lives. You were so worth the wait. After giving birth to your 10-pound brothers, you were so easy at seven pounds."

The school tied together a parents' training session from earlier in the week that focused on literacy with the Incredible Kids Day by asking parents to write a poem or letter to their children.

Some children got overlooked, but that was addressed, as well, said fifth-grade teacher, Amelia Candelaria, by the children writing to each other.

"We've got their backs," she said.

Writing to each other was a fun part of the project, said one of Candelaria's students, Priscilla Cruz.

"I thought that it was very nice because you get to tell them how important they are and incredible and different things about them," she said. "Some of the things I wanted to tell my classmates were that they were helpful, nice and they help me in different things and I help them."

The teachers and students have been preparing for the event for some time, said Assistant Principal Celia Sanchez.

• "We have had about a month's worth of planning as far as having all the kids tell the parents about our incredible day," she said.
• "It's a great morale builder. The kids feel really good about themselves. And it's just an overall activity.
• This is the first year we've done it, and we're going to be doing it again, making it even bigger and better."

The students thought it was pretty good this time around, as emotions got the better of many of them.

There were few dry eyes in Candelaria's class as the students opened, then read their letters.

"It says that I am a very good girl and a I am a God present," Jaileen Ruiz said of her letter from her mom that was written in Spanish. "And that I have a good mind. I think good. And that I could accomplish the things I want and when I grow up I can be what I want to be."

Bubbles of tears clung to her eyelashes as she explained what it all meant to her.

"I was happy. I was happy that I was hearing that," Ruiz said. "I felt that I was special to her. It made me proud of my mom, and it surprised me that she said those things. I'm going to give her a hug when I get home."

In preparing for the day, Candelaria's class studied descriptive writing and poetry, as well as a child's place in the world.

• "I think that it's a really neat way to build a community because we learn too that it takes a whole village to raise a child," Candelaria said.
• "And by doing this, kids realize that they not only have the support from their parents and families but they have it from teachers and other kids at school."

The support of parents is particularly important for children to understand, Darlene Santistevan said.

"I always felt like kids are the most important resource that we have," she said. " I've always volunteered in the schools. I've always felt that kids are the best investment that we can make in helping them read and learn and I've always thought that if we don't teach our kids, we're losing out. It's the best investment we can make is to teach them to read and be good to humans. To be good to each other."

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Santa Fe/ COLUMN: Parade on Canyon Road Kicks off SFPS's MusicFest!

By Robert Nott

The New Mexican

October 14, 2012

Alexandra Esquibel plans to be part of a wall of sound that Santa Fe Public Schools' music students are building Saturday on and around Canyon Road.

The Santa Fe High School junior will be playing the violin or viola as part of this year's MusicFest! This annual event kicks off its third anniversary with a noon parade moving up Canyon Road on Saturday, Oct. 20.

• Over the course of the next month or so, some 400 students enrolled in various school music programs, as well as the roughly 50 music educators employed by the district, will show off their skills in an array of mostly public events.
• The events are designed to draw public attention to the music programs and also raise money for supplies, instruments, transportation costs and classroom music clinics.

But it all starts off with that parade - "The shortest parade in the city, but its precious," explained the district's music-education coordinator, Leeanne Devane - featuring marching bands, singers, string ensembles, recorder ensembles, ribbon dancers and Superintendent Joel Boyd.

Afterward, various school bands, choirs, singers and orchestras will pair up with participating galleries and businesses along the route to perform in more intimate settings.

• For instance, between 1 and 2 p.m., Aspen Community Magnet School's fourth-grade musicians will perform at Cafe des Artistes, 223 Canyon Road,
• the Santa Fe High School Orchestra will play at Mark White Fine Art, 414 Canyon Road, and
•  El Dorado Community School's string ensemble plays at the Waxlander Gallery 622 Canyon Road.
• Between 2 and 3 p.m., the E.J. Martinez Elementary School Patriotic Singers perform at Canyon Road Contemporary Art, 403 Canyon Road,
• Piñon Elementary School's choir performs at William and Joseph Gallery, 727 Canyon Road, and
• female singers from both Capital High and Santa Fe High will perform with members of the Santa Fe Women's Ensemble at 3:30 p.m. at Winterowd Fine Art, 701 Canyon Road.

"This will be the strongest music fest event yet," Devane said. "It's starting to take hold and become rooted in the community. ... We are a visual arts city and one that increasingly continues to support music education for our children."

The fest also gives students the chance to perform alongside professional musicians. "That kind of opportunity allows children to discover the world of music out there and realize where they can take it in their lives," she said. These professionals, in her words, "Bring a larger world of music to our students, they make it alive for them in a way that is not possible when music education is confined to the classroom."

Esquibel, who will perform Saturday with the Women's Ensemble, agreed: "It's great; they can give us advice and they have been doing this for a long time and can tell us what it's like."

The district's music education budget is somewhere in the range of $2.5 million to 3 million, Devane said.

• Every student in grades K-6 receives some form of music education and
• about 3,000 students in grades 4-12 are enrolled in music electives as well.

"I would love to see it keep going," Esquibel said of the festival. "It shows how important music education is to this community."

Devane said the district is working with both Santa Fean Magazine and Partners in Education to make the MusicFest! possible. You can find a detailed schedule of events on the district's www.sfps.info website or call Devane at 467-2513.

Also in tandem with MusicFest! renowned violinist and conductor Guillermo Figueroa, music director of the Music in the Mountains Festival in Durango, Colo., is in town raising money for music education in Santa Fe.

He will perform at 7 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 20, in the Scottish Rite Center on Paseo de Peralta. Tickets are $40 and $50, and all proceeds benefit the Santa Fe Youth Symphony Association. Call 467-3770 for tickets and information.

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Santa Fe/ OBITUARY: Betsy Tapia: St. Michael's Teacher 'Truly Changed Students' Lives'

By Tom Sharpe

The New Mexican

October 12, 2012

Betsy Tapia, a teacher at St. Michael's High School for more than 30 years, died Friday, Oct. 12, after a brief illness, an announcement by the school said.

Tapia, 63, taught English at the school and, early in her employment, also taught Spanish.

She is survived by her 10-year-old daughter, Desirae, and several siblings.

She was born in New Mexico on June 6, 1949. In the early 1970s, she lived in Muskogee, Okla., and worked as a community organizer for public health, recreation and at-risk youth advocacy.

She earned a bachelor's degree from the College of Santa Fe in 1978, and in 1994 earned a master's degree from St. John's College.

Prior to joining St. Michael's in 1981, Tapia taught at Questa Elementary School as well as the Cristo Rey School. She also worked as a rape crisis counselor in Las Vegas, N.M.

She wrote stories and poetry, and many years ago published three books of poetry through The University of New Mexico and New Mexico Highlands University, where she once served as a residential adviser.

