Santa Fe/ The A-Z of School Grades: State Official Works to Decipher New A-F System
By Robert Nott
The New Mexican
October 19, 2012
Acknowledging there is no perfect way to measure or explain the complex A-F school grading system that has taken root in New Mexico, the state Public Education Department nonetheless held a series of statewide workshops designed to explain the A-Z of it all to educators and parents.
Friday's session, presented by Peter Goldschmidt, assistant secretary of assessment and accountability for the Public Education Department, was held at the Jerry Apodaca Education Building on Don Gaspar Avenue. It drew only about 20 people.
- The state first initiated the grading system back in January with preliminary grades using a variety of measures - three years of reading and math proficiency scores, growth for both high- and low-performing students over three years, attendance and graduation rates, for instance.
- This summer, after the department revamped those measures, schools received final grades. Of the state's 831 public schools, 275 received a C, 250 received a D, 198 garnered a B, and 39 netted an A.
On Friday, the department announced that schools that received an A or jumped up by at least two grade letters since January would receive just over $60 per student as a reward.
- That money must be used for instructional materials, such as books and computer software.
- The Public Education Department has committed more than $1.7 million to this effort, and among the 88 schools receiving this money are four Santa Fe elementary schools: Atalaya, Chaparral, Ramirez Thomas, and Wood Gormley. The latter received the A; the other three all jumped up by at least two grade letters.
- The Public Education Department also is funneling about $3.5 million into schools that received D or F grades to invest in the coaching of school leaders and professional development for staff to help those schools climb up and away from the bottom of the list.
But on Friday morning, the focus was on explaining why the A-F system provides clarity to parents, educators and students. Though the report went deeper than previous explanations of how the various measuring components were factored, it still resulted in a litany of sometimes-complex definitions - particularly when it came to the concept of value-added models or the notion of coefficients of data changing when comparing schools - that would likely appeal to a statistician and leave the average parent a bit bewildered.
- "There is no best way to do this," Goldschmidt explained to the assembly. "We don't claim this is the perfect way, but we have evidence that it works very well."
He patiently went over the various factors under consideration as the state compiles three years of data per student and per school, with the goal of holding each school accountable for its level of success.
- When it comes to grading, elementary and middle schools currently rely more on individual student performance than high schools, wherein
- high schools factor in graduation rates and programs to boost students' preparation for college and careers.
So, with a grading system like that, could that rare nontraditional school - such as Albuquerque's Public Academy for Performing Arts, with students in grades 6-12 - be given two separate report cards, one for middle school and one for high school? "This is a difficult question to answer," Goldschmidt said, but the answer seemed to be no.
- One audience member asked if demographics factor into the equation. "Not demographics, but academics," Goldschmidt replied, stressing that the state wants to move away from labels and avoid making excuses - such as poverty - for a child's standing.
- What about the fact that state testing is aimed at grades 3-8 and 11 and 12, and thus doesn't include the ninth grade? Goldschmidt said the grades rely on eighth-grade test results for ninth-graders, as the differences in exam results are minimal between those two grades.
Goldschmidt said the state is unlikely to consider many changes to the current measurement system - until the Common Core Standards, which the state is slowly adopting, take full effect in 2015.
He said parents in particular should remain involved in the grading system and continue to research what it means for their children.
- "It would take a lot of work to really understand this all," he said." I went to school a long time to study the statistics behind this." But, he added, the grading system is valid, as everyone understands "a B is better than a D."
Speaking by phone Friday afternoon, Public Education Department Secretary-designate Hanna Skandera said similar presentations that she gave earlier in Farmington and Albuquerque attracted close to 100 people. The goal of these workshops, she said, is to empower community members to continue to learn more about the system and "play a part in it."
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Las Cruces/ NMSU Researcher Alfred Valdez Studies Computer-Based Feedback in Education
By Emily C. Kelley ["Eye on Research" is a weekly feature provided by New Mexico State University, University Communications]
Las Cruces Sun-News
October 22, 12
Computers are everywhere in our lives today - from the programmable coffee pot that makes the morning joe, to a preschool classroom, and from laboratories on college campuses, to the smart phone in your pocket or purse. Computers have changed the way we live our daily lives. But, can computers help us learn?
New Mexico State University Assistant Professor Alfred Valdez, who works in the Communication Disorders Program, is studying computer-based feedback for use in an educational setting and is working to determine which types of computer-based feedback work best.
- "I became interested in computers a long time ago, I think when they first came out, as a vehicle for instruction," Valdez said.
- "Computers offer you an opportunity to give feedback, whereas books can't do that very well and television doesn't do that very well.
- But, if you're looking for an instructional support device that might behave almost as if it were an instructor, computers can work very well, in that they give feedback - you do something, the computer does something back."
The feedback computers can give can be anything from an affirmation of the work the user or student has completed, in the form of a numerical score, or it can provide information to change a misconception, or provide the user with new knowledge. The variability in the kinds of computer feedback is vast.
Valdez is working to determine which kind of computer-based feedback is best for learning, in general, and which types of feedback work for various learners.
When he started the research, Valdez was initially under the assumption that feedback is always a good thing, though he soon learned that this was a misconception.
- "There are instances when giving feedback is actually detrimental to learning. That was a big piece of news to me. For example, if you give the correct answer as feedback before you allow the person to think and consider their answer, you encourage a more shallow and certainly less active way of learning," he said.
Valdez started his line of research in feedback by looking at two types of feedback.
- "If somebody uses the wrong answer, you can give them the correct answer as feedback.
