Las Cruces/ NMSU's STEM Outreach Center: $4.78 Million Grant Helps Students Reach for the Stars
By Emily C. Kelley
Las Cruces News-Sun
November 18, 2012
She's only in fifth grade, but Esperanza Carlos is taking her first steps toward a career in space thanks to STEM outreach programs at New Mexico State University.
"It's fun because I learn about NASA, math. I'm interested in it because I want to be an astronaut when I grow up," said Carlos, a Riverside Elementary School student. "I love planets and I love science and math."
Carlos is among thousands of students in southern New Mexico who benefit from NMSU's STEM Outreach Center each year. Now the center, in collaboration with local public school districts, has received a $4.78 million federal flow-through grant, administered by the New Mexico Public Education Department, for expansion and continuation of science, technology, engineering and math afterschool programs in the Gadsden and Las Cruces school districts.
The STEM-focused 21st Century Community Learning Centers Afterschool Program is a continuation of
- the Southern New Mexico Science, Engineering, Mathematics and Aerospace Academy (SEMAA), a NASA program;
- Digital Media Academy (DiMA), which focuses on cultivating critical thinking skills through the use of technology for 21st century learning;
- Save the Children, a national reading program; and
- AfterMath Education, an afterschool program that offers an extension of classroom curriculum, tied into language arts, social studies, physical education, arts and more.
The grant will supply $880,000 per year for Gadsden schools and $315,000 per year for Las Cruces schools, for the next four years.
"SEMAA kids are testing higher in science and math on standardized tests," said Susan Brown, STEM Outreach Center director. "This program brings more science into the classroom."
- The funding fuels programs in the 15 elementary schools in the Gadsden Independent School District, and five middle schools, along with San Andreas High School in the Las Cruces Public School District, for four more years.
- The SEMAA and DiMA programs last for 13 weeks in the Gadsden schools and eight weeks in Las Cruces schools. The programs will reach approximately 6,600 students per year.
"I was in SEMAA last year with Mrs. Peterson," said Jorge Macias, fifth grade student at Riverside Elementary School. "I thought it was fun, so I got in this year."
Each of the programs offers one field trip to NMSU each semester.
- Students will have the opportunity to engage in fun, educational activities and meet members of the NMSU STEM community.
- Each SEMAA class is limited to 20 students, so the teachers can focus on the lessons and not be overwhelmed with too many students. As a result, most classes have a waiting list.
These programs are particularly important in the Gadsden schools because the district and school administrations, teachers, parents and students were vocal in their need for the continuation and expansion of the enrichment programs. The program funding also provides transportation for the children involved, so everyone has the opportunity to participate.
"We're excited that the kids are doing something fun and educational after school," said Ligia Ford, program specialist in the STEM Outreach Center.
The October session fell on Halloween so costumes for students and teachers added to the fun. The fifth grade students participating in the SEMAA program at Riverside were working on a project to learn about the moon and its hemispheres.
"It's so wonderful because everything is laid out for us - week one, everything is in a bag," said Diane Bass, Riverside Elementary School fifth grade teacher. "We have a binder that we follow (for SEMAA activities). We can make the binder our own - here's the idea and we make it how we want to present it."
The SEMAA program staff assembles all of the supplies for the lessons, separated by week, into huge plastic tubs. They call this massive organizational activity "tubbing."
- "We supply everything from notebooks to scissors to glue, and even an actual astronaut outfit - like their spacesuit - for examples for the teachers. We don't ever want to have a teacher looking for a supply, we want to have markers and everything ready to teach their lessons," said Ford.
- "We also sort them by week because we don't want a teacher to have to scramble through the kit. We just need them to be able to pull out a lesson, say this is week one, and get started. It's a lot of work for us, our prep work is a lot, but we love it."
Once the tubs are prepared, teachers attend a Saturday workshop at NMSU to go through the lessons with SEMAA staff members. This professional development activity allows for greater networking amongst STEM teachers in southern New Mexico, but also a chance to learn new techniques for making teaching STEM more engaging.
The 21st Century Afterschool Program also engages parents and members of the community through family festivals and adult-family workshops.
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Socorro/ Automotive Technology Program: Dual Enrollment High School Students Shifting Gears
By Lindsey Padilla
El Defensor Chieftain
November 17, 2012
Socorro High School has an automotive technology program for students interested in automotive mechanics.
This is the 15th year for the program, said auto tech teacher Tony Montoya. The course is one of two in New Mexico schools to have the dual enrollment course with Western New Mexico University.
The course moved to the new career building a year ago. In previous years, students enrolled in the course were taken to Torres Elementary School, Montoya said.
In order to get the dual enrollment course, Montoya filled out the necessary paperwork. WNMU hired Montoya because he has 26 years' experience in automotive repair, he said. At Socorro High School, Montoya worked as an assistant coach with athletic trainer duties from 1996 to 2005.
Montoya started out with 17 students in the auto tech course, and has increased enrollment to 40 students. However, some students have transferred out of the program because they moved on to different things, or because the program was not for them, he said.
"My experience is in auto repair," Montoya said. "It's like running a business that I've mastered."
The auto tech course has six categories to master. The first is theory of brakes; second is manual transmissions and axles; third is electronics and electricity; fourth is chasings and steering; fifth is automatic transmission and trans axles; and the sixth is air conditioning.
Montoya has 24 students in theory of brakes, 17 in electronics and four in automatic transmission and trans axles, he said. The four who are in the last category will complete the program in May.
His fifth-period class, which has six students, has completed the brakes and manual program and is halfway through electricity and electronics, he said. Once students have completed the program, they are eligible to take an Automotive Service Excellent test to be certified in any automotive category.
Students can take the test on their own or do it through WNMU, he said.
SHS junior Dewey Sauls is in the course, and has found relating the difference between what he learns from the book and what he learns in the shop challenging, he said.
"I get to learn about fixing things," Sauls said. "I learned how to build bikes, so I wanted to know how to work on cars. I have helped people where I live change oil and fix brakes."
Sauls' plans for college include going to WNMU and earning a certified degree as a mechanic. He wants this as his future, he said.
"Montoya is a good teacher," he said. "If you don't understand the material, he will describe it to you."