Tapia was named to the National Honor Roll of Outstanding American Teachers in 2007.

A memorial service is scheduled for 10 a.m. Monday, Oct. 15, at St. Michael's High School. Funeral arrangements are pending.

The school's statement Friday said, "Through her rigorous writing assignments - which often required deep introspection - her careful guidance through class discussion, and her gentle nature, she was a teacher who truly changed and improved her students' lives."

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El Paso TX/ Schools Confront Scandal of Students Who 'Disappeared' at Test Time

By Manny Fernandez

New York Times

October 13, 2012

It sounded at first like a familiar story: school administrators, seeking to meet state and federal standards, fraudulently raised students' scores on crucial exams.

But in the cheating scandal that has shaken the 64,000-student school district in this border city, administrators manipulated more than numbers. They are accused of keeping low-performing students out of classrooms altogether by improperly holding some back, accelerating others and preventing many from showing up for the tests or enrolling in school at all.

It led to a dramatic moment at the federal courthouse this month, when a former schools superintendent, Lorenzo Garcia, was sentenced to prison for his role in orchestrating the testing scandal. But for students and parents, the case did not end there. A federal investigation continues, with the likelihood of more arrests of administrators who helped Mr. Garcia.

• Federal prosecutors charged Mr. Garcia, 57, with devising an elaborate program to inflate test scores to improve the performance of struggling schools under the federal No Child Left Behind Act and to allow him to collect annual bonuses for meeting district goals.
• The scheme, elements of which were carried out for most of Mr. Garcia's nearly six-year tenure, centered on a state-mandated test taken by sophomores. Known as the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, it measures performance in reading, mathematics and other subjects.

The scheme's objective was to keep low-performing students out of the classroom so they would not take the test and drag scores down, according to prosecutors, former principals and school advocates.

• Students identified as low-performing were transferred to charter schools, discouraged from enrolling in school or were visited at home by truant officers and told not to go to school on the test day.
• For some, credits were deleted from transcripts or grades were changed from passing to failing or from failing to passing so they could be reclassified as freshmen or juniors.
• Others intentionally held back were allowed to catch up before graduation with "turbo-mesters," in which students earned a semester's worth of credit for a few hours of computer work.

A former high school principal said in an interview and in court that one student earned two semester credits in three hours on the last day of school.

• Still other students who transferred to the district from Mexico were automatically put in the ninth grade, even if they had earned credits for the 10th grade, to keep them from taking the test.

"He essentially treated these students as pawns in a scheme to make it look as though he was achieving the thresholds he needed for his bonuses," said Robert Pitman, the United States attorney for the Western District of Texas, whose office prosecuted Mr. Garcia.

Another former principal, Lionel Rubio, said he knew of six students who had been pushed out of high school and had not pursued an education since. In 2008, Linda Hernandez-Romero's daughter repeated her freshman year at Bowie High School after administrators told her she was not allowed to return as a sophomore. Ms. Hernandez-Romero said administrators told her that her daughter was not doing well academically and was not likely to perform well on the test.

Ms. Hernandez-Romero protested the decision, but she said her daughter never followed through with her education, never received a diploma or a G.E.D. and now, at age 21, has three children, is jobless and survives on welfare.

"Her decisions have been very negative after this," her mother said. "She always tells me: 'Mom, I got kicked out of school because I wasn't smart. I guess I'm not, Mom, look at me.' There's not a way of expressing how bad it feels, because it's so bad. Seeing one of your children fail and knowing that it was not all her doing is worse."

The program was known as "the Bowie model," and Mr. Garcia had boasted of his success in raising test scores, particularly in 2008, when all of the district's eligible campuses earned a rating of "academically acceptable" or better from the state. But parents and students had another name for what was happening: "los desaparecidos," or the disappeared.

State education data showed that 381 students were enrolled as freshmen at Bowie in the fall of 2007. The following fall, the sophomore class was 170 students. Dozens of the missing students had "disappeared" through Mr. Garcia's program, said Eliot Shapleigh, a lawyer and former state senator who began his own investigation into testing misconduct and was credited with bringing the case to light. Mr. Shapleigh said he believed that hundreds of students were affected and that district leaders had failed to do enough to locate and help them.

• "Desaparecidos is by far the worst education scandal in the country," Mr. Shapleigh said. "In Atlanta, the students were helped on tests by teachers. The next day, the students were in class. Here, the students were disappeared right out of the classroom."

Court documents list six unindicted co-conspirators who assisted Mr. Garcia, but they have not been publicly identified. Parents and educators believe that several of those involved in the scandal continue to work in the system or have taken jobs at nearby districts. The El Paso district, meanwhile, has had trouble maintaining its leadership, with the board of trustees appointing three interim superintendents since Mr. Garcia's arrest last year.

Mr. Garcia's program led to an inquiry involving three federal entities: the F.B.I., Mr. Pitman's office and the Education Department's inspector general. The state's education agency penalized the district in August by lowering its accreditation status, assigning a monitor and requiring it to hire outside companies to oversee testing and identify the structural defects that allowed the scheme to go unchecked.

On Wednesday, the newly appointed commissioner of the Texas Education Agency, Michael L. Williams, came to El Paso to speak with parents and administrators, telling them he had the power to take other steps, including installing a new board of trustees.

"I'm outraged by what happened," Mr. Williams said after the meeting. "We're going to give the district an opportunity to right the ship. And if that doesn't happen, then obviously there are several options available to the commissioner of education, and I'll look very, very carefully at those options."

Former El Paso educators have criticized state officials and the local board as failing to hold Mr. Garcia accountable. In 2010, the Texas Education Agency issued letters clearing Mr. Garcia of wrongdoing, finding insufficient evidence on accusations of "disappeared" students and testing misconduct.

Mr. Garcia was the first superintendent in the country to be charged with manipulating data used to assess compliance with No Child Left Behind for financial gain, the authorities said. Before he was hired in 2006, Mr. Garcia was a deputy superintendent in Dallas and received a doctorate from the University of Houston. His annual salary was $280,314 when he resigned last November, three months after his arrest.

In June, Mr. Garcia pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy to commit mail fraud. One charge was connected to the scandal, and the other involved his efforts to secure a $450,000 no-bid contract for a consulting firm run by his former mistress. He was sentenced to three years and six months in federal prison and was ordered to pay $180,000 in restitution to the district.

He was also fined $56,500, the amount of testing-related bonuses he had received.

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Denver CO/ Douglas County: Teacher Pilot Plan Using Market-Based Pay & Rigorous Evaluation

By Clayton Woullard

Denver Post

October 15, 2012

The Douglas County School District's new pay-for-performance pilot program - using market-based pay and a rigorous evaluation approach - has begun.