- Or, you can provide the underlying principle that would lead one to arrive at the correct answer," he said.
"What I've found is that learners really like to get the correct answer - they don't want the underlying principle. The correct answer doesn't take as much effort and it's easy to remember. However, it makes more pedagogical sense to give the underlying principle as feedback, because the underlying principle generalizes to other situations."
Valdez's dissertation work focused on how one could motivate students to use and benefit from that more difficult form of feedback.
- He found that giving students a goal that is achievable, yet still demanding, while providing feedback about their performance toward that goal, seemed to motivate them to use the more difficult form of feedback more effectively.
- "I think the way that we manage our own behavior is that we set up internal goals. If we're given feedback pertinent to how closely we are to achieving those goals, we like that," he said. "We like getting feedback as to whether we're reaching the goal or not."
He studied two age groups - college students and kindergarten students, examining how each operates when given goals.
- For college age students, setting a performance goal and telling them how closely they are getting to the goal seemed to be important,
- whereas kindergarten students seemed to not understand the concept of the goal, and therefore didn't understand the feedback.
In future research, Valdez plans to use a more visual form of feedback for the kindergarten students and examine how they use achievement goals to guide their learning processes.
With advances in technology, computer-based instruction is more flexible now than when Valdez first started his work in 2003. The computer programs are more adaptable and can recognize a learner's characteristics, adjusting to the learner.
Valdez sees the computer as a tool, like a pencil, but does not see computers as replacements for human instructors - at least not yet.
"Students - kindergarten, middle school and high school students - they seem, for the most part, to be familiar and comfortable with technology and to some extent, they enjoy using that technology to help them learn," Valdez said. "The big trick is whether students are actually benefitting from that technology or not. Is technology really supporting learning or is it simply entertaining? That's the big challenge for us - to know how to use that technology to support instruction and education, not to replace it."
Valdez plans to continue his research by using what is already known in terms of human learning, cognition, memory and self-regulation, and apply those principles to existing technology, so that technology can be used more effectively in learning. He also hopes to extend his research from a college age population to also include more school age and pediatric populations.
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Taos/ $14,200 National Park Foundation Grant Helps Taos County Students Connect to Old Spanish Trail
By Matthew van Buren
Taos News
October 20, 2012
A grant from the National Park Foundation is being used to help Taos County students explore and appreciate their public lands.
The $14,200 grant, through the "America's Best Idea" program, is funding "La Vereda Vieja" - an exploration of the Old Spanish Trail that is seeking to connect "underserved youth" from Taos and Peñasco to the cultural and natural resources associated with the historic trail.
- "The (Old Spanish National Historic Trail), although significant to the development of the six states it crossed, remains unknown to most Americans, even those near its corridor," the grant application states.
- "Administered jointly by the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management, the (trail) was used as a trade route between Northern New Mexico and southern California from 1829-1848.
- Few physical traces remain to provide evidence of the trail, because it was used primarily to carry merchandise on the backs of pack mules and horses."
According to information from the National Park Foundation, the grant program is now in its fourth year and seeks to strengthen communities' relationships with parks and engage new audiences.
- "There are so few physical remnants of the (Old Spanish Trail) that gaining appreciation of the trail requires a deeper understanding of its history and environmental factors that contributed to route selection and the ability to look deeper than what can be seen by the untrained eye," the application states. "Students will learn by exploring trail history through its people, animals, foods and geography."
- Students will also be involved in "trail stewardship," including monitoring, cleaning, assessing and repairing damaged sections of trail.
On a Monday (Oct. 15) field trip, students from Taos High School visited the Taos Valley Overlook Trail system, south of town. Maps, compasses and global positioning systems (GPS) devices in hand, the students walked the trail, tried to identify far-off peaks and other landmarks, and practiced using the instruments.
Taos High history teacher Jeff Carr said he learned about the project from an art teacher. "It sounded like a great opportunity for the kids," he said.
Carr said learning about the Old Spanish Trail is relevant to local history, and activities such as map reading are also useful for students.
"It fits into the curriculum quite nicely," he said.
He said none of the students on the trail Monday had been there before, despite its proximity to Taos, and he sees value in getting kids active and engaged in learning outside of the classroom. "It's right in their own backyard," he said of the trail system. "This is the kind of thing we need to do all the time."
Carr said the grant helps pay for transportation, maps, compasses, and substitutes during field trip days. "The school district doesn't have to put out a dime for this," Carr said. Grant program speakers visited his classes twice prior to Monday's field trip.
Named for the Ken Burns film, visit www.national parks.org/our-work/programs/americas-best-idea.
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ABQ/ APS Fitness Program Earns Rave Reviews
By Glen Rosales
ABQ Journal
October 20, 2012
Two Albuquerque Public Schools on the West Side are participating in a pilot fitness program that is earning praise from its participants.
- "It's a wonderful program because it's so convenient," said Melissa Velasquez, an eighth-grade language arts teacher at Lyndon B. Johnson Middle School. "I had been looking for something, and then this came around."
The twice-a-week program that also is in place at Volcano Vista High School includes stretching, yoga and Pilates, as well as nutrition information, said Katherine Chavez, APS employee wellness coordinator.
The program also is in place at the main APS center, as well as two Northeast Heights elementary schools.
The district's insurance partners, Presbyterian Health Plan and Lovelace Health Plan, are sponsoring the pilot program, which started at the beginning of the semester and will last through December, Chavez said.
- Each participant was given a health assessment in the first session, and will have another one in the final session to measure how they progressed, she said.