The course gives students a choice as to the direction they want to take in the future because there are various categories, Montoya said. "Electronics is involved in everything," he said.
"The challenges are learning how to use tools," said junior Katana Garcia.
Garcia said her family works on cars, and because of the course, she now knows how to solve car problems. Garcia joined the program because she wanted to see what it was like. She would like to study automotive and photography in college. The auto tech course will help her feel more prepared, she said.
"You have to know how a car operates," Montoya said. "The book gives plenty of examples and the students are learning electrical terms. They (students) are balancing classroom and shop work."
Sophomore Summer Allen has been in the course for two years, and said she likes it because it's a laid back environment.
Montoya pushes the students, but not to the point where they are stressed, she said.
"The hands-on connects you with a verbal reminder of what you are doing," Allen said.
She plans to follow through with the course in her junior year. She said she grew up around auto mechanics, and said it's interesting that she gets college credits.
"I want to know what's wrong with my car so I don't get ripped off," Allen said.
Students who are enrolled in the course receive a dual enrollment - one credit per semester - while still earning high school credit, Montoya said. The full course is equal to five college credits that can be transferred if the students choose to major in automotive. If not, the credits can be used as an elective in college.
"There is a shortage in automobile mechanics, and it's important to have hands-on people in these areas." Montoya said.
According to Montoya, 70 percent of the work is done in the classroom and the other 30 percent is hands-on in the shop.
"This course will lead students to jobs in the parts industry and will help with resumes," Montoya said.
Junior Sarah Patterson started the program as a freshman. She dropped out in the first semester and said the challenge was having to come back.
"It's hard to leave and come back, you forget about a lot of things," Patterson said.
Patterson's grandfather was a mechanic, and she was interested in it. It is a possibility this will be in her field when she gets older, she said.
"Hands-on is beneficial because it's different than the book, because it's different when it's right in front of you," Patterson said.
Montoya doesn't want to compete with other auto shops in the area. People who want to bring cars in the shop can call and set up an appointment with him so students can work on automobiles during class periods, he said.
Junior Carlos Gomez is from Chihuahua, Mexico. He knew very little English when he took the program and he had to drop out in the first semester because of the language barrier, Montoya said, but then he came back.
Gomez said when he first took the course it was hard, but he had help from his tutor. He took the class because it's fun to know how to fix your own car, he said.
According to Gomez, working with cars is one of his options for when he attends college.
"I will be able to help someone to solve their problems with fixing a car," Gomez said.
Montoya said the program has grown tremendously, but money is always a struggle. WNMU and Socorro Consolidated Schools provide the tools and equipment, and the school district also supplies the curriculum, he said.
"We are very fortunate to have the program," Montoya said.
Sophomore Colton Wheeler took the course because he thought it would be fun and wants to fix cars himself, he said.
"I didn't think I was going to learn how to fix a car. It's fun," Wheeler said. "I like the hands-on, because without hands-on I would be lost. I want to attend college and eventually work at a shop, and in the future open my own shop."
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ABQ/ School Board: Charter School Objectivity Questioned
By Hailey Heinz
ABQ Journal Staff Writer
November 19, 2012
School board members squared off Friday after one board member pressed another on whether her position as a charter school administrator creates a conflict of interest on charter issues.
The exchange touched off a heated dialogue about how Albuquerque Public Schools interacts with charters schools.
The issue arose while the board was discussing its legislative wish list for the next session.
- The board was considering an agenda that calls for lawmakers to change the state's school funding formula.
- The agenda does not specify changes, but one change that has been discussed by a task force - which includes APS Superintendent Winston Brooks - is eliminating a subsidy for small schools.
- Charters rely heavily on the subsidy, but the district's similarly sized alternative schools are not eligible for the funds.
Board member Analee Maestas raised concerns about this part of the legislative agenda, and about a task force recommendation that would limit the growth of charter schools that aren't demonstrating academic success.
In addition to representing the South Valley, Maestas is the founder and director of La Promesa charter school, which is chartered by the state.
Board member Martin Esquivel questioned whether Maestas can be objective.
"Dr. Maestas, I'm just wondering out loud if you have a conflict of interest on this issue, or if you've given that any thought," Esquivel said.
Maestas responded by saying, "I think it is an issue that impacts all of our districts, period," but then abstained when the board voted to approve the legislative agenda. She later said in an email that she does not have a conflict of interest, and that she disclosed her support for charters during her campaign.
The issue arose again later in the meeting, as the board prepared to vote on a policy that limits when APS students can take online courses at charters. Maestas, who cast the only "no" vote, said she was "disappointed" in the board for approving a policy that she believes restricts opportunities for students.
"Many of you call me an advocate for charter schools, and even ask if there's a conflict of interest," she said. "Well, I am proud to be an advocate for charter schools, and for choice."
She went on to say "many" of her fellow board members are not committed to charters, which prompted board member Lorenzo Garcia to object.
"To paint us in the same brush stroke that we're not concerned about charter schools or that we have a lack of commitment to charter schools, in my mind is unconscionable," Garcia said. "This board has grappled with the issue of charter schools, at least for the last four years that I've been a member. I think we've been reluctant to shut down charter schools, to call them out, simply because there's been all this ambiguity in the law around what's supposed to happen and who's responsible for what. And I just want to say emphatically I support charter schools. I do not support bad charter schools."
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ABQ/ $11 Million APS Discovery Education Contract Approved Unanimously Despite Controversy
By Mike Gallagher
ABQ Journal Investigative Writer
November 19, 2012
Albuquerque Public schools took the dive into digital education in a big way this summer, signing a seven-year contract with Discovery Education to supply "tech books" for science, health and social sciences.
But the $11.3 million no-bid contract wasn't without grumbling and criticism, despite unanimous approval of the school board.
Some teachers cheered. Others seethed. And then the rumors started. Among them:
- The person driving the contract, now retired school system Academic Officer Linda Sink, was going to work for Discovery Education.
- Discovery Education had an "in" with Superintendent Winston Brooks.
- The contract was secret and illegal.
- No traditional textbooks would be available.
- The Discovery materials didn't match up well against the competition.