The system is different from the state evaluation tool that requires a system for evaluating teacher effectiveness by next year. The district previously had a system in which teachers were paid bonuses for extra work they did or for exceeding expectations.

The system is a pilot program this year and has been funded with $4 million. The district failed to get more funding for the program from voters last year.

• The first component, market-based pay, sidesteps the experience-based scale the district has used and looks more at performance, education and supply and demand.

Brian Cesare, chief human-resources officer for the district, said, for example, a teacher coming into the district straight out of college would be paid based on how many such teachers are applying for the job compared to the demand for the position.

He said this year the district made more than 400 offers for jobs - 396 applicants accepted and 15 declined, six because of pay.

The district has established five "buckets" with 70 teacher types.

• The system also eliminates knowledge-level advancement, in which teachers get a raise for gaining education. Cesare said now teachers have to prove the worth of that education through their performance.

That's where the second component comes in: the Continuous Improvement of Teacher Effectiveness standards, which assistant superintendent for secondary education Dan McMinimee said is based on the state standards.

• It puts teachers into four areas: highly effective, effective, partially effective and ineffective.
• The evaluations will be done by the teacher's supervisor as well as by students and parents and not solely on standardized tests.

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New York NY/ Dear Teacher, Johnny Is Skipping the Test

By Soni Sangha

New York Times

October 12, 2012

Later this month, children at 169 New York City elementary and middle schools will, for the second time in a calendar year, take a 40-minute "field test" in math and English language arts to determine which questions will go on future state standardized exams.

Lori Chajet's daughter will not be among them, though the tests are scheduled to be given at her school, Public School 321, in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Nor will many students at Public School 261 in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, or children at schools across District 6 in northern Manhattan.

Ms. Chajet's objection is not to testing itself, but to the way tests are being used to evaluate schools and teachers.

• "I want my school to use tests to help instruction, to help find out if kids don't know fractions," she said. "I don't want my child to feel like her score will decide if her teacher has a job or not."

Ms. Chajet is one of a small but growing number of parent activists in New York City opposed to the system's emphasis on high-stakes testing. Many of them took part in a boycott of the field tests in June, when parents at 47 public elementary and middle schools of the 1,029 tested had their children sit them out. In their eyes, it was a win-win situation: Children who skipped the field tests did not risk punitive action or potential harm to their school's grade on the city's progress reports, while their parents could make a statement against the tests.

Field testing is not a new concept.

• Future standardized test questions used to be tucked into actual exams, as they were in the last round of state tests, said Tom Dunn, spokesman for the State Education Department.
• But trying out a large number of questions requires multiple versions of an exam, and New York, to save money, printed a limited number of versions of the actual test in the last go-round.
• To try out enough sample questions would have required lengthening the exams substantially. The solution, officials said, is to use stand-alone field tests.

The tests are not cheap: Pearson, the company that creates the standardized exams and the field tests, charged the state about $7 million for testing services for the 2012 calendar year - 30 percent of that budget went toward field testing.

The urgency to create new questions is heightened because the state has adopted a new core curriculum.

• The existing standardized tests no longer reflect what New York's children are learning and do not accurately assess instruction, according to Adina Lopatin, deputy chief academic officer in the New York City Education Department.
• To change the exam, the state needs to change the questions.

"We think the testing will have a positive impact in instruction across the city this year," Ms. Lopatin said.

The anti-testing activists are not so sure. Last spring, Martha Foote remembers, her son, an avid Yankees fan, would come home looking sullen after taking standardized tests in school. He was not allowed to play or read if he finished an exam early, so he would hold imaginary ballgames in his head, he said. Ms. Foote stopped asking about school and started asking about the games. Occasionally, he would shake his head dejectedly and say: "Not so good. The Yankees lost."

She became convinced that the emphasis on standardized tests was ruining her son's experience at school. Other parents at P.S. 321, and schools like it, felt the same way. They talked about their concerns on the sidelines of soccer fields and during dance classes. And they came together in groups like Parent Voices, New York, to which Ms. Foote belongs, to make themselves heard.

Anti-testing activists say their movement is not geared exclusively at politicians or school officials, though they have gotten Assemblyman James F. Brennan, a Brooklyn Democrat, to sponsor amendments to buy the state time to reconsider whether tests should be used to evaluate teachers. They have also gotten a resolution in front of the City Council that, if passed, would call for the state to re-examine school accountability and testing policies.

That is not enough, testing opponents say. They want to bring parents from across the city into their movement. While they do not expect to get a critical mass of boycotters this fall, their progress can be seen in the outcropping of new committees at city schools' parent associations with the words "community" or "action" in their names.

Jen Nessel leads the newly formed Community Action Committee of the P.A. at the East Village Community School in Manhattan. The group came together after the field tests in June, when nearly all parents in the school signed a letter, delivered to the principal, stating that they would decline to have their children take the test.

"We had this overwhelming sense that we need to do something," Ms. Nessel said.

Like many of the schools that have been centers for this movement, East Village Community routinely does well in its annual progress report and is in no danger of being shut down because of poor performance on the standardized tests. Most of the schools with activist parents have more white children and are more likely to be middle-class than the system as a whole.

Their goal, the activists say, is to make common cause with parents at struggling schools, with populations that are more likely to be black and Hispanic and poor, and where any opposition to standardized testing - if it exists - has been far less vocal.

"I think there is an opportunity to have more lower-income parents being more visible and more active," said Andrea Mata, a parent activist who works with a group called Change the Stakes that is opposed to high-stakes testing.

Change the Stakes, which has members in northern Manhattan, said it mailed outreach packets last week to each New York City school being tested. In the packet are informational materials in English and Spanish, including a form that parents can sign and deliver to their principal indicating their intention to opt out of the exam.

Diana Zavala, whose son sat out the field tests at his school in Manhattan in June, worked on the Spanish materials and said her experience in her largely Dominican neighborhood indicated that the battle to sway parents would be hard. "Other parents, for cultural reasons, say, 'I'm putting a kid in my school's hands, and it's O.K.,' " she said. "It's a testing acceptance, and so you have to change those hearts."

When the latest round of field tests was announced, the parent board at P.S. 321 immediately called for parents to opt out - about 90 percent did last June - and Ms. Foote joked that the school was looking for the list of students who would take the test rather than who would not. Boycotting a field test, Ms. Foote said, "is a safe outlet for anger to be heard." Few parents are likely to boycott the actual tests when they are given in the spring, though some activists have called for that. "I just don't know at this point whether we can go any further, " Ms. Foote said.

Sitting out the real exams can have serious consequences.

