Estancia/ School Board Puts $4.1 Million Bond on February Ballot
By Mike Bush
Mountain View Telegraph
November 15, 2012
The Estancia Board of Education this week decided unanimously to place a $4.1 million bond issue on the ballot in February, money that - if approved - would go to building a new middle school.
The board members considered setting the amount at $3 million instead of the higher number, but in the end decided $3 million might not be enough to complete the project.
"I'd rather have it and not need it, than need it and not have it," Board Chairman Randol Riley told his colleagues.
The election is set for Feb. 5. If voters give their OK, Estancia Municipal Schools can begin selling $3 million in bonds right away. The balance, $1.1 million, would be issued over the following three years.
- Plans for the new structure, which is expected to cost $5.5 million, are well underway, with construction set to begin in June 2013.
- If all goes as planned, it will be completed in time for the fall 2015 semester.
- Demolition work will be completed before the new school year starts in August 2013.
"We're trying to keep inconvenience to a minimum," said Ovidiu Viorica, a state schools official working with the architects.
Construction funds from the state are critical to the project and are contingent on the success of the bond election, according to John D. Archuleta, senior vice president and manager of George K. Baum & Co., an investment banking house headquartered in Albuquerque.
The Albuquerque-based architectural firm, Fanning Bard Tatum, has come up with several potential designs in an evolving process. Representatives of the firm presented the latest plans to school district officials at an informal meeting Tuesday before the Board's regular meeting began.
The firm is working closely with the New Mexico Public School Facilities Authority, according Viorica.
Except for the spring 2014 semester, plans call for the gym to remain open during construction.
The new school will be 7,320 square feet smaller than the existing one, but the space will be used more efficiently, according to both the architects and Viorica.
The old school was built in 1954, with an addition completed in 1994.
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ABQ/ APS Looks at Health Benefits
By Hailey Heinz
ABQ Journal Staff Writer
November 20, 2012
Albuquerque Public Schools must provide insurance benefits to about 50 substitute teachers who clock the most hours, under a provision of national health care reform.
The district may also have to contend with more employee dependents moving onto the APS plan if other employers in the Albuquerque area cut back on benefits.
Aaron Wells, who consults with APS for insurance broker Willis, gave a presentation Monday morning to the school board's finance committee about health care reform's potential impacts on the district. Wells said he thinks dependents moving onto the APS plan will be the biggest effect.
- "What I'm afraid the bigger impact to APS is going to be is the decisions that other employers make regarding the health care coverage that they offer and the way they fund it, and the potential for a huge migration of people to come back to your plan," Wells said. "You could pick up, in 2014, a whole bunch of dependents because other Albuquerque employers are cutting back. And what you would have then is a very attractive health plan."
- Wells said he sees the potential for APS to add 1,000 dependents to its plan, which could be costly for the district. Although those dependents would pay into the plan, APS would still be covering an average of 65 percent of their costs.
- Another impact for APS is a provision of health care reform that requires employers to provide coverage to employees who work 30 hours per week or more. This is significant for APS because the district currently doesn't provide insurance for substitute teachers. However, Wells said this will likely only affect the 50 or so substitutes who work the most hours.
The law allows the district to look at the average number of hours employees worked over a time period ranging from three months to a year.
- Wells said if APS decides to look at substitute teachers' hours over a full year, including the summer months, about 50 would be eligible for coverage.
- But if the district measured hours over a nine-month school year, it would be obliged to provide coverage to roughly 500 substitutes.
The board also received an update about the health status of its employees, based on screenings and surveys that have been done over the past few years.
- The highest risks for APS employees are all related to weight control and nutrition, with 51.4 percent of employees at high risk for diabetes.
- The screenings also found that 30.6 percent of APS employees are obese, compared to the national average of 25.9 percent.
Board member Lorenzo Garcia said he would like to see APS focus on helping its employees improve their health.
"I just think that there is an opportunity here for us to have a health promotion strategy for our district employees that values them, and communicates that we're interested in longevity, both in terms of life and working longevity," Garcia said. "I think their attitudes can be bettered if they see themselves making gains."