Taking them in order:
- Sink says, and the company confirms, that she never sought a job with Discovery and wasn't offered one. Although he didn't ask her, Brooks was sufficiently concerned that he called his "contact" at Discovery and warned against hiring Sink.
- Brooks has done consulting work for Discovery through a firm that hires school superintendents around the country and puts them together in panels to give feedback to companies that want to sell products to school systems. He said that work had nothing to do with the APS contract.
- The contract isn't secret. It was provided to the Journal in response to a request under the Inspection of Public Records Act and appears to be a typical technology license contract that state and local governments enter for copyrighted or proprietary computer software and support. The state system for buying instructional materials allows for no-bid contracts and copyrighted material to be exempted by law from the state procurement system.
- Textbooks will be available while teachers are taught how to use the new "tech-books" and beyond. The tech books under the contract are for students in kindergarten through 12th grade in science, social science and health. The contract requires training in the use of the technology for all teachers using them.
- Sink says criticism of the Discovery materials during the evaluation was unfair because they were inappropriately included in a comparison with traditional textbooks - something she said wasn't supposed to happen.
Rumors, accusations
The strained relationship between Brooks and Sink appears to have played a role in the behind-the-scenes rumors and accusations.
Sink was acting superintendent and applied for the superintendent position when Brooks was chosen to run the district four years ago. Brooks subsequently appointed her as the district's chief academic officer until her abrupt retirement in August. That was about the time the school board approved the Discovery Education contract.
Brooks tape-recorded an interview with the Journal for this story in case of future "litigation."
Despite their feelings toward each other, both are strong supporters of the school district's move into digital tech books and say that within a few years the technology will be the main instructional support for all teachers.
Digital tech books include online videos, instructional games and other tools not available with traditional textbooks. The Discovery Education program also includes student assessment and teacher training over the seven-year-contract.
Sink's role
Sink's retirement was made public a week before the school board unanimously approved the Discovery Education contract, which APS emails show she was pushing hard.
Rumors that she was going to work for Discovery Education reached Brooks, who said in an interview that he was concerned about the public perception if Discovery Education hired Sink.
He didn't call Sink, but he did call Discovery.
- "I called my contact at Discovery and told them that (hiring her) would be a big mistake," Brooks said in an interview with the Journal.
Sink in a telephone interview said she wasn't surprised Brooks didn't call her, given the strain between them but she would have told him the rumors weren't true.
Brooks, who wasn't directly involved in the details of the procurement process, said he called his contact to express his concern.
- "At a minimum, under no circumstances should she be assigned to the APS account and it could mean termination of our contract."
- "I was born at noon," Brooks said. "But not at noon yesterday."
He added, "I wasn't trying to blackball her."
But Sink says she never applied for a job with Discovery Education and was never offered one. Christina Scripps, who oversees media relations for the company, agreed.
- "I'm retired at this point," Sink said. "I'm looking into consulting at some point, but I'm retired."
- "There are always rumors," she said. "Whenever you move into something new, it upsets people."
Brooks consulting
Brooks is a consultant to the Education Research & Development Institute, which counts Discovery Education among its 200-plus clients.
- Brooks and other superintendents are brought in for sessions in which they hear presentations by textbook publishers, computer firms, software companies, food suppliers and other companies.
- He is paid $500, in addition to expenses, by the institute for each panel he sits on.
- "I have been on Discovery's panel twice in four years," Brooks said. "It's about telling the business partners how to improve their products."
The school board was aware of Brooks' deal with the institute and approved giving him up to 10 paid days a year to work on the consulting panels.
He said sitting in on the two panel presentations by Discovery Education had nothing to do with the company's current contract.
- "Discovery was already doing business with APS before I got here," Brooks said.
- "Some science teachers had been using Discovery Ed - or pieces of it - for years at APS on an individual basis," he said.
- Schools were using library funds to buy portions of the Discovery Education programs.
No bid
The Discovery Education contract wasn't put out to a formal bid. State procurement law exempts copyrighted material like textbooks from going through traditional bid procedures.
Sink said the district talked with other companies but didn't see their offerings as being as fully developed as those of Discovery Education.
Instead, the district and Discovery Education conducted a pilot program at two middle schools and 37 other classrooms around the district.
- "They worked with us to bring what they offered in line with common core curriculum," Sink said. "That was important. Plus we were able to evaluate the entire program over time."
Textbooks go through an evaluation by the State Public Education Department, which provides a list of approved textbooks to local districts. Discovery Education materials didn't go through that process and were not on the approved list.
- School districts are required to spend 50 percent of the money appropriated by the state on the texts and educational materials approved through the state system.
- Individual school districts have discretion over the remaining 50 percent.
"We worked with the Public Education Department to make sure we were following the law in negotiating with Discovery," Sink said.
A PED spokesman confirmed that the department conferred with APS on the Discovery Education contract.
Sink said the move into digital tech books was opposed by some teachers and even some members of her own staff.
The Discovery Education tech books were included in a teacher evaluation that also had traditional science and social science textbooks approved by the Public Education Department.
The tech books didn't fare well.
One letter to the Journal claimed the Discovery Education tech books didn't come close to lining up with state or national standards. But Sink said the Discovery Education tech books weren't supposed to be included in the evaluation process.
And the evaluators were not presented with all aspects of the Discovery Education program, Sink said.
She said someone on her staff who opposed the move to digital textbooks included part of the Discovery Education program in the evaluation.
"That evaluation was for traditional textbooks so we would have a list of approved texts that teachers could draw on and the district could buy," Sink said.
She said the district "took a middle ground" so teachers could have access to traditional textbooks to supplement the Discovery Education program.
"But not every kid is going to have a textbook," Sink said. Sink said, that under the Discovery Education contract, teachers get training each of the seven years of the contract. With traditional text books, training is available for the first year the texts are available.
Brooks said he was comfortable with the decision because other major school districts, like Clark County, Nev., and Miami-Dade, Fla., had entered into contracts with Discovery Education.
APS says the average traditional textbook costs $75 while the tech books average out to around $43.