• Andrea Mata's son opted out of the third-grade English-language exam in the spring. His advancement to the next grade hinged on a portfolio of his work gathered by his teacher that demonstrated skills tested on the state exam, including examples of reading accuracy, comprehension and writing. In addition, he had to take an exam that was much shorter than the state standardized test and included written responses and multiple-choice questions.
• Ms. Mata said his teacher recommended he be allowed to move on to fourth grade, but the community superintendent disagreed. The Matas were told that he had two options: go through a month of preparatory work and then take the standardized tests when they were re-offered in July, or appeal. They appealed. Their principal advocated on their behalf, and in August, Ms. Mata's son was promoted.

She said that the family had discussed the risk with their son before collectively deciding what to do. But this year, the exam will help determine where he goes to middle school, and how they will handle the test - and how their son will feel about skipping it - is less certain. "I don't know what our position on opt-out is going to be this year," Ms. Mata said, emphasizing that her son would be a major voice in the conversation. "We're going to have to make this decision as we get closer to the date."

Officials said they weren't concerned that large numbers of children would skip the field tests this month. "The numbers of the people who were boycotting in June were small," Ms. Lopatin, of the city Education Department, said.

But activists say that the boycott is just one step in changing the way schools approach testing and how parents and families fit into the conversation.

"Certainly, at 321 it's a way to say these are your rights as parents," Ms. Chajet said. "If you don't want them to sit for this and you want to do one of the many other enriching things that they can do in school, you have that right. And that's as important as anything right now. "

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Washington DC/ College Persistence Linked to Rigorous Courses and Academic Advising

By Caralee Adams

Education Week [Edweek.org]]

October 12, 2012

New research suggests that if schools can figure out how to keep college freshman on track, the nation could be well on its path to meeting President Obama's 2020 goal of leading the world in producing college graduates.

A study released Thursday finds the answer is linked to higher levels of math in high school, more Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses, and good college advising. And those factors hold regardless of student's socioeconomic status.

The research by Kasey Klepfer and Jim Hull at the Center for Public Education at the National School Boards Association focused on freshman-to-sophomore persistence rates, since college students are more likely to drop out their first year than any other. And with graduation rates hovering around 58 percent at four-year colleges and 33 percent at community colleges, educators are eager to learn how to get more students to the finish line.

"High School Rigor and Good Advice: Setting up Students to Succeed" a nationally representative sample of more than 9,000 high school sophomores in 2002 through their second year in college, both two- and four-year institutions, and discovered three factors related to students' chances of success:

• High-level mathematics: Taking Pe-calculus, Calculus or math above Algebra II gave student from a high socioeconomic status (SES) a 10 percent better chance of persisting at a four-year college and improved the odds by 22 percent for those from a low SES.
• Advanced Placement/International Baccalaureate courses: The study found the more of these courses a student took, the higher their persistence rates were. This was especially true for low-achieving and low-SES students. They got an 18 percent boost in success at four-year colleges and a 30 percent boost at two-year schools if they enrolled in these classes. "It is surprising that we find that simply taking an AP/IB course in any subject improved persistence in college, and that whether a student passes a test for that course isn't as important," the report noted.
• Academic advising: Talking to an academic adviser in college either "sometimes" or "often" significantly improved persistence rates as much as 53 percent for low-income students at four-year colleges and 43 percent at two-year schools.

The report encourages school leaders to help by making sure data is being collected on high school graduates' performance in college, offering rigorous curriculum to all students in high school, and supporting academic counseling.

"The lesson to colleges here is clear: policies to encourage these relationships can go a long way toward making sure students are on pace to earn a degree," the report said. "But we also believe that academic advising can be a great benefit when it starts earlier. Middle and high schools need enough counselors to monitor student progress so they can make sure all students are taking rigorous courses and have the support they need to be successful in them."

Taking these suggestions can improve persistence and move the college completion agenda forward, the report suggests.

If 90 percent of current freshmen persisted to graduation, there would be an additional 3.8 million graduates by 2020. And if graduation rates increased to 60 percent for two-year institutions and 90 percent for four-year institutions, they would produce an additional 6.6 million graduates by 2020-enough to meet the labor market's needs in this decade as well as the President's 2020 goal, the report noted.

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Washington DC/ Charter School Financing Gets You a Green Card? The New US-Visa Rush

By Stephanie Simon

Reuters/ Huffington Post

October 12, 2012

It's been a turbulent period for charter schools in the United States, with financial analysts raising concerns about their stability and regulators in several states shutting down schools for poor performance.

The volatility has made it tough for startup schools to get financing.

But an unlikely source of new capital has emerged to fill the gap: foreign investors.

Wealthy individuals from as far away as China, Nigeria, Russia and Australia are spending tens of millions of dollars to build classrooms, libraries, basketball courts and science labs for American charter schools.

• In Buffalo, New York, foreign funds paid for the Health Sciences Charter School to renovate a 19th-century orphanage into modern classrooms and computer labs.
• In Florence, Arizona, overseas investment is expected to finance a sixth campus for the booming chain of American Leadership Academy charter schools.
• And in Florida, state business development officials say foreign investment in charter schools is poised to triple next year, to $90 million.

The reason? Under a federal program known as EB-5, wealthy foreigners can in effect buy U.S. immigration visas for themselves and their families by investing at least $500,000 in certain development projects. In the past two decades, much of the investment has gone into commercial real-estate projects, like luxury hotels, ski resorts and even gas stations.

Lately, however, enterprising brokers have seen a golden opportunity to match cash-starved charter schools with cash-flush foreigners in investment deals that benefit both.

"The demand is massive-massive-on the school side," said Greg Wing, an investment advisor. "On the investor side, it's massive, too."

Two years ago, Wing set up a venture called the Education Fund of America specifically to connect international investors with charter schools. He is currently arranging EB-5 funding for 11 schools across North Carolina, Utah and Arizona and says he has four more deals in the works.

And that's just the start, Wing says: "It's going to be explosive."

Credit crunch

The charter school movement is somewhat controversial. Critics-led by teachers' unions-contend they divert much-needed funds from traditional public schools. Still, they have proved quite popular and now educate more than 2 million children in the United States.

Charter schools are publicly funded but privately run, sometimes by for-profit companies.

• They receive taxpayer dollars to educate each child who enrolls.
• Yet in most states, they get little or no public money to build classrooms, libraries and other facilities.

Well-established and successful chains of charter schools, such as KIPP, Green Dot or Achievement First, receive hefty support from philanthropic foundations and private donors. The chains can also tap into financing provided by an array of for-profit and non-profit investment funds created for that purpose.

But the charter school movement also includes hundreds of small, one-of-a-kind schools, often started by parents seeking a different educational environment for their children. Those mom-and-pop startups have always had a hard time securing funding to build their schools. Many have had to make do with makeshift classrooms in strip malls or church basements.

And lately, experts say, the credit crunch has worsened.

"It's a hard go," said Eric Hall, an attorney in Colorado Springs who advises charter school boards.