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Las Cruces/ The Bridge: Resigning Leader Tracey Bryan Built Legacy of Education Partnerships
By James Staley
Las Cruces Sun-News
November 19, 2012
Many prominent local figures in education and business aren't ready to see Tracey Bryan leave.
Bryan announced Monday she is resigning her post as the president and CEO of The Bridge of Southern New Mexico, a nonprofit organization that pushes to improve the area workforce through education and business initiatives.
Bryan, who came to The Bridge in 2010, and her husband are moving to the Washington, D.C. area in January because he received a promotion there.
"The committee's decided not to let her go," joked Garrey Carruthers, dean of New Mexico State University's business college. "We haven't told her or her husband yet."
Carruthers, the former governor, is not part of The Bridge's 19-member board, but he has served as a facilitator, ensuring that its processes run smoothly.
He is a self-described "great admirer" of Bryan.
"It's not often you see a person come into an organization that's struggling and make as many contributions in such a short time," he said.
Formed in 2009, The Bridge emerged from a cooperative effort between multiple education and business leaders with the mission of lowering Doņa Ana County high school dropout rates, which can influence the area's whole economy.
Las Cruces Public Schools Superintendent Stan Rounds, who is also president of The Bridge, said graduation rate has improved from "between 58 and 61" percent to 73 percent at LCPS since 2007.
- Perhaps the most notable achievement of The Bridge in Bryan's tenure has been the opening of the state's first two "early college high schools," Arrowhead Park and Chaparral.
- They are an amalgam of traditional high school and community college courses which allow students to graduate with a diploma and an associate's degree.
- Another is in the works, which will focus on careers in the medical field, an area in high demand locally.
Rounds said work for that new school won't fall to Bryan's replacement. He said much of the planning is done, and even staffing is set.
"She helped mature the organization," Rounds said of Bryan. "(Her replacement) will take it from this point and move it forward."
Rounds said The Bridge's four-person executive committee will interview the applicants for the position.
Bryan said she plans to stay in town through mid-January in order to help the transition.
"If we can identify the right person, we want them as soon as possible," she said.
Bryan said she and her husband have "deeply loved" Las Cruces. She also praised the board at The Bridge.
- "This county is leading the state in connecting the dots and building strong pathways between education, workforce development and economic development," she said. "The lessons we learn here will change the county, the state, and perhaps even the country."
The hope is that the transition is seamless.
Said Doņa Ana Community College President Dr. Margie Huerta in a statement: "The college looks forward to continuing supporting the vision of The Bridge to ensure all students in Doņa Ana County graduate with skills to compete in an international workforce."
Rounds said he is hoping for somebody with a nonprofit background who is a "good community fit."
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ABQ/ EDITORIAL: Price Should Matter When the Public Pays
ABQ Journal
November 20, 2012
There's an old saying equating low prices with poor quality that "you get what you pay for." There's another regarding high prices and average quality about being "taken to the cleaners."
Albuquerque Public Schools officials and board members should ensure neither is happening when it comes to taxpayers' investment in capital projects.
Those projects add up to hundreds of millions of public dollars annually. In fact, APS has a $368 million bond and property-tax proposal headed to voters Feb. 5.
So it's not surprising that the recent revelation APS went with the high bid for a new classroom building at Sandia High School - a bid $1 million above the lowest - is raising eyebrows.
Nobody wants APS to be lured via low-ball bids that leave district crews repairing what the public paid for (a $50,000 repair after a sewer line was connected to a cafeteria grease trap at Hoover Middle School). And nobody wants taxpayers routinely paying millions more than the agreed on price because of change orders (of course there can be disputes over which party is responsible for those).
But nobody should want APS not to pursue the best deal from a price standpoint, either.
The Sandia contract, for $14.16 million, is supposed to cover a new science and math building, library, band and ROTC practice field and life sciences greenhouse. It went to HB Construction of Albuquerque.
The lowest bid, $13.03 million, came from Gerald Martin construction.
APS Chief Operations Officer Brad Winter says HB got the highest ranking under a system known as Qualification Based Selection, which factors in things including a company's past performance, health and safety record and project management plan. Four other bids fell in between the Sandia high and low bids.