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ABQ/ New Frontier for Scaling Up Online Classes: Course Credit
By Justin Pope
KOB-TV, Channel 4
November 18, 2012
In 15 years of teaching, University of Pennsylvania classicist Peter Struck has guided perhaps a few hundred students annually in his classes on Greek and Roman mythology through the works of Homer, Sophocles, Aeschylus and others "the oldest strands of our cultural DNA."
But if you gathered all of those tuition-paying, in-person students together, the group would pale in size compared with the 54,000 from around the world who, this fall alone, are taking his class online for free a "Massive Open Online Course," or MOOC, offered through a company called Coursera.
Reaching that broader audience of eager learners seeing students in Brazil and Thailand wrestle online with texts dating back millennia is thrilling. But he's not prepared to say they're getting the same educational experience.
"Where you have a back-and-forth, interrogating each other ideas, finding shades of gray in each other's ideas, I don't know how much of that you can do in a MOOC," he said. "I can measure some things students are getting out of this course, but it's nowhere near what I can do even when I teach 300 here at Penn."
A year ago, hardly anybody knew the term MOOC. But the Internet-based courses offered by elite universities through Coursera, by a consortium led by Harvard and MIT called edX, and by others, are proving wildly popular, with some classes attracting hundreds of thousands of students. In a field known for glacial change, MOOCs have landed like a meteorite in higher education, and universities are racing for a piece of the action.
The question now is what the MOOCs will ultimately achieve.
- Will they simply expand access to good instruction (no small thing)?
- Or will they truly transform higher education, at last shaking up an enterprise that's seemed incapable of improving productivity, thus dooming itself to ever-rising prices?
Much of the answer depends on the concept at the center of a string of recent MOOC announcements: course credit.
Credit's the coin of the realm in higher education, the difference between knowing something and the world recognizing that you do. Without it, students will get a little bit smarter. With it, they'll get smarter-and enjoy faster and cheaper routes to degrees and the careers that follow.
Students are telling the MOOC developers they want credit opportunities, and with a push from funders like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the MOOCs are trying to figure out how to get it to them.
"Initially, I said it'd be three years" before MOOCs began confronting the credit issue, said MIT's Anant Agarwal, president of edX, which launched only last May and has 420,000 students signed up this fall (Coursera is approaching 2 million). "It's been months."
But making MOOC courses credit-worthy brings challenges much harder than producing even the best online lectures, from entering a state-by-state regulatory thicket to assessment. How do you grade 100,000 essays? How do you make sure students in a coffee shop in Kazakhstan aren't cheating on quizzes?
Last Tuesday, Coursera, which offers classes from 34 universities, announced the American Council on Education would begin evaluating a handful of Coursera courses and could recommend other universities accept them for credit (individual colleges ultimately decide what credits to accept). Antioch University, Excelsior College and the University of Texas system are already planning to award credit for some MOOCs.
Two days later, Duke, Northwestern, Vanderbilt and seven other prominent universities announced a consortium called Semester Online offering students at those institutions-and eventually others, though details aren't yet clear-access to new online courses for credit. These won't be giant classes, but the announcement is important because top colleges, generally stingy about accepting outside credit, are signaling they agree the technology can now replicate at least substantially some of the high-priced learning experience that takes place on campus.
The latest announcement will come Monday, and appears smaller but is potentially important: a first-of-its-kind partnership between edX, the MIT-Harvard consortium, and two Massachusetts community colleges. EdX's popular introductory computer science course from MIT will provide the backbone of a class at the community college-a key gateway to degree programs-with supplemental teaching and help from community college faculty on the ground.
This is where the rubber meets the road for transforming higher education. Community colleges are beset by waitlists (400,000 in California alone) and bottlenecks in important introductory courses, as well as low success rates. If scaled-up MIT-quality teaching can help with solve those problems, MOOCS could be truly revolutionary. Massachusetts Bay Community College president John O'Donnell calls edX an invention comparable to Gutenberg's printing press.
Online classes have been around for going-on two decades, so what's the big-deal about MOOCs? Scale.
So far, online courses have offered convenience, but they generally haven't scaled up any more easily than traditional ones; somebody still has to grade the papers, and answer students' questions. One study found 93 percent of institutions charge the same or more for online courses as for in-person ones. No solving the college cost crisis there.
Molly Broad, president of the American Council on Education, refers to the "iron triangle" of higher education: cost, access and quality. The assumption has always been it's a zero-sum game-you can improve any one of those only at the expense of the others. There's also the famous analogy of Princeton economists William Baumol and William Bowen from the 1960s, that college teaching is akin to a string quartet. No matter how technology improves, a string quartet simply can't be performed (well) by fewer people than in Beethoven's day. So the relative cost of college (and musical performance) will always rise, relative to other things where efficiency does improve.
If MOOCs solve the scale problem, they could upend those paradigms. But it isn't easy.
Take assessment. Multiple-choice online quizzes are simple enough, but on more open-ended assignments, MOOC students now are mostly grading each other's papers. When they have questions, they're mostly asking fellow students. "Crowd-sourced assessment" raises obvious questions. MOOC leaders are exploring artificial intelligence solutions but admit many aren't fully baked.
EdX's Agarwal even said his group is exploring a kind of rubric of "self-assessment." Asked if he had faith that, particularly in a course aspiring to credit-worthiness, students could really grade their own essays, he replied: "Faith? Yes. Certainty? No."
Cheating's another problem that suddenly matters with credit at stake. EdX is working with a testing company to arrange for proctored exams in centers around the world. Coursera says it will be easier for far-away students to let them wave an ID card and take a test in front of a webcam, proctored from afar. MOOCs won't offer those things for free. But they could cost much less than, well, the full string quartet.
Broad, of ACE, said MOOCs are promising, but her group will send faculty out to "kick the tires" and research whether online courses enrolling 150,000 can really be credit-worthy. They'll talk to both students who complete and those who drop out (at edX, 80 to 95 percent who sign up don't finish the work).
A likely outcome is more blended models like the Massachusetts experiment, where MOOCs provide the backbone and resources local institutions can't offer, but local institutions still handle the one-on-one and award the credit. Such models could be "the best of both worlds," said Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller. Versions are already in places as varied as San Jose State and the National University of Mongolia.