- Participants were measured for their blood pressure, body-mass index and body-fat percentage.
- They also answered questions about their stress and depression levels.
It's part of an ongoing effort by the school district to promote health and wellness of APS employees, Chavez said.
General wellness, she said, will contribute to the wellbeing of APS employees, reducing sick days and hopefully helping lower insurance costs in the long run.
- "This is a really good voluntary program," said Presbyterian's Tim Rivera, director of account services and retention, who is working with the district. "APS is very forward-thinking in this. APS is actually engaging employees and getting them involved."
At the five sites, more than 100 employees are taking advantage of the program, Chavez said. And if it proves to be worthwhile, the district will consider expanding it to more schools.
"I can tell you that we've already gotten a number of schools asking about it," Chavez said.
Peggy Friend, an LBJ secretary, said she hopes the program continues in the spring and into the future.
"I need the exercise," said Friend, who suffers from rheumatoid arthritis and Type II diabetes. "I need it."
Before the program started at LBJ, however, Friend said she couldn't maintain a regular exercise regimen.
- "This is really perfect because we meet right after school," she said. "You don't have to go home and change and then go back out again. You're already here so it's really convenient."
The program incorporates an online charting system and also encourages journal-keeping so participants can track their progress for themselves.
- "Our instructor told us not to get on the scale," Velasquez said. "She said we'd notice the change in our clothes."
Indeed, that has been the case, she said, adding she can notice a reduction in her stress level, increased energy and more restful sleeping.
What's more, Velasquez added, it's easier to maintain an exercise schedule when a group of colleagues or friends are working out together.
- "It's a lot of fun," she said. "Everybody in our group helps each other. We support each other."
And one day, when there was a mix-up with a substitute instructor, the group completed its workout anyway, Velasquez said.
The instructor "is going to be so proud of us that we went ahead with our workout anyway," she said. "It's really all about a lifestyle change."
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Santa Fe/ COLUMN: Some Troubles Haunt Schools for Decades
By Robert Nott
The New Mexican
October 21, 2012
"Sixth-graders at Chaparral Elementary School want to enter the computer age but they're using good old-fashioned reading to get there," a December 1983 New Mexican article noted. It seems teacher Sharron Adams was working with the kids to start a Read-a-Thon, in which students found sponsors to pay them at least 10 cents a page per 100-page reads of popular novels, so they could raise money to buy a computer for the classroom. A favorite choice: C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia.
I found this tidbit while looking back at New Mexican archive copies of stories about Santa Fe Public Schools dating from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s. It's interesting to see which issues and problems remain, and what has changed over time.
- For instance, in May 1990 Atalaya Elementary School parents and teachers discussed adding another 20 days to the school year under a legislative ruling that offered $2 million to select schools in the state to improve academic achievement. I could not verify whether the extra 20 days happened or not, but I'm guessing not.
- Get this: in July 1983, the district discovered an extra $208,000 cash balance left over in that year's budget and decided to give all district employees a one-time token payment of $200, which used up about $198,000.
- In December 1991, a school-board budget advisory committee recommended closing Acequia Madre, Alvord, Atalaya and Tesuque elementary schools. (Alvord closed a couple of years ago; the rest remain open.)
- In April 1992, some schools were discussing replacing the A-F grading system for students with new report card standards that included such measurements as "Reads with comprehension" and "Student does not understand skill or concept."
Parents seemed well organized in those days to pressure the school board over a variety of issues, including long-term efforts (1989-1992) to remove Principal James Starr from E.J. Martinez Elementary School, as they argued that he did not listen to parent or teacher concerns when making decisions.
- In the early 1990s, El Dorado Elementary School parents complained about a too-frank sex education course given to their kids by members of the state Health and Environmental Department's family-planning staff. The New Mexican later interviewed some sixth-graders there who said the sex-ed talks were "no big deal."
- In January 1994, teachers at Santa Fe High School expressed their frustration with poor morale, lack of faith in district leadership and the low starting salary - $22,000 per school year. A follow-up article quoted one teacher as saying, "The students run this campus. The teachers can't control them." The article noted that 15 percent to 18 percent of that school's teachers left each year.
- In April 1994, students in teacher Penny Garcia's class at Nava Elementary School conducted a joint interview of Mayor Debbie Jaramillo. When they asked her about violence in the schools, she said, "There's too much of it." The headlines were full of crime and violence in the schools at the time; much more so than today, and it seems that the district first began using private security guards on its high school campuses in the late 1970s.
- In August 1995, the district tried to encourage more kids to eat in the school cafeterias by contracting with Taco Bell, Subway and Pizza Hut to provide food at Capital High, Santa Fe High and Capshaw Middle School. This pilot effort led to an attendance jump of 100 kids per day at Capital and Capshaw and 200 kids per day at Santa Fe High!
Finally, going back about 35 years, a December 1977 article notes that the district planned to close Hansen Elementary School - which was entirely made up of portables - due to low enrollment rates. (No wonder.) The district planned to move the portables to Piñon Elementary School. Aspen Community Magnet School now sits on the site of the former Hansen school.
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ABQ/ OPINION: Testing Madness Hurts Teachers, Too
By Anne Michaud [Anne Michaud is interactive editor for Newsday Opinion and a member of the Newsday editorial board]
ABQ Journal
October 20, 2012
Stories of silly test-taking are filling the halls of the public high school and middle school that my daughters attend. This fall, our school district is testing kids on topics they haven't learned yet.
Teachers are placing geometry and chemistry questions in front of students who haven't ever studied the subjects. Kids new to Spanish class are being asked to leer y escribir.