Last month, Fitch Ratings warned it was likely to downgrade bonds backed by charter schools because the sector is volatile and the schools are highly leveraged. Such risks mean charter-school debt is typically considered speculative, rather than investment grade, said Eric Kim, a director at Fitch Ratings.

Meanwhile, the IRS has signaled it plans closer scrutiny of charter schools' tax-exempt status if they rely on for-profit management companies to provide their classroom space and run their academic programs, Hall said. He sent his clients a long memo this summer warning that the stepped-up IRS oversight could put some at "significant risk."

If that weren't enough to make investors wary, several well-known charter schools have run into significant legal and fiscal hurdles in recent months.

• Missouri regulators shut down six campuses run by Imagine Schools, one of the nation's largest for-profit charter chains, because of poor academic performance.
• A judge in California ruled that Aspire Public Schools, a large non-profit chain, hadn't secured the proper approval for six of its schools and would have to get permission from local boards of education to continue running them. Local officials yanked the charter of a high-achieving middle school in Georgia over concerns about mismanagement.

All told, about 15 percent of the 6,700 charter schools that have been launched in the United States in the past two decades have since closed, primarily because of financial troubles, according to the Center for Education Reform, which supports charter schools.

This fall alone, more than 150 established charter schools didn't open their doors to students.

Such volatility "will spook people, no doubt about it," said David Brain, chief executive officer of Entertainment Properties Trust, which has historically owned movie theaters but branched out to invest in charter schools, including the six that were shuttered in St. Louis.

Brain said the closures did not affect his company's bottom line and he remains convinced charter schools are a profitable sector. But even he's not ready to start backing untested startup schools.

Charter school administrators say they know that wariness all too well.

"Until you get that charter renewal that says you're doing good things"-typically after five years in operation-"banks won't even talk to you," said Hank Stopinski, principal of the Health Sciences Charter School in Buffalo. Without foreign investment, he said, "we would not have been able to do this project."

Recession-proof

The EB-5 program has drawn sharp criticism in the past.

• Some immigrant investors have lost both their money and their shot at U.S. citizenship when their American partners proved inept or corrupt.
• In the United States, critics have questioned the value of trading visas for scattershot investment.

Yet interest is surging.

• In the first nine months of this year, the government approved 3,000 petitions from foreigners seeking to participate in the program-nearly twice as many as were approved all last year, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Charter schools have become particularly trendy because they are pitched as recession-proof.

• An investor forum in China last spring, for instance, touted U.S. charter schools as a nearly fool-proof investment because they can count on a steady stream of government funding to stay afloat, according to a transcript posted on a Chinese website.
• Arizona educator Holly Johnson, who runs three charter schools and plans to open a fourth next year, said she couldn't believe how easy it was to secure $4.5 million in funding from abroad.

"We didn't have to do anything at all," she said, other than open her schools to potential investors. They didn't ask many questions, she said. Their concern was more basic: "They wanted to come over and make sure it was real."

Inner satisfaction

Eager to join the rush, Ali Faisal devoted a day this week to touring charter schools in Arizona.

Faisal, 37, is a Pakistani citizen who now lives in Calgary, Canada. He runs a technology consulting business that works with oil and gas companies and says he is eager to expand to the United States. He figures the best way to do that is to get a green card.

And the best way to do that, he said, is the EB-5 program.

Participants can get a temporary visa by investing $500,000 to $1 million in a federally approved business.

• If the business creates or preserves at least 10 jobs in two years, the investor and his immediate family are eligible for permanent residency in the United States.
• "It's a much easier path," Faisal said.

He decided to put his money in a charter school, he said, because that way he felt he'd be serving society as well as helping himself. The schools he saw impressed him with their rigorous science curriculum and he said he hoped his investment would help nurture a new generation of American entrepreneurs.

"Investing in some type of hotel," Faisal said, "will not give me that inner satisfaction."

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Bangalore INDIA/ Rohini Nilekani Pours Her Wealth into Books for India's Poorest Children

When she found herself suddenly wealthy, the Indian philanthropist founded Pratham Books, a nonprofit publisher that uses innovative ways to put low-cost books in the hands of millions of kids.

By Kavitha Rao, Contributor 

The Christian Science Monitor [CSMonitor.com]

October 12, 2012 at 8:00 am EDT

"My mission is to put a book in every child's hand," says Rohini Nilekani. That's an ambitious goal anywhere, but especially in India, where there are more than 300 million children, most of whom can't afford books, or even read.

• Ms. Nilekani is founder-chairperson of Pratham Books, a nonprofit publishing house that uses innovative ways to tap India's vast market.
• "The children we reach are first-generation readers," she says. "Their parents probably don't know how to read. They may never have bought a book in their lives."

Set up in 2004, Pratham Books is an offshoot of Pratham, one of India's largest nonprofit groups, which supports education across India.

"Pratham was already teaching millions of children, but there was no [high-]quality content out there. What there was was too expensive," Nilekani says. So Pratham Books was set up to bring "as many [high-]quality books as possible, as cheaply as possible, in as many languages as possible, to the unreached child," she says.

Eight years later, Pratham has published more than 10 million books with 225 titles in 11 languages. Most of the books are priced at less than 25 rupees (about 45 cents).

Nilekani's own journey is something of a fairy tale. She has gone from being a middle-class journalist (something of an "activist," she says) to being a wealthy philanthropist. In 1981, when just 20 years old, Nilekani invested 10,000 rupees (about $180) - all the money she had - into a company cofounded by her husband, Nandan Nilekani, along with six close friends. That company grew into Infosys Ltd., India's second-largest technology company, with a net profit of $1.72 billion in the last financial year.

Nilekani, who owns 1.41 percent of the stock, is now one of India's richest women. She calls herself an "accidental philanthropist" because of her accidental wealth.

• "I felt very uncomfortable when I became wealthy," she says. "One of my ways of dealing with it was to give it forward right away. I believe that any society that allows the creation of legitimate wealth expects that the wealth be used for its benefit."
• Early on she used her profits from Infosys to set up a charitable foundation. She soon developed a reputation for philanthropy, and in 2010 Forbes magazine chose her as one of its "48 heroes of philanthropy."

Her reputation for getting involved, rather than merely writing a check, led to her being invited to set up Pratham Books.

Pratham is attacking a huge problem.

• In most of rural India, children read only textbooks. Reading for pleasure remains a luxury available only to the rich. Even by Grade 5, many children still can't read.
• Pratham Books also has to cope with a hugely diverse country with more than 22 languages and innumerable dialects.
• As Nilekani points out, in India the language changes every 100 kilometers (62 miles). The challenge of reaching children in rural areas who speak obscure dialects is formidable.

Still, she says, everything that Pratham Books does aims to "democratize" reading.