Struck, the Penn classicist, agrees courses like his will likely work best partnering with local institutions much closer to the students, at least when it comes to credit. Intro-level science classes are one thing, but it's just not feasible at a scale of 54,000 for a class like his.
Higher education involves both transmitting information and "experiential learning that changes a person," he said. For the latter, at least in his subject, the technology's not yet there.
"These characters of Greek and Roman myth are just full of gray, wonderfully instructive, fundamental grays that make us re-examine our own humanity," he said. "I don't know how much of that I can do with the MOOC."
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Santa Fe/ COLUMN: Las Cruces Educator Pamela Cort - State's Top Teacher is Santa Fe Native
By Robert Nott
The New Mexican
November 18, 2012
When Pamela Cort was a little girl growing up in Santa Fe, she wanted to be an actress. "Doesn't everybody?" she asked with a laugh during a recent phone interview. Her parents were educators, and she was pretty sure she did not want to be one herself, although as a child she would play teacher, using her mom's textbooks, with her two younger sisters.
Earlier this month, the Las Cruces Public School District French teacher was named New Mexico Teacher of the Year during a surprise celebration held in her school. "They made a red carpet from butcher paper and laid it out from my room to the administrative office, and they had all of the kids out of class decked in confetti, and the band played for me and the superintendent was there - it was amazing and wonderful, and I felt overwhelmed," she said.
- The former Santa Fean has nothing but good memories of her public-school education in the capital city: "All my teachers were amazing, from my time at Wood Gormley Elementary School through Santa Fe High School. I can remember the names of all my teachers - not in their content areas, but in terms of the impression they left on me of the importance of being a lifelong learner and continually being educated."
She first took French in high school because, in those days, the school had an open-enrollment, first-come, first-served policy and it turned out that Spanish class was already full. Her French teacher, Judy Greaves "opened my eyes to how exciting it is to learn another language and learn another culture."
Cort first studied at New Mexico State University, then transferred to Washington State University (where she earned a bachelor's degree in French) and then returned to NMSU, where she graduated in 1986 with a master's degree in curriculum and instruction and her teaching certificate. She taught French at West Mesa High School in Albuquerque before relocating to Las Cruces. She has worked there for 20 years.
The state started its Teacher of the Year award in 1963. Last year, Pecos Independent School District's MaryBeth Britton earned the honor for her work in raising test scores among her students. Cort acknowledged she is amazed that a foreign-language teacher who teaches an elective won the honor this year. But, she noted, "Through teaching another language, the students learn a lot about their own language. This is not just an elective. It is an academic course and through it they will learn more about their other subjects."
Advances in technology help her in the classroom. "I can bring France and French-speaking cultures to our students. In the past it was limited to using cassette tapes and written documents, which, by the time they got to us from France, was already old news. Now we have access to current events and because of that they have a better global understanding," Cort said.
Every other spring she takes some of her students on a trip to France for three weeks as part of a home-stay program. She will do that again come May. In the interim, she is scheduled to meet the rest of the nation's Teachers of the Year at a gathering in Dallas in January and then, in April, the whole lot of them will travel to Washington D.C., to meet President Barack Obama.
Her husband, Bob, works for NASA - "He wears a shirt that reads, 'Yes, I am a rocket scientist,' " she noted - and she has a daughter studying music at the University of Colorado in Boulder and a son attending Las Cruces High School. Both her children took French classes, she said.
She said being named Teacher of the Year "gives value to what I do and hopefully gives value to what we all do in the educational profession. We get a lot of flak from the press and the public. There are really high expectations in our profession, but I think teachers hold those expectations as sacred."
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Savannah GA/ US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan Sketches Out 2nd-Term Agenda
By Michele McNeil
Education Week [Edweek.org]
November 16, 2012
In his first major postelection remarks, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that he will use his second term to continue to leverage education improvement at the state and local levels, with a new emphasis on principal preparation and evaluation.
And, he made clear that if Congress isn't serious about reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, of which the No Child Left Behind Act is the current version, then his department won't devote a lot of energy to it.
Duncan used his remarks today to the Council of Chief State School Officers to emphasize that his second term as President Barack Obama's education chief will focus on fine-tuning the work started during the first term.
"We came out of the gates flying" in the first term, he said, and he plans to "replicate that as much as we can."
Reauthorization is a top priority for the state chiefs. And during a Q-and-A session, they questioned his commitment to rewriting the law, especially now that the federal department can shape the accountability landscape through waivers.
Duncan said, repeatedly, that he did not want reauthorization to happen through a bad bill.
- "We will lead, we will help, we will push, but Congress has to want to do it," said Duncan, who says he plans on staying in the Obama cabinet for the "long haul."
This is only the second public speech for Duncan since his boss was reelected to a second term. (The first one was a speech light on substance, and not on his public schedule.) The secretary, who has said he would remain for a second term if the president wished him to, has been mum-until now-about his own plans for education policy over the next four years.
Duncan reaffirmed his commitment to using federal incentives as a lever for education policy changes. I
- n his first term, that leverage came in the form of $100 billion in education aid from the 2009 federal economic-stimulus package, and later, from the announceement that the administration would grant waivers and flexibility from key parts of the NCLB law.
- What leverage he will have for a second term, beyond overseeing implementation of existing efforts, is unclear.
Duncan said there would continue to be a focus on revamping the teaching profession, including improving principal preparation programs-an area he didn't think got enough attention during his first term. Later, in an interview, he said that renewed focus could come via Title II grants, which are used for professional-development-type activities, federal School Improvement Grant dollars, and other programs.
He offered more details in his remarks into what gains, and losses, are being seen in schools using the four turnaround models as part of SIG program, which he said will remain a focus in his second term. Though federal officials still aren't releasing the data to the public, Duncan said that two-thirds of schools are seeing gains in reading and math, with slightly better performance in elementary schools. But one third of all SIG schools showed no improvement, he noted.
And, he stressed that improving early-childhood education and making college more affordable and attainable would have a prominent place in his second term.
Some state chiefs, clearly concerned about just how much more involved Duncan would get in school improvement in their states, questioned his reach-from the recent Race to the Top for district competition to talk that he might pursue NCLB waivers for districts in states that, for whatever reason, do not get a waiver.