What's the point? To measure student growth in this new age of evaluating teachers, apparently one must test kids at the beginning of the school year, and then again once they've finished the class. The difference in scores will show the growth achieved.
Generally, I love our school district, but this is a disheartening approach. Kids are joking about filling in the little ovals in a Christmas tree shape, or choosing all "B" answers. One foreign-language teacher told the class she wouldn't be unhappy if they bombed on this initial test - it will make her and the students look better at year's end.
Such a cynical approach is bad for students. Tests ought to be sophisticated enough to measure growth from one year to the next without presenting kids with impossible questions. Teachers should take a more sober stance toward teacher evaluation, and work with administrators to create a serious system to weed out the bad teachers, assist the struggling and honor the good. Teachers have everything to gain by elevating their craft's status in the public eye as a professional calling.
My opinion isn't teacher-bashing, it's teacher self-interest. When underperformers keep their jobs, other teachers have to do remedial work with students the following year.
Standards elevate. At times, there has been talk about creating professional certification for journalists, with an ethics board to kick out the miscreants. That might hoist our approval ratings out of the trough. But journalism's denizens haven't been able to decide on the terms of evaluation. Sound familiar?
I wonder if other school districts have found a better approach to this state Education Department's directive to create a teacher evaluation system. Districts are supposed to base 40 percent of a teacher's grade on test scores - 20 percent on student results on standardized state tests, and 20 percent on tests created by the district. The remaining 60 percent will be based on administrators' observations.
What could go wrong? Well, a lot. Say an administrator dislikes a teacher for personal reasons, or has cause to favor another. This is all the more reason for teachers to engage in how the evaluation process is written, and what results it produces in these early years.
My kids' district, by giving them tests they can't hope to do well on, is reinforcing suspicion of authority: The administration is making us do it this ridiculous way. But imagine if all the adults in school seemed to be cooperating in their quest to educate. Wouldn't that send a healthier signal to students? We would be telling them that the people in charge of their world agree on what's good.
I saw an inkling of this on meet-the-teacher night in the gym class. In both the middle and high schools, gym teachers explained that they are working fitness into the curriculum - teaching kids about staying strong and lean, instead of just instructing them on the rules of the game. The idea made sense, and if they resented this change, it didn't show.
It's going to take time to work out the bugs in this new, national effort to grade teachers. For the sake of the good and dedicated ones, teachers should be engaged and insist on wielding their own marking pens.
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Santa Fe/ OPINION: Test Scores No Panacea for Teacher Evaluations
By Rep. Rick Miera [Democrat, Chair of the House Education Committee and Ellen Bernstein, President, Albuquerque Teachers Federation]
ABQ Journal
October 22, 2012
We appreciate the Journal's editorial about the dedicated teachers at Susie Rayos Marmon Elementary who are working on their National Board Certification. We couldn't agree more.
Teachers certified by the National Board add a great deal of value to their students and to the teaching force. That is why, in 1999, the New Mexico Legislature passed legislation to recognize and compensate these teachers and encourages more of them to aspire to earn this prestigious credential. And, that is the reason the Albuquerque Teachers Federation has provided comprehensive support for aspiring National Board candidates.
As the Journal correctly points out, teachers who earn the certification - or who aspire to it - are lifelong learners who, like most teachers, work to pass that desire on to their students.
The process teachers go through to achieve National Board Certification is called an authentic assessment. What makes it authentic? The assessment of their teaching is directly connected to the work they do every day with their students.
The Journal quoted a study that confirms that teachers with National Board Certification make a qualitative difference for their students. That is why New Mexico modeled the 3-Tiered Licensure dossier process after national boards. Our 3-Tiered licensing system for teachers is also an authentic assessment. It centers on each teacher's ability to teach well and to assess student's learning. It is connected to their actual work.
Authentic assessments should be the focus of any future legislation, both for our teachers in their evaluations and for our students.
After all, if we value outcomes for our students, such as the ability to understand essential concepts, work in groups, think critically and solve problems, we must measure those abilities. And, if we value those attributes in student learning, then we are obligated to value, and assess, the same qualities in teaching.
Standardized tests are not authentic or instructionally sensitive. They do not represent the degree of students' mastery, nor do they accurately reflect the quality of the instruction. There is no research-based link between test scores and teaching effectiveness.
Other nations use performance-based or authentic assessments, where students are evaluated on the basis of real work such as essays, projects and activities. Ironically, because these nations do not focus on teaching to standardized tests, they even score higher than U.S. students on those kinds of tests.
We have proposed a better way to link student learning, teacher effectiveness and teacher evaluation. We believe that an overhaul of the teacher evaluation system must be well balanced and include observations by supervisors, input from students and a more authentic measure of how much students have learned.
The Public Education Department rule places too much emphasis on testing and not enough on observing teachers teach and other measures like student surveys.
But more important, we want more for New Mexico's students than a curriculum based on high-stakes testing. We know that when "effective" teaching is defined primarily by test scores, it creates incentives to spend time on the wrong things, like broad surface knowledge and test prep, rather than the right things, like deep conceptual understanding.
Educators know that much of what a student really understands is better demonstrated through projects or research, or other means that are not "standardized." Many legislators also know the importance of using other measures of student knowledge, which is why we supported an alternative plan last session.
An example of a more authentic link between teachers and student outcomes is Student Learning Objectives. The process of setting objectives requires teachers to create goals for their students, connected to the standards, and to measure student progress toward those goals.