Unfortunately for future prospects, the other losers are a who's who of Albuquerque contractors, easily recognizable names that have done lots of big jobs. It's troubling to think that list isn't qualified to do APS work. And not only does the system not leave much of a door open for contractors that have never worked for APS, it gives price just 40 percent weight.
Under that formula APS taxpayers ended up with the bid $1 million above the lowest, $500,000 above the second-lowest, $200,000 above the second-highest.
That doesn't easily square with asking voters for more of their hard-earned cash. APS board member David Robbins says "we're telling the public we need these monies, and we don't take the second- or third-lowest bid, we take the highest bid. My concern is, how good are we in managing people's money?"
Winter says the system has delivered higher-quality projects, but he would consider increasing the weight given to price. That should happen. Reversing it to 60-40 might make sense. Because just as important as weeding out poorer performers is considering the real bottom line.
Taxpayers should have confidence that when they spend more, they are getting what they paid for.
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Washington DC/ US Department of Education Releases Early Snapshot of School Improvement Grants Data
U.S. Department of Education [Ed.gov]
November 19, 2012
The U.S. Department of Education today released an early snapshot of student performance data at schools that have received federal School Improvement Grants (SIG) program funds, a key component of the Department's blueprint for helping states and districts turn around the nation's lowest-performing schools.
Under the Obama Administration, the SIG program has invested up to $2 million per school at more than 1300 of the country's lowest-performing schools.
The data released today provides the first overview of performance for the first cohort of schools after one year of implementing SIG. The data begins in the 2009-2010 school year and ends in the 2010-2011 school year, the first year schools received SIG funds.
In three main areas, these early findings show positive momentum and progress in many SIG schools;
- Schools receiving SIG grants are improving. The first year of data show that two thirds of schools showed gains in math. And two thirds of schools showed gains in reading.
- A larger percentage of elementary schools showed gains than did secondary schools, suggesting that it is easier to improve student performance at a young age than to intervene later. Seventy percent of elementary schools showed gains in math, and seventy percent showed gains in reading, a higher percentage of improving schools than was found in middle or high schools.
- Some of the greatest gains have been in small towns and rural communities.
Another third of SIG schools had declines in achievement, a not surprising finding given the steep institutional challenges that these schools face.
"There's dramatic change happening in these schools, and in the long-term process of turning around the nation's lowest-performing schools, one year of test scores only tells a small piece of the story," said Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. "But what's clear already is that almost without exception, schools moving in the right direction have two things in common; a dynamic principal with a clear vision for establishing a culture of high expectations, and talented teachers who share that vision, with a relentless commitment to improving instruction."
The SIG snapshot focuses on proficiency rate changes in the first year of SIG implementation, from 2009-10 to 2010-2011 in SIG-awarded Tier I and Tier II schools. It covers just over 730 (approximately 90 percent) of the 831 SIG-awarded Tier I/II schools in the program's first cohort. Not included were fall-testing states and the very small number of closed schools.
Because this snapshot covers only a single year of SIG implementation, and because many factors contribute to student proficiency rates, it is too early to establish a causal connection between SIG funds and school performance.
- The Institute for Education Sciences is conducting a long-term, gold-standard evaluation of the SIG program with student-level longitudinal data that will also compare to similarly situated schools that did not receive SIG funds.
- Moreover, at least one rigorous study, by Professor Thomas Dee at Stanford University, already found positive results in SIG schools as compared to similarly situated schools that did not receive SIG funds.
As a part of the Department's transparency efforts, it is making available three years of state assessment data on all schools in the country through restricted-use files for research purposes. These files will include data for the 2008-2009, 2009-2010, and 2010-2011 school years broken down by subgroups.
In January, the Department plans to publicly release all school-level assessment data, including state-by-state SIG assessment data, once protections to ensure privacy of students are finalized and put in place. This public file will be posted on the Department's website. The Department is also collecting data on other leading indicators that will give a more complete picture of performance in SIG schools, like student attendance, teacher attendance, and enrollment in advanced courses; it intends to publish that data early in 2013.