Duncan said during his remarks that while the majority of his department's time and money is spent with states, he did not want states to have "veto power" over districts that have their own improvement ideas.
"We do want to see innovation at the district level," he said. "I think it's important we play there."
And even though during his formal remarks Duncan indicated district-level waivers are off the table, he clarified in the later interview that even though the department's focus is on state-level flexibility, district waivers are very much still on the table.
There are obvious issues he will face in his second term-especially around (state) waiver implementation.
- Already, Virginia and the department had to agree to a waiver do-over after the state's methodology-approved by the department-resulted in little closing of achievement gaps.
- Other states endured criticism for setting different school performance goals for different subgroups of students, something the department allows as long as the groups farthest behind academically make faster progress.
- And, states and the department have come under fire for what some see as weak accountability for graduation in the approved waivers.
Waivers were made available as Congress stalled on rewriting the ESEA. So far, more than 30 states have earned flexibility from many of the core provisions of the NCLB law.
"We have 32, 33 different systems. Is that optimal? Probably not," he said to the chiefs.
Duncan's speech was to a group going through some transitions of its own. Gene Wilhoit, the CCSSO's executive director, is retiring-passing the torch to Chris Minnich, the group's longtime membership director. And one of the group's board members, Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett, who helped create a separate group of "Chiefs for Change," was not re-elected. He did not attend the meeting, but his successor and the victor in that race, Glenda Ritz, did.
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Washington DC/ Education Technology, Digital Learning Not As Easy As It Seems
Alliance For Excellent Education Report
Huffington Post
November 19, 2012
A report from the Alliance for Excellent Education identifies four key challenges that public school district leaders must address in the next two years in order to successfully bring digital learning and education technology into K-12 classrooms.
The driving force behind the nationwide effort to adopt a comprehensive digital learning strategy is the move by all states to raise academic expectations by requiring students to graduate from high school college- and career-ready.
Additionally, the Common Core State Standards adopted by 46 states and the District of Columbia necessitates using technology to prepare students for computer-administered assessments in the 2014-15 school year.
- "If you're a school or district leader who is considering using education technology and digital learning in your schools, STOP - and go no further - until you have a comprehensive plan that addresses your district's specific challenges and learning goals for all students," Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia, said in a statement.
One challenge facing district leaders is ensuring that all students are adequately prepared for college and career following graduation.
- The report states that schools must adapt accordingly and provide students with learning opportunities that are more hands on, experiential, project-based and aligned with their interests. Doing so will enable students to produce content, analyze information and develop a deeper knowledge of complex topics.
- Districts must also manage shrinking budgets and rethink how resources are allocated in support of teachers. The report recommends streamlining expenses, offering online professional development, elevating media specialists as instructional leaders and analyzing budget expenses.
- When it comes to training and supporting teachers, the Alliance for Excellent Education encourages a transition from a teacher-centric culture to learner-centered instruction, so as to combat the widely uneven and inequitably distributed access to teachers.
- Lastly, districts need to address the growing technology needs of society and individual students, particularly low-income students and students of color who are most at-risk of being left behind.
According to Wise, many school districts are in varying stages of addressing these challenges and subsequently developing comprehensive plans for digital learning strategies. While some have stepped up and set an example for others to follow over the next two years, other districts are in the process of implementing only certain aspects of digital learning. Still, some have yet to begin preparation.
- "Whatever stage a district is in," Wise said, "there is real value in taking a self assessment to make sure your district's technology strategies meet its educational needs, including changing curriculum and instruction."
Overall, the report concludes that by employing effective educational strategies that connect and improve what it dubs the "three Ts" - teaching, technology and use of time - district leaders can create the conditions for whole-school reform and productive instruction.
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Washington DC/ Writing Undergoing Renaissance in Curricula
Ascent stems from the common core, college feedback, and new research
By Catherine Gewertz
Education Week, Vol. 32, Issue 12 [Edweek.org]
November 14, 2012 [posted online 11/19/12]
Teachers are focusing on writing instruction like never before. More and more, they're asking students to write about what they read, helping them think through and craft their work, and using such exercises as tools not only to build better writers, but to help students understand what they're studying.
The shift is still nascent, but people in the field are taking notice. It marks a departure from recent practice, which often includes little or no explicit writing instruction and only a modest amount of writing, typically in the form of stories, short summaries, or personal reflections, rather than essays or research projects on topics being studied.
- In Oak Park, Mich., high school students are reading and rereading texts, taking notes on different features and levels of meaning each time, to inform their reading and discussion as well as the writing they will do about those texts.
- First graders in South Strafford, Vt., are reading Dr. Seuss' The Lorax, for fun, then for greater understanding, and then to hunt for evidence. They look for events in the plot that illustrate how the whimsical protagonist tries to protect the Earth and assemble examples into a simple paragraph to support the theme of the story.
On a literacy landscape that rarely features explicit writing instruction, and where the writing that does take place is often unconnected to reading, experts say, these kinds of projects are unusual for the way they connect writing and reading. Attention to reading has persistently been high, they say, but a focus on writing has waxed and waned in the past few decades.
"Now we're seeing a lot more attention to the idea that writing about a text can improve reading about that text," said literacy expert Timothy Shanahan, the chairman of the department of curriculum and instruction at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Driving Change
Several forces are bringing about that change.
- One is the Common Core State Standards, which tie reading and writing together by placing a heavy emphasis on writing in response to one or more texts.
- Another-echoed in the standards-is feedback from college professors and employers, who bemoan young people's weakness in the analytical writing most needed in college and training for good jobs.
Research, too, is sparking reconsideration of the role writing can play in making better readers.
- "Writing to Read," a 2010 meta-analysis of 93 studies of writing interventions, found that writing had consistently positive effects on students' reading skills and comprehension. Writing about what they read was particularly helpful to students' comprehension, but so were taking notes on what they read, answering questions about it, and simply writing more often.
- An expert panel brought together by the International Reading Association [IRA] and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development concluded in a report earlier this year that reading and writing require "independent instruction." Too little still is known about the "reading-writing connection," the panel said, but it is sufficiently promising to warrant further research to inform classroom practice.