Pratham Books is able to price its books so low partly because it's a nonprofit, subsidized by capital from Nilekani and other donors. Nilekani is unapologetic about this and says that while financial sustainability is a goal, Pratham Books's first priority is social impact.

But Pratham Books also keeps its costs low through continuous innovation.

• One of its biggest recent successes has been story cards, sheets of laminated paper folded to make a story and priced at only 2.5 rupees (about 4 cents).
• Children who can't afford books can share and trade these easy-to-read, easy-to-store cards.
• Ten million have been sold already.
• Pratham Books is also trying out "sachet" books in retail stores across India - tiny, cheap books targeted at poor rural customers.

"We are constantly trying out new things," Nilekani says. "Some work, some fail, but because we don't have to worry about the financial bottom line, we can take risks."

Pratham Books's biggest challenge is distribution. Recognizing that it can't possibly cover the whole of India alone, Pratham teams up with both government and private organizations.

• In 2008-09, it partnered with the government of the state of Bihar, one of the largest and poorest states in India.
• The state gave more than 70,000 government schools budgets to buy books.

Kamal Jha works in the nonprofit sector and helped the Bihar government obtain the books.

• "We chose Pratham Books because even the poorest child can relate to them. They are simple and colorful, with Indian authors and local themes," he says. "Later we needed Urdu books for Muslim children, and Pratham was one of the very few publishers which supplied them."

Mr. Jha recalls how Nilekani drove for hours through one of the remotest districts of Bihar to visit a school run by her great-grandfather and established by Mohandas Gandhi in 1917.

• "It showed how keen she was to do something in Bihar, and her family commitment to philanthropy," he says. "Corporate donations always come with so many conditions. This kind of enthusiasm means so much more."

Pratham Books is also teaching the teachers.

• Its new pilot program, currently operating in 45 schools, partners with small private schools, giving them what it calls a "Library in a Classroom," which includes books, activities, and training for teachers.

Pratham Books also teams with large consumer brands, whose distribution networks reach into every corner of India.

• Unilever, the consumer-goods giant, sends salesladies door-to-door selling soap. Pratham Books persuaded Unilever to send Pratham Books along, too.

Children's author Subhadra Sen Gupta has published her books with many top publishers, including Penguin and Puffin. Yet her books with Pratham Books are especially meaningful, she says, because of its reach.

• "I have done sessions with children in government schools who usually only see textbooks, and I love the way their world opens up with Pratham Books," she says. "My books being published in so many languages is a miracle, because no [other] Indian publisher will do that for you."

Pratham Books uses Creative Commons licensing to make its books more accessible.

• CC allows anyone to use, tweak, rewrite, and translate Pratham Books, most of which are freely available on the Internet through sites such as Scribd and Flickr.
• Good professional translators are difficult to find in a country with so many languages.
• With CC, translators are free to use Pratham Books's content and create versions in their own languages.

"When it comes to learning, why put it behind walls?" Nilekani says. "Everything does not have to be a commodity."

This free sharing of content has already created a bevy of new products, such as audio versions for blind readers, versions for iPads, and books in regional languages. Pratham is also active on social media, which is helping it to gather an army of volunteers. On Sept. 8, International Literacy Day, it held a storytelling day in which 250 storytelling "champions" across India read the same book to children.

Pratham's next task is to "scale up" to face the huge challenges that remain and continue to rethink how books can be used or shared, Nilekani says. "Knowledge is still kept under wraps in India: We must open it up."

Ms. Sen Gupta sums up what keeps the Pratham family going.

"Once, after doing two sessions with a bunch of kids, I was getting my breath back by sitting on a bench when they were all going past," she says. "One boy patted my shoulder and said with aplomb, 'Bahut mazaa aya! (It was great fun!).' Then I got patted by about a hundred kids with loud 'thank-yous.' It felt like they had pinned a medal to my chest.

"That is what Pratham does. [It] brings the joy of stories and imagination into the lives of kids who have so little of that."

To learn more, visit www.prathambooks.org.

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Boston MA/ Games for Change: How Digital Fun is Becoming Way to Better the World

Using online games to benefit society, or 'games for change,' is a fast-growing movement. A favorite pastime of teens and young adults is being used for good causes.

By Kallie Smith

Global Envision/ CSMonitor.com

October 12, 2012

By the time average Americans turn 21, they have played 10,000 hours of video games.

That is equal to the amount of time they will spend in school in the United States between 5th and 12th grade or it is equal to five years in a full time job. According to Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers, a person who spends 10,000 hours on any activity "masters" it.

Take World of Warcraft, a hugely popular interactive virtual reality game with 10.3 million players around the world. It's not your '90s Mario Brothers with 10 controls.

• Warcraft is so complex that the online wiki encyclopedia about the game - characters, history, events - -has 96,890 pages, making it one of the largest wikis in the world.
• Mastering Warcraft means internalizing vast amounts of the information in that wiki.

World of Warcraft is not saving the world. But focusing on the positive uses of video games could turn gamers into global heroes.

The education potential of games is huge, in part because so many people are already playing them.

• Globally, we spend 3 billion hours playing video games.
• There are few activities that over a fifth of the population do that can be used to create change.
• If we harnessed that time and energy for really tough global problems, we just might be able to solve them.

Using games for social benefit, or "games for change," is a fast-growing movement led by an organization founded in 2004 under the same name. Games for Change's mission is to "catalyze social impact through digital games."

Using games for positive social change has evolved just as gaming itself has evolved. As more people became aware of the popularity of games, they began to spread. First came simple educational games: The Oregon Trail and Reader Rabbit were popular in the United States in the '90s.

The United Nations saw the value of games and was an early pioneer in figuring out how to use them to create positive social change--and putting funding behind it.

• Food Force, launched by the World Food Program in 2005, puts players in the shoes of an aid worker. They start off with a fairly simple plot of wheat. If their wheat survives, the aid worker has to figure out how to get the food to a processing plant, showing the player the complexities of the global food supply chain. But drought and pests--devastating issues that real-life farmers face every year--often hit the player's fields, forcing them to manage a hunger crisis. The game is played by 10 million on Facebook, and raises money for the World Food Program by letting players donate through the game.
• Evoke , a real-time game published online in 2010, was funded by the World Bank as a tool to inspire and create real innovations that would help solve global issues. The game was set in Africa, but the solutions could have impact around the world. For a 10-week period, players followed a virtual storyline while earning points from fellow competitors for blogging about real-world social change activities they did as part of the game, such as developing a bike that creates enough electricity when pedaled to charge personal electronics.

Jane McGonigal, a key proponent of the movement, gave a popular TED talk in 2010, further pushing the concept of gaming for change forward.