In the meantime, the Department is encouraging states to improve transparency by making as much data publicly available as possible in order to shine a spotlight on school performance, and to target additional support to schools that aren't demonstrating success and hold these schools accountable for making progress. Federal resources that can help states improve transparency include the Privacy Technical Assistance Center and the National Forum on Education Statistics.
To determine if you are eligible to access the files and for more information on the process, please visit http://nces.ed.gov/statprog. Key data findings are attached.
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Washington DC/ US Department of Education Analysis Paints Mixed Picture of SIG Program
By Alyson Klein
Education Week [Edweek.org]
November 19, 2012
- Two-thirds of chronically underperforming schools that tapped into a big new infusion of cash under the federal School Improvement Grant program made gains in math or reading, but
- another third saw student achievement decline in their first academic year, according to an analysis by the U.S. Department of Education [http://www.edweek.org/media/sig_data_presentation.pdf].
A quarter, or slightly more, of the schools in the program had seen their student progress slip before they got the grant, then saw gains after they received SIG funding, the analysis found.
But slightly more than a quarter of the schools in the program already were beginning to show improvement before they got SIG dollars-only to see student achievement dip afterwards.
Over all, the analysis paints a mixed picture of the first year of the supercharged SIG program, which received $3 billion under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the largest federal investment in school turnaround in history. The program, which requires schools to take dramatic steps such as closing schools, removing staff, and extending the school day, has been the subject of significant controversy, all the way from district central offices to Capitol Hill.
Upon releasing portions of the analysis late last week, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan cautioned against reading too much into the data, which only covers the changes in student achievement from the 2009-10 to the 2010-11 school year. That represents the first year of the new version of the program, which, in addition to the infusion of federal stimulus money, calls for schools to use one of four controversial school improvement models. SIG grants cover three academic years.
- "I think it's way, way too early to draw any conclusions," Duncan said in an interview. He spoke publicly about the data Friday in a speech to the Council of Chief State School Officers, who were meeting in Savannah, Ga. "We're in this for the long haul. One year of gains isn't success. One year of declines isn't failure."
But during this year's election campaign, President Barack Obama cited the achievement gains under the school turnaround program in his debates with Mitt Romney, his GOP opponent, telling the voters that "schools that were having a terrible time" were "finally starting to make progress."
Looking at the Data
Elementary schools generally did better than middle and high schools, the analysis found. (High schools make up a significant chunk of the program's first cohort.)
Rural schools-which some policymakers cautioned would not be able to implement the stringent turnaround models required by the program-performed about as well as their suburban and urban counterparts.
Here's a more detailed breakdown of what the department found:
- Out of 731 schools that received funding in the first year of the program, 25 percent posted double-digit gains in math, and 15 percent posted double-digit gains in reading. Forty percent posted single-digit gains in math, and 49 percent posted single-digit gains in reading. Twenty-eight percent saw a single-digit dip in math, 29 percent in reading. Another 6 percent saw a double-digit decline in math, 8 percent in reading.
- In some cases, schools that got SIG money were already on a path to improvement, but fell off once they got the grant. Twenty-six percent of schools in the program were on a trajectory to improve their math scores, but declined once they entered the SIG program, while 28 percent of schools where math scores had been slipping began to show improvement after getting the grant. In reading, 28 percent of schools that had been showing gains before SIG actually lost ground once they got the grant. A smaller percentage of schools, 25 percent, had been showing sluggish improvement in reading before the grant and began to improve once they got the funding.
- Elementary schools were more likely to see double-digit growth and less likely to see declines in achievement, particularly in reading. Twenty percent of elementary schools posted double-digit gains in the subject, compared with 6 percent of middle schools, and 15 percent of high schools.
- Rural schools, in the department's view, did about as well as their urban and suburban counterparts. For instance, 19 percent of rural schools posted double-digit gains in reading achievement, compared with 15 percent of urban schools, 14 percent of suburban schools, and 15 percent of schools in towns.
Left Unanswered
While the analysis paints a broad-strokes portrait of overall student achievement, it leaves unanswered some major questions. For one thing, the data isn't broken out by which schools used which of the four improvement models, so it's tough to say which model is most effective.
The data also doesn't include graduation rates, or any information on discipline and school climate-two important indicators of school turnaround. Duncan said in an interview he