- In 2010, the Newark, Del.-based IRA revised its standards for teacher preparation to include a greater emphasis on writing "as a way of emphasizing the importance of the reading-writing connection," said Rita M. Bean, who chaired that committee and is a professor emeritus of education at the University of Pittsburgh.
- A recent policy brief from the National Council of Teachers of English, based in Urbana, Ill., calls for having students write about and discuss complex texts and use those texts as models for writing.
Reading has occupied a higher profile than writing on the literacy landscape in part because of the focus on discrete reading skills that emanated from the National Reading Panel report in 2000, experts say, and the ensuing emphasis on those skills in the federally funded Reading First program and in state tests required under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.
Noting with alarm the growing gap, the National Commission on Writing in 2003 called for schools to double the amount of time they spent on writing.
- "For all intents and purposes, 'literacy' became synonymous with 'reading,' and writing became the stepchild of literacy rather than an equal partner," said Andrés Henríquez, a program officer at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which underwrote a string of studies on reading and writing, including "Writing to Read."
- Students still spend little time writing in school. Teacher surveys by Steve Graham, the author of "Writing to Read," and colleagues show that students spend less than half an hour writing each day in elementary school, and much of what they write is lists and fill-in-the-blank answers to questions. Even at the high school level, seven in 10 teachers reported that their preservice training had not prepared them adequately to teach writing, and nearly half did not assign a single multiparagraph writing task per month.
"What we have, typically, is kids not writing more than a paragraph of text, all the way through high school," said Mr. Graham, a professor at Arizona State University in Tempe. "It's not very promising for writing or for writing instruction."
Poor Performance
Scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress reflect correspondingly lackluster writing skills. The report issued in September, for the 2011 exam, shows only one in four middle and high school students writing at the "proficient" level or better.
The national picture of student writing led the authors of the common standards to elevate its role in literacy instruction and to tie it closely to reading, not only in language arts classes but across the curriculum. Assessments for the standards, being designed by two groups of states, are expected to reflect those connections as well, with tasks that combine research and writing.
The idea, said Susan Pimentel, one of the lead authors of the standards, is to reduce writing "opinion untethered to evidence" and "decontextualized" writing-writing not based on the reading of a text-in favor of writing that requires students to read, comprehend, and respond to text, grounding their interpretations in evidence found there. That shift reflects what young people can expect in college and work, she said.
"In faculty and employer surveys, the kinds of skills that score high are the argument and evidence-related skills, developing ideas with relevant details and reasons," Ms. Pimentel said. "Telling stories scores very low. Expressing one's feelings, very low."
Increasingly, educators are seeing the need to make explicit connections between writing and reading and to teach genre-specific types of writing, said Barbara Cambridge, the policy director for the NCTE.
"Writing hasn't always been taught, especially outside of English/language arts classrooms," she said. "We know writing helps reading. But avid readers aren't necessarily good writers. This stuff has to be taught."
- That's what Linda Denstaedt and her colleagues are trying to do as they craft K-12 curriculum units to reflect the standards in Michigan. At the core of their work at Oak Park High School is the "multidraft read," aimed at teaching students to delve into reading like writers, she said, which strengthens both their reading and their writing.
They read a text again and again, first to make sense of it and note their questions, as the teacher works the room to help, Ms. Denstaedt said. A second round of annotating focuses on looking for elements of the genre and how it works. They read again to spot structural decisions the writer made to create meaning, she said. The students then use what they learned in their own writing.
- "All of this adds up to learning to read in layers, learning to read like a writer," said Ms. Denstaedt, the co-director of the Oakland Writing Project, which is a consultant to Michigan on the project and is an affiliate of the Berkeley, Calif.-based National Writing Project. "And you're learning how to read better as you write."
Too often, she said, writing is "all about doing tasks, assignments. We get students doing reading, and maybe writing, but we're not necessarily helping them learn how to think their way through a text."
- Schools in Westerly, R.I., found that better writing can offer new ways to demonstrate knowledge. Dismal state science scores led the district to focus on writing and an inquiry-based approach to science instruction, and it paid off.
Only 49 percent of the 4th graders at State Street Elementary School scored proficient on the state science test in 2010, but 80 percent did in 2011. That number slid to 63 percent in 2012, said Principal Audrey Faubert, but she is still pleased with the improvement.
"Maybe they learned the science concepts better because they had to explain things," she said, "but I attribute it more to having a better way to show what they know, and that's important, too."
- A math teacher in Brighton, Mich., found that writing had a powerful effect on helping her 6th grade students understand algebra concepts. Julie Mallia and a colleague from the English department, Don Pawloski, teamed up in spring 2009 to have students write 10-page "how to" books for the next fall's 6th graders. Drawing both on math and on writing instruction, students had to explain concepts such as solving a problem with x.
Many students reported understanding the math concepts better after writing the books, Ms. Mallia said, because their writing brought them face-to-face with the spots where their conceptual understandings were weak. And it opened up a valuable formative-assessment tool.
"I was really surprised at how many students who were able to get the right answers realized in trying to write the books that they didn't get the ideas behind them," she said. "That gave me a chance to work with them and reteach what they didn't understand."
'A Strong Tie'
Writing is poised to occupy a heftier role in the College Board's Advanced Placement program. In 15 schools, the organization is piloting two courses that, if completed along with three other AP classes, will lead to a new "capstone" credential.
A critical-reasoning course, taken during the junior year, includes a major research project that demands a 3,000-word group paper and a 1,200-word individual paper, said John Williamson, the project's senior director. Students must also do a 15-minute written and multimedia presentation. The end-of-year exam will require three or four 500-word essays, he said. The senior-year course is in research-methodology, culminating in a 20-page paper.
"There is a strong tie between reading and writing all the way through these courses," he said. "When students write about what they read, they come to new understandings about it. And it's bigger than just the writing; it's about communicating your disciplinary understanding to different audiences."
Diana Leddy and Joey Hawkins, the teachers who developed the writing approach used with The Lorax, said the root of it is using writing to deepen understanding.
- "To be able to write well, you need to understand the material well, and to do that, you need to be a good reader," said Ms. Leddy. She and Ms. Hawkins work as consultants, primarily in New England schools, and also for the New York City-based nonprofit Student Achievement Partners, whose founding partners co-led the writing of the English/language arts common standards.