"Games are really good for exploring complex issues in society," continued Games for Change spokesperson Suzanne Seggerman in an interview on ABC News in 2011.

Social change games have been branching to all fields and all styles.

• Foldit is a game designed to discover protein structures that will solve genetic problems and diseases. Each player gets to fold proteins and the game determines if that protein solves a medical problem. Busy-work that would take someone a lifetime to do alone is spread among thousands of players in order to help teach human puzzle-solving strategies to computers. Researchers had been working for over a decade on discovering an AIDS protein that may lead to a cure. Earlier this year, the gamers solved the protein puzzle within 10 days.
• Peacemakers is helping establish understanding between Israelis and Palestinians. As a player, you are the leader of both nations and have to use real facts reported on in the news to determine the actions you would take to successfully lead that nation peacefully. Players see not only their political views but also the other side's, too.

The number of these games has been growing, and as these games become more established, the success of their objectives is becoming more apparent.

For organizations with messages or agendas, games are a fun way for people to get involved. Technology is spreading from laptops to tablets to mobile phones. 75 percent of the world's population has access to mobile phones, making the possibility of scaling games for change incredible.

Games that create positive change is a way for companies that produce games to reach an entirely new market segment. At the same time, gaming audiences welcome the chance to reverse the stereotype of "gamers."

For game developers, it's also a new market: helping nonprofits with social missions reach a new, engaged audiences. For the first time next year, the Games for Change organization will get an entire day at the annual Game Developers Conference to help more developers get involved.

The opportunities for charitable organizations are increasing every day, and as groups like Games for Change have conferences of their own, recruiting developers to create the games is getting easier.

Soon, a favorite pastime may actually do a lot of good.

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Washington DC/ COLUMN: Bill Gates, Other Billionaires Funding Charter Effort in Washington State

By Valerie Strauss

Answer Sheet daily column, Washington Post

October 12, 2012

 To get an understanding of how America's wealthiest people are using some of their fortunes to drive school reform, take a look at a list of the contributors to the pro-charter school initiative on the Washington state ballot in November. The first few pages - the ones with the biggest donations - is a who's who of billionaires.

The money is being donated to support Initiative 1240, which, if passed, would allow public charter schools to open in the state for the first time.  Washington voters have rejected the opening of public charter schools three times - in 1996, 2000 and 2004 - but supporters are nothing if not persistent.

First on the list (which starts with the biggest donations and goes down) is Microsoft founder Bill Gates, with a $2 million gift dated Oct. 4, 2012. He is also third on the list - with an $800,000 donation dated June 19, 2012, and he is No. 11 on the list - with a donation of $200,000, dated June 7.  His aggregate total, according to the Oct. 4. report, is $3 million.

Another billionaire occupies the No 2 spot - Alice Walton of Walmart Stores, Inc., who, unlike Gates, doesn't live in the state. Her Oct. 5 donation is listed at $1.1 million. She is also fourth on the list, with a July 11 donation of $600,000, giving her an aggregate total of $1.7 million.

Walton is listed on the Public Disclosure Commission form as a resident of Bentonville, Ark., so you might wonder why she cares so much about charter schools in Washington state. The Walton Family Foundation has been instrumental in funding charter school and voucher initiatives around the country over the past several years.

We move to No. 5 on the list, billionaire entrepreneur Nicolas J. Hanauer of Seattle, with a $550,000 gift dated Sept. 14, which adds to his $250,000 gift on July 11, his  $175,000 donation on June 28 and his June 5 donation of $25,000, for an aggregate of $1 million.

No. 6 and No. 7 are Jackie Bezos and her husband, Mike, who happen to be the parents of Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos. They each gave $250,000, for a total of half a million, dated Aug. 28. But wait, they are also No. 13 and 14 on the list too, each with a $125,000 donation dated June 13. They are listed as living in Mercer Island, Wash.

At No. 8 is the fabulously wealthy Anne Dinning, a powerhouse at the hedge fudge giant DeShaw & Co., who gave $250,000, as did her husband, Michael Wolf, for a total of half a million for the couple. They live in New York. Wolf is No. 10 on the list.

Rounding out the top 15 is another Microsoft billionaire, Paul Allen of Seattle, who donated $100,000 on June 14.

The latest public disclosure forms show that cash contributions to the pro charter effort amount to $8.3 million. Opponents of the charter initiative say they have no wealthy donors and far less money.

This all helps illustrate what education historian Diane Ravitch referred to as "the billionaire boy's club" (which apparently has expanded to include females) in her  bestselling book, "The Life and Death of the Great American School System," and her in subsequent writings.

In this post, she wrote: "Today, the question of democracy looms large as we see increasing efforts to privatize the control of public schools. There is an even more worrisome and allied trend, and that is the growing influence of money in education politics at the state and local levels."

Washington state is only one example.

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New York NY/ OPINION: Want to Ruin Teaching? Give Ratings

By Deborah Kenny [Chief executive and founding principal of Harlem Village Academies and the author of "Born to Rise: A Story of Children and Teachers Reaching Their Highest Potential"]

New York Times

October 14, 2012

As the founder of a charter school network in Harlem, I've seen firsthand the nuances inherent in teacher evaluation. A few years ago, for instance, we decided not to renew the contract of one of our teachers despite the fact that his students performed exceptionally well on the state exam.

We kept hearing directly from students and parents that he was mean and derided the children who needed the most help. The teacher also regularly complained about problems during faculty meetings without offering solutions. Three of our strongest teachers confided to the principal that they were reluctantly considering leaving because his negativity was making everyone miserable.

There has been much discussion of the question of how to evaluate teachers; it was one of the biggest sticking points in the recent teachers' strike in Chicago. For more than a decade I've been a strong proponent of teacher accountability. I've advocated for ending tenure and other rules that get in the way of holding educators responsible for the achievement of their students. Indeed, the teachers in my schools - Harlem Village Academies - all work with employment-at-will contracts because we believe accountability is an underlying prerequisite to running an effective school. The problem is that, unlike charters, most schools are prohibited by law from holding teachers accountable at all.

But the solution being considered by many states - having the government evaluate individual teachers - is a terrible idea that undermines principals and is demeaning to teachers. If our schools had been required to use a state-run teacher evaluation system, the teacher we let go would have been rated at the top of the scale.

Education and political leaders across the country are currently trying to decide how to evaluate teachers. Some states are pushing for legislation to sort teachers into categories using unreliable mathematical calculations based on student test scores. Others have hired external evaluators who pop into classrooms with checklists to monitor and rate teachers. In all these scenarios, principals have only partial authority, with their judgments factored into a formula.