In this letter, we have presented our points of agreement, as well as where, how and why we differ with others on these important issues. But we welcome the discussion. It is a debate our children deserve.
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ABQ/ LETTER: Incredible Kids Day Huge Success
By Lois M. Meyer, Los Ranchos
ABQ Journal
October 20, 2012
I want to applaud the teachers, principal and assistant principal at Edward Gonzales Elementary School for "tying together a parents' training session that focused on literacy with the Incredible Kids Day by asking parents to write a poem or letter to their children."
And I applaud the Journal for covering this wonderful experience in an APS school ("Not a Dry Eye," Saturday, Oct. 13).
It is no surprise that children "cried in class reading letters from their proud parents." This is what reading is and should be - the communication of emotion and meaningful messages from one human being to another, not some dry practice of phonics sounds practiced aloud in empty drills or trite written texts, as is happening in too many classrooms under the present regime of reading instruction.
I suspect that there were no "low" or "unsuccessful readers" in the classrooms when children were motivated to unlock the messages of love and appreciation written by their parents or classmates. How different this reading experience is from time-controlled, bubble in, motivation-killing standardized tests that too often pronounce them "low readers"!
I don't know what grade the Public Education Department has given Edward Gonzales School, but I trust the PED will rate these teachers as "exceptional" for their creativity, humanity and the way they "have the backs" of their students by making sure each child received a letter from someone who appreciated them, and then invited the children to read - yes, read!- that letter aloud in class.
And how significant that you featured letters written - and read aloud - by children in third grade, the grade at which the PED and the governor would like to retain children who are "unsuccessful readers."
Perhaps the Edward Gonzales experience needs to be studied carefully by the PED, the governor and the Legislature, to learn what motivates children to read successfully, with enthusiasm, passion, and "without a dry eye."
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Denver CO/ Mandarin Chinese Becoming First Choice as Second Language
By Nancy Lofholm
The Denver Post
October 22, 2012
Ivie Hunt was barely 6 last spring and had just finished kindergarten when she shocked the hostess at a Denver Asian restaurant by chatting comfortably in Mandarin Chinese.
"Here was this little blond, white girl having a full conversation with the hostess in Mandarin," said her mother, Ann Hunt, who admitted to being a bit stunned herself.
That kind of surprise may wear off as Mandarin Chinese becomes the first choice of a growing number of second-language learners.
More language students are saying adios to the recent stampede to learn Spanish and huan ying - or welcome - to mastering a Chinese dialect now spoken by an estimated 100 million non-Chinese.
In Colorado, there are many Ivies - ages 3 to 99 - twisting their tongues and brains around the foreign concepts of Mandarin grammar, tones and characters.
- More than 60 schools around the state - ranging from primary-level immersion schools to universities to private language enterprises - are teaching this most widely spoken language in the world.
- More online classes are popping up.
- Chinese-language clubs are taking over tables in coffee shops.
- Chinese tutors are becoming a hot commodity.
The popularity of Mandarin has been driven by several factors:
- China's ascendancy in the global economy means anyone doing business on an international basis is likely to encounter Mandarin speakers.
- The spotlight on the 2008 Beijing Olympics increased tourism to China and heightened interest in Mandarin.
- Also, more Americans are traveling to China to adopt Chinese babies and want to be conversant with their children.
- Speaking Mandarin has become a hot ticket on college applications as well as a starred addition to executive résumés.
"If you are going to get around in the world, you are going to need to speak Chinese. It's a language everyone is going to be speaking," said aviation consultant Mike Boyd, who studies Mandarin for one intense hour a week at the Colorado Chinese Language School in Denver.
That message may be catching the attention of the younger set - and their parents - the most.
It is no longer so unusual for preschoolers to be signed up for Mandarin instruction.
- At least one school district has dropped Spanish classes and added K-12 Chinese.
- Some charter schools are offering total immersion in Mandarin beginning in kindergarten.
That's how Ivie could chatter in Chinese after one year at the Denver Language School without ever being anywhere near the Great Wall or the Ming Tombs.
And that's why Trinity Jones, 12, thinks nothing of having conversations in Mandarin while socializing with her classmates at the Denver Center for International Studies.
Trinity had the option of immersing herself in French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese or Lakota, but she was fixed on learning the language spoken by more than a billion people in the world.
"I knew it would help me in the future," said Trinity, who already has her sights set on being a government translator or working for a company such as Apple in China.
Mandarin has become such an important language around the state that the University of Colorado at Boulder has added a program called Teaching East Asia. It is geared toward training more Chinese instructors and furthering learning about China for more students.
It is also aimed at getting a handle this year on just how many Chinese-language schools and learners are out there.
The program uses funding from an initiative called STARTALK that was developed under President George W. Bush to promote teaching and understanding of "strategically important" languages.
Jon Zeljo with the Teaching East Asia program said one focus of the summer institutes held for teachers and students the past three years has been to make Mandarin classes sustainable by giving Chinese teachers more resources and to expose more students to Mandarin at a young age.
The Chinese government is assisting in this endeavor by funding half the salaries of Chinese teachers through Chinese Language Council International programs called Confucius Institutes or through a Chinese Ministry of Education program called Hanban.
Kuo Li teaches Mandarin and Chinese culture to 144 students at Battle Mountain High School in Edwards with Chinese government help and said his students are learning much more than how to pronounce Chinese tones correctly.
"Chinese gives these students a larger horizon in their future lives," he said.
Amanda Sauer is principal at Erie Elementary in the St. Vrain Valley School District, which has embraced the teaching of Mandarin more than any other district in the state. Four Chinese-language teachers are half funded by Hanban.