Ms. Leddy's and Ms. Hawkins' method reinterprets a tenet that has been central to many in literacy instruction.
"It's been an axiom that children should write about what they know," Ms. Leddy said. "That can mean writing from personal experience. But our interpretation is that we can help them know something, and that opens up a lot of areas for them."
A memoir, a speech at a memorial service, and a college essay all offer testament to the need to know how to write from personal experience, said Ms. Hawkins. But "it's a tremendous missed opportunity if all a kid writes about is what he knows."
Accordingly, when Ms. Leddy teaches The Lorax, she walks through the text repeatedly with students, discussing it from a different angle each time. When they're through, students learn to write short "hand paragraphs," with the thumb as the topic sentence-the Lorax cares for the Earth-followed by three examples of how he does that and a "pinky sentence" restating the interpretation.
Catherine Snow, a literacy expert and professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Mass., welcomes the shift to text-based writing, saying that personal narrative has been overemphasized in most language arts classrooms.
But the risk in focusing writing exclusively on text, she said, is that many students will not be interested enough in the reading to analyze it. The text-based skills can be taught, though, through topics and texts carefully chosen to engage students, Ms. Snow said.
In a Harvard project being developed in several districts in Maryland and Massachusetts, 4th through 7th graders tackle topics that fire them up, such as whether Tater Tots should be served in the cafeteria, Ms. Snow said. Such questions drive them back to their readings to search for information they can use to build well-founded arguments, she said.
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New York NY/ Private School Goes All In With Tech
By Sophia Hollander
Wall Street Journal
November 18, 2012
Before enrolling at Avenues: The World School, a new for-profit academy in Chelsea, sixth-grader Isabelle Levent had little interest in technology. She wrote her short stories by hand or tapped them out on an Olivetti typewriter she got for her ninth birthday. When her mother bought a flat-screen television, she called it a waste of money.
Now, Isabelle submits homework online, films classes on her iPad to show her mother and no longer struggles under the weight of a book-laden backpack as she commutes from the Bay Ridge area of Brooklyn. Almost all her textbooks are digital.
"I thought it was actually pretty cool because usually you don't use technology in class," said Isabelle, an 11-year-old who attended Public School 104 last year. To avoid distraction, she added, "when I get home and start doing my homework, I try to start without my laptop."
Educators have experimented with technology for decades, starting with dusty computer carts shoved into corners in the 1970s, but perhaps no school in the nation has integrated digital tools into the classroom on the scale of Avenues, which opened in September.
Almost every aspect of Avenues involves cutting-edge technology, from audio-sensitive cameras on the walls intended to connect classrooms around the world to the replacement of most physical textbooks with multimedia versions accessible only on iPads (and frequently created by teachers).
All students at the nursery school to 12th grade school have access to iPads, but starting in fifth grade, all are equipped with an iPad and a MacBook Air-an approach that some experts called unprecedented and, perhaps, redundant.
There are 6,000 physical books at Avenues, but an additional 70,000 books, magazines and databases are available digitally, with plans to expand both collections. "Yes, there are students who love that physical book," said Alia Methven, director of library services. "but that instant access of the virtual books is very appealing."
The school has a technology and library staff of 10-some have teaching backgrounds and are tasked with helping teachers use digital tools.
Fusing technology into the classroom "was so baked into our DNA early on, it almost didn't rise to the level of decision," said Avenues CEO Chris Whittle. "If you're going to be a modern school, you're going to be advanced in this regard."
To be sure, Avenues may not be a model for cash-strapped school districts across the country. It raised $75 million from private donors before opening its doors and invested $2 million on technology infrastructure. The program's operating budget, not including salaries, is $1 million and is funded in part by an annual $2,000 fee charged to every family on top of the school's $39,750 tuition (the fee also covers lunch and other items).
Still, as even the poorest school districts start to experiment with high-tech gadgets, Avenues has become a willing laboratory to test ideas, approaches and the possibilities of global projects, administrators say. The results remain to be seen.
"If what we're doing is replacing a 50-cent notebook with a $700 notebook, that's probably not a good use," said Howard Pitler, incoming chief program officer for Midcontinent Research for Education and Learning, a nonprofit group.
He said he knew of no school offering iPads and laptops to students and called it likely "redundant."
But, he added, if technology is used to "extend the classroom beyond the walls of the classroom, it could be a game-changer."
That is precisely their intent, Avenues officials said, pointing to projects that have already connected their students with other schools to study weather patterns and cyber bullying. With plans to develop their own network of academies around the world, Avenues officials said the ability to share across cultures will only increase.
The most visible aspect of the technology program-equipping students with both an iPad and laptop-is essential, school officials said. Students naturally consume information on one device and process it through another, much like the traditional notebook and textbook setup. But this time, they offer spreadsheets, access to e-books and databases, cameras and video editing software.
"I think this is really going to be one of Avenues' claims to fame," said Emily Glickman, president of Abacus Guide Educational Consulting, which guides parents through private-school admissions.
Avenues officials said they viewed the school as a training ground for Internet use in college and beyond-and part of that is teaching students how to wield that freedom wisely.
- Each middle school student takes a yearlong class in digital citizenship. The idea isn't to bust students for playing prohibited video games but to teach them responsible online behavior.
- For that reason, few websites are blocked, but usage is monitored. Emails aren't regularly checked although officials reserve the right to do so.
Students can download pictures and music onto their computers-and decorate them as they see fit. But if the memory maxes out, the personal items must be the first to go. The laptops and tablets are replaced every two years.
Instead of battling with students for control of the classroom screens, administrators try to take a different tack. "Why don't you create something really cool for the screens, and we'll put it up," said Dirk DeLo, the school's chief technology officer.
There have been some snafus. A fifth grade student, for instance, attempted to download games onto his iPad, only to accidentally lock out the entire grade when he added a new password.
"It was a teachable moment," Mr. DeLo said.
Students are encouraged to experiment. Isabelle Levent recently shot and edited a video about superstorm Sandy that was deemed among the best in the school. She taught herself the technology to slice it together.
Books are still piled around Isabelle's room. But her Olivetti typewriter is now packed away in its case.
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