This type of system shows a profound lack of understanding of leadership. Principals need to create a culture of trust, teamwork and candid feedback that is essential to running an excellent school. Leadership is about hiring great people and empowering them, and requires a delicate balance of evaluation and encouragement. At Harlem Village Academies we give teachers an enormous amount of freedom and respect. As one of our seventh-grade reading teachers told me: "It's exhilarating to be trusted. It makes me feel like I can be the kind of teacher I had always dreamed about becoming: funny, interesting, effective and energetic."

Some of the new government proposals for evaluating teachers, with their checklists, rankings and ratings, have been described as businesslike, but that is just not true. Successful companies do not publicly rate thousands of employees from a central office database; they don't use systems to take the place of human judgment. They trust their managers to nurture and build great teams, then hold the managers accountable for results.

In the same way, we should hold principals strictly accountable for school performance and allow them to make all personnel decisions. That can't be done by adhering to rigid formulas. There is no formula for quantifying compassion, creativity, intellectual curiosity or any number of other traits that make a group of teachers motivate one another and inspire greatness in their students. Principals must be empowered to use everything they know about their faculty - including student achievement data - to determine which teachers they will retain, promote or, when necessary, let go. This is how every successful enterprise functions.

A government-run teacher evaluation bureaucracy will make it impossible to attract great teachers and will diminish the motivation of the ones we have. It will make teaching so scripted and controlled that we won't be able to attract smart, passionate people. Everyone says we should treat teachers as professionals, but then they promote top-down policies that are insulting to serious educators.

If we don't change course in the coming years, these bureaucratic systems that treat teachers like low-level workers will become self-fulfilling. As the great educational thinker Theodore R. Sizer put it, "Eventually, hierarchical bureaucracy will be totally self-validating: virtually all teachers will be semi-competent."

The direction of education reform in the next few years will shape public education for generations to come. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has repeatedly said that in the next decade, "over 1.6 million teachers will retire," and our country will be hiring 1.6 million new teachers.

We will blow that opportunity if we create bureaucratic systems that discourage the smartest, most talented people from entering the profession.

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New York NY/ BOOK REVIEW: Exam Schools

At the most elite public high schools, students have access to scientific gear more common at private research universities.

By Naomi Schaefer Riley [Author of "The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons Why You Won't Get the College Education You Paid For"]

Wall Street Journal

October 14, 2012

Exam Schools

By Chester E. Finn and Jessica A. Hockett

Princeton, 255 pages, $24.95

As we try to make sure that no child gets left behind, are we keeping others from getting ahead? Or, as Chester Finn and Jessica Hockett put it in "Exam Schools": "As the country strives to . . . close its wide achievement gaps [and] repair its bad schools . . . is it also challenging its high achieving and highly motivated students?"

This isn't an easy question to answer. Most high-achieving students are educated in ordinary public schools, often taking the more challenging courses in an honors-track curriculum or Advanced Placement classes.

• But some are educated in academically selective high schools that require students to score well on tough exams just to get in.
• According to the criteria chosen by Mr. Finn and Ms. Hockett-principally, that schools be publicly funded and admission competitive-there are 165 such high schools in the U.S., out of 22,568.

These days, when parents seem ever more eager to get their children into Ivy League colleges, competitive high schools may seem uncontroversial-merely an early version of the selectivity that universities routinely practice in their own admissions practices. But during the 1960s and 1970s, exam schools came under attack for their elitism. When the country was trying to desegregate schools and provide more money to low-income districts, schools for the gifted were countercultural-out of step with the egalitarian spirit of the times.

But things started to change in the wake of the 1983 blue-ribbon commission that declared America to be "a nation at risk" because of the poor quality of our public-education system. Some elite high schools, like Stuyvesant or Bronx Science in New York City, have their roots in the early part of the 20th century; but roughly half, according to Mr. Finn and Ms. Hockett, have been founded since the commission issued its report. Exam schools aren't the only way to serve gifted students, but they certainly represent the most concerted effort.

For admission to such schools, "quantitative evidence"-i.e., test scores-matters a lot, but not always exclusively.

• Most schools aim for some kind of diversity or even an approximation of the racial makeup of the school district in which they're located.
• Few manage to achieve it. Asians and whites are usually overrepresented, blacks and Hispanics underrepresented. But the schools are fairly representative socioeconomically-you certainly don't have to be well-off to get in.
• "Selective these schools are," the authors note, "but 'elitist' is not a fair or accurate term for them."

What are they like? The authors visit several schools. If Mr. Finn and Ms. Hockett had provided a few more anecdotes from their visits, they might have given readers a better feel for the atmosphere. But the information they do collect is helpful nevertheless.

• First, they find extremely motivated students-kids who don't want to stay home even when they are sick because they worry about falling too far behind. Some students are downright cocky. At the Liberal Arts and Sciences Academy in Austin, Texas, students have been known to bring pillows to mandatory state tests so that they can "nap" after they've sped through the exams.
• At Thomas Jefferson High School, in northern Virginia, the authors find "a DNA sequencer, a gas spectrometer, a cell counter, and innumerable other costly, complex devices that one might expect to see in a research university preparing doctoral students, not in a public high school."
• Classes are often run on schedules closer to a college arrangement than a high-school one, with longer classes meeting two or three times a week. Students take an array of Advanced Placement classes, in foreign languages, science, math and history, among other subjects, which are supplemented by classes on more eccentric topics. The Illinois Math and Science Academy, in Aurora, has offered intersession classes on "Nuclear Weapons and WMDs" and "Molecular Gastronomy."
• Most schools offer some kind of independent study.
• To accomplish all this, many exam schools have longer school days.

School administrators acknowledge that they often must work around union rules restricting teaching hours. As the principal of the School Without Walls in Washington, D.C., explained to the authors, it is "better to seek forgiveness than ask permission." The teachers seem happy to work long hours and skirt the rules to get a chance to work with such motivated students.

The selective schools and their home districts mostly seem to ignore each other-as long as the schools promise not to take too many of the smart kids away from the district, or too much money. Which means that most of these schools cannot grow very much, and many of them, through fundraising drives of one sort or another, raise tens of thousands of dollars a year from parents and other sources in order to operate.

But like other public schools in a time of economic distress, exam schools find that their budgets are being tightened. As Mr. Finn and Ms. Hockett note, they are going to need to show their "value added"-the benefit to students, school districts and even the local economy. As one would expect, a much higher percentage of exam-school graduates score in the higher percentiles of college-admissions tests and get admitted to elite colleges. How much of the success of these schools is simply the result of selection? Almost no research has been done on the question. It is true that the demand for them is high. For parents who want to raise kids in big cities and send them to schools with rigorous standards, the only alternatives are often high-price private schools.

Even now, the concept of a selective high school can rub against the cultural grain. One parent at Pine View School for the Gifted in Florida told the authors that he was a bit uncomfortable with the school's name. "For me, I guess I feel like all kids are gifted in some way." But that didn't stop him from sending his kids there.