Sauer echoes Li's statement.
"Our district looked at how to prepare kids for 21st-century jobs - to help them have a global view," she said.
- Students in kindergarten through second grade in Erie start out with sessions every other week that focus more on Chinese culture than on learning grammar.
- Students move on to weekly classes focused on writing characters and language-building in third grade.
- They can then choose whether to continue learning Chinese in middle and high school.
Ann Hunt is pretty sure Ivie will continue her Chinese studies. She and her husband, Dr. James Hunt, have already decided their 2-year-old son will also have the chance to learn Mandarin. They have mused over what it will be like to eventually have two teenage children in the house who are fluent in a language that is a mystery to them and to the two older children in the family.
Already, they struggle with not being able to help Ivie with her Mandarin homework.
"Overwhelming is how I would describe it," she said. "Overwhelming but amazing."
Or, as her daughter might tell her, in Mandarin it is jingren - amazing.
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Brooklyn NY/ At Technology High School, Goal Isn't to Finish in 4 Years
By Al Baker
New York Times
October 21, 2012
Flakes of green paint are peeling from the third-floor windowsills. Some desks are patched with tape, others etched with graffiti. The view across the street is of a row of boarded-up brownstones.
The building and its surroundings in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, may look run-down, but inside 150 Albany Avenue may sit the future of the country's vocational education: The first 230 pupils of a new style of school that weaves high school and college curriculums into a six-year program tailored for a job in the technology industry.
By 2017, the first wave of students of P-Tech - Pathways in Technology Early College High School - is expected to emerge with associate's degrees in applied science in computer information systems or electromechanical engineering technology, following a course of studies developed in consultation with I.B.M.
- "I mean, in 10th grade, doing college work?" said Monesia McKnight, 15, as she sat in an introduction to computer systems course taught by a college professor. "How great is that?"
The United States has the highest proportion of college graduates in the world. Yet many with four-year degrees are facing a transforming economy where jobs require less generalized types of education and more of the skills that many college graduates lack, in science, technology, engineering or math.
Into this breach, school systems around the country have been aiming to start new high schools like P-Tech.
- Officials in Chicago were so taken by New York's school that they opened five similar schools this year with corporate partners in telecommunications and technology.
- Besides New York and Illinois, education officials in Maine, Massachusetts, Missouri, North Carolina and Tennessee have committed to creating such schools, and the Obama administration has recommended that Congress provide more money for vocational education - the preferred name is career and technical education, or C.T.E. - to promote this approach.
A year from now, New York City plans to open two more schools just like P-Tech, focusing on other growing industries in the city, possibly including health care. A fourth one is planned to open in September 2014. The State Board of Regents is also trying to develop assessment exams for this type of school, perhaps one that could be substituted for one of the usual Regents tests.
"When we view high-quality C.T.E. programs, we see how engaged those students are and what clear aspirations they have for their future," said John B. King Jr., the state education commissioner. "Unfortunately, that's not always present in some of our struggling schools."
P-Tech, which began last year with a ninth grade and now has a 10th grade, is inside Paul Robeson High School, which is being phased out because of poor performance. Students attend from 8:35 a.m. to 4:06 p.m., in 10-period days that intersperse traditional classes like math and English with technology and business-centric courses like "workplace learning," which teaches networking, critical thinking and presentation skills. Second-year students are offered physics and global studies as well as the business courses and college-level courses in speech or logic and problem solving - or both. There is also a six-week summer academy for geometry.
The objective is to prepare students for entry-level technology jobs paying around $40,000 a year, like software specialists who answer questions from I.B.M.'s business customers or "deskside support" workers who answer calls from PC users, with opportunities for advancement.
Stanley S. Litow, the president of I.B.M.'s International Foundation, the company's philanthropic arm, and a former deputy schools chancellor in New York, said that the P-Tech curriculum was mapped backward: I.B.M.'s own employees were analyzed to learn what skills a student would need.
Each student also is paired with a mentor from the company, as is the principal, Rashid F. Davis;
- students take trips to I.B.M. facilities to learn such things as how computer chips are made;
- the company helped train the school's 18 teachers, and
- it provides a full-time liaison based at the school to work with faculty from the New York City College of Technology and the City University of New York, which also helped develop the course work.
Mr. Litow said that while no positions at I.B.M. could be guaranteed six years in the future, the company would give P-Tech students preference for openings. They would also be well-trained for other information technology jobs, Mr. Litow said.
"Because that is the problem," he said. "Too few kids have these skills."
P-Tech students are chosen by lottery, with academics not factored in, said Josh Thomases, the Education Department's deputy chief academic officer. Mr. Davis said that 52 percent of last year's ninth graders scored below proficiency on their math and English eighth-grade exams. But he noted that 76 of those 102 pupils had already passed the English and Integrated Algebra Regents exams. He said 16 took a college class over the summer at the New York City College of Technology, and since school began this year, they and 34 others are enrolled in at least one college class that is taught at P-Tech by one of three professors from the college.
- "At the center of all this is the notion that there are young people who have as much potential to learn what we think of as basic academics as anyone, but whose learning style, whose interests and preferences are for doing things where they can see: 'What does this mean? Why am I doing this?' " said Stephen F. Hamilton, a professor of human development at Cornell University who has studied the success of Germany's apprenticeship programs.
"Right now," he added, "I think what P-Tech is trying to do is laudable."
There were 600 applicants for the second freshman class, or about six times as many as for the first.
This is despite the school's threadbare appearance. Mr. Davis said he pours most of his resources into academics - even using Robeson's beat-up desks to save on costs.
"You have to know where to place your priorities, and our priorities are in the intellectual capital of the people that we hire," said Mr. Davis, who added that 88 percent of his students were poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunch (the citywide average is about 75 percent).
Whether the school is worth the investment depends on how it is compared. Since most vocational schools finish in four years - Mr. Litow said some P-Tech students could "be on a fast track" to finish in four - the six-year program costs the city more. But most of the jobs the students are aiming for require at least a two-year associate's degree as well. Absent financial aid, New York City's community colleges charge $3,900 a year in tuition.
"And what is the return on the individual student?" Mr. Litow said. "It is the difference between a low-wage job with no career and the solid wages and skills to have a productive middle-class job."
Several students at P-Tech said they felt the school was giving them a new start in academia, by appealing to their passions for learning something that moved them. Some were already looking beyond the prospect of an I.B.M. job, like Eketa Roberts, 15, who said she wanted to be a lawyer, possibly in technology; Cierra Copeland, 15, who wants to be a cardiac surgeon; and Clifton McDonald, 15, who wants to create technology that improves on prosthetics, and also write fiction. Clifton has already written five chapters of a novel about a boy with amnesia, "who woke up in a world that he doesn't completely recognize."
Another, Lamar Agard, 14, noted the practical realities, too.
"I'm getting an associate degree," he said as he sat in his ninth-grade math class. "It's giving me the opportunity of getting my college degree without having to pay for it."
Recently in Dan Berkley's 10th-grade physics class - which was being taught in part by Brian Lewis, a math teacher - the students were well dressed and some even had briefcases. Amare Lewis, 15, said he never wore a tie to school until now.
"If I'm going to take these classes, and be part of I.B.M., I feel like I want to dress well," he said.
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Washington DC/ COLUMN: Ex-Marine Turned Teacher: 'Stop Demonizing Me and My Profession'
From Valerie Strauss' daily column: The Answer Sheet
By Matthew Swope [Swope has been teaching physics for 10 years and before entering the teaching profession, was a Marine and a police officer]
Washington Post
October 21, 2012
The following piece by Swope was first published on Diane Ravitch's blog. It is both moving and important.
I am a teacher. Year 10. High school physics. I am a professional educator in a field that demands professional credentials, continuing education, skill and knowledge based licensing exams and background checks including fingerprints so I am deemed responsible enough and safe enough to work with children. I'm a mandated reporter of physical abuse, neglect, and sexual abuse.
There, now I've established my bona fides and authority to speak knowledgeably on the subject.
Oh, wait, I have to knock out the ones who claim I've only ever taught. I served in and was honorably discharged from the United States Marine Corps. I then spent six years carrying a badge and a gun and worked a beat as a police officer in a city of 180+ thousand people. I've done other things than teach.
When I was a cop, if crime went up on my beat they didn't blame me for not working hard enough.
- They brought in additional officers to beef up the presence and manpower.
- They did dispassionate studies of data to identify problems, communicated the results to me, and let me help decide how to address them.
- They swarmed identified problems with social assistance and community programs, assigned undercover officers to work from the inside,
- provided more funding for Women's Protective Services and Children's Protective Services,
- brought in the narcotics and gang task forces to assist,
- assigned volunteers from the DA's office and City Council to spend weeks riding around with me as observers so they could see what I was up against, and
- provided me with medical aid and psychological care (mandated after certain stressful incidents like shootings) and
- never, ever, accused me of not working hard enough or being a good enough cop.
Instead, they identified poverty, drugs, poor or absent parenting, and legitimate mental illnesses and disabilities as the root of the problem.
I was provided the proper equipment to do my job and it was regularly serviced and updated. I was provided continuing training in the mental and physical duties of my job.
I got tired of seeing kids as victims or criminals and went back to a school to try and help them from the other side of life. I became a teacher. I took a $24k per year pay cut for this privilege. I saddled myself with 20 years of student loans. I spend in excess of $1000 a year of my own money to provide equipment and student supplies so I can do my job effectively. I take every student in my class, whether it was the year I am doing inclusion teaching or the year I have the AP kids. I turn none away nor should I.
As an American citizen, it's my task and privilege to educate everyone who comes through my school's door. I make progress with every student but that progress cannot always be measured by a standardized test. I feed some of my kids. I've bought them clothing. I've visited them in juvie, hospitals, hospices and at the graveside. I've been praised, cussed, disrespected, honored and ignored by parents and administration.
I lead my department, my campus academic competition team and my students. I follow my principal and superintendent. I'm responsive to parents.
I love kids and teaching.
I'm tired. I am not respected. I am underpaid.
I am not responsible for what happens outside of my 45 minutes a day with your child. I only accept that responsibility for my own two children.
Please help me do my job for your child and community. Stop demonizing me, my profession, and my fellow teachers. See through the deceptive manipulation of the reform movement and high stakes standardized testing. Don't buy into the propaganda about teachers unions and how evil they are. Don't listen to political hacks like [Michelle] Rhee who are only in it for the opportunities to gut the profession and privatize it for the wealthy to plunder profits from.
Let me teach. Allow fellow professionals and administrators to evaluate me fairly and help me if I don't meet expectations. Listen to me when I speak for I am a professional and I am in it to do the best job possible with the kids I am given.
Help me. I want to help you.
~~~~~~~~~
Washington DC/ OPINION: Considering Cursive in a Digital World
By David Polochanin [Polochanin is a middle school English teacher in Glastonbury, Conn. He is on a sabbatical leave to write children's literature and professional articles. His work has been widely published in New England newspapers]
Education Week, Vol. 32, Issue 8 [Edweek.org]
October 17, 2012
"What does a cursive Q look like?" I asked my wife after dinner one recent night. We were helping our 5-year-old daughter form uppercase letters in manuscript when it occurred to me that I did not remember how to form a cursive capital Q. It's just not something you write that often. I scribbled a cursive Z, hoping that it would help spark my memory of Q. Weren't they similar? Finally, we resorted to what most people do when they immediately need answers like this: We Googled it.
It turns out that a cursive Q resembles a sweeping, curvy number two with several loops, and the visual helped me instantly remember it. But what this episode also brought to mind was not so much my inability to remember certain cursive letters but a recent concern in my classroom, where I teach middle school English, with my own penmanship, and the balance between teaching skills like cursive handwriting and 21st-century skills in schools.
I take a small degree of pride in writing feedback to my students on their essays, poems, and other written work. I try to be a little humorous. I ask some probing questions. I relate to students' ideas if I can. I do not aim to correct every single problem with each student's paper, but make an effort to highlight several good qualities and areas for improvement. And then I usually wrap up with a summarizing statement-usually as positive as possible to start off, and then if needed a direct statement about what the writer needs to do better, such as "let's talk during your study hall tomorrow about how to keep verb tenses consistent."
But in the last few years, when I have returned papers with comments on them (deliberately not written in red, of course, which could look like a massacre), invariably there are a few students who face a significant stumbling block: They can't read my handwriting, a half-cursive, half-printed type of shorthand that has evolved from my days as a journalist. And there are probably a few more students who do not ask for clarification, who are probably completely confused but eager to move to their next class.
It's not often that I think about cursive writing at all, but between my own failure to remember how to make a cursive Q and recollections of students in recent years who can't decipher my own unique cursive script, I am reminded of the articles written in recent years about the antiquity of cursive penmanship. The writing has been on the wall, as they say, for the last decade: School districts are not spending as much classroom time teaching cursive penmanship.
The claim is that there are simply too many more important skills that a student must learn to be successful in school-to read well, compute math, think scientifically, to express one's ideas clearly in writing. In fact, it has been reported that the Common Core State Standards address keyboarding but not cursive handwriting. With less than eight hours a day in school, how can educators justify time teaching tedious cursive letter formation?
At one time, I bemoaned this instructional trend, and not just because when I was in elementary school in the early 1980s handwriting was a more significant part of the curriculum; everyone mastered cursive writing then. I believed it was a valuable skill, and part of me still does. After all, how will children learn to sign their names or read historic documents (or their teacher's comments)?
But beyond that, there is an artistic flair about cursive penmanship-everyone's writing is personally symbolic-not to mention the larger benefit of a child interacting with letters and language, and, of course, being neat, which is an underrated skill in itself. I can recall the workbook pages in which I traced and repeated cursive letters. I enjoyed the practice. Back then, it was a progressive step of being an elementary schooler, a rite of passage.
While that rite of passage still exists, it's definitely muted. The attention cursive writing gets is in decline. From what I can see as an educator, the expectation to write in cursive beyond elementary school is essentially absent in some schools. When I was in junior high school and high school, final drafts of writing assignments were to be written in cursive. It was the most formal style we had at the time.
Meanwhile, when students in my school district reach 6th grade, teachers want readable handwriting. Most of the students at this level cannot read cursive well, let alone write it, and they aren't getting any more instruction in penmanship.
- In my last 11 years teaching in a middle school, approximately one child per year writes consistently in a cursive script, and that's only because they want to. Many teachers generally prefer word-processed work, anyway, because it's much neater.
So with the evolution of writing clearly moving toward composing on the computer-so long, Ticonderoga No. 2 pencils and fun-smelling eraser caps-the question remains: Will learning cursive even matter in years to come?
It's difficult to argue with the theory that learning 21st-century skills must take precedence over less important skills, such as cursive-letter formation. While it's not impossible to do both, something has to give in a curriculum when new skills are introduced. And teetering on the edge, where it has been for some time, is instruction in penmanship.
Peer into the houses of young children and you'll find them using technology as if they were born with the ability. The truth is, children learn quickly. I witness this every day as my 5-year-old and 7-year-old find new uses for our iPad that I didn't know existed.
- My 5-year-old has learned to reverse the camera image and record videos of herself. She takes photos of my wife and me without our knowing.
- My 7-year-old checks his fantasy-baseball team, makes roster changes, plays video games, and practices math problems. The other day, he discovered Google Maps and looked up Washington, D.C., and Fenway Park, home of his beloved Red Sox. I thought that was pretty cool.
As my children get older, technology will take on a far greater role. In Glastonbury, Conn., where I teach, the board of education recently authorized funding for every incoming high school freshman and sophomore to get an iPad next year. That is the direction we are headed.
In an ideal world, I'd like to see my children learn the intricacies of forming cursive letters. But the realist in me understands that new skills have arrived. My children will be able to look into history books and observe what a formal letter written in a cursive script once looked like, how the writers of the Declaration of Independence wrote the entire document that way. But generations from now, many adults and children may not be able to figure out one word of it. It will look like a foreign language. Such is change.
As my wife and I continue to work on practicing writing uppercase letters with our daughter, I am hopeful that there are no other letters, besides the cursive Q, which will stump me. But if we encounter one, I know that if we turn to our laptop or iPad, the answer will be only a few seconds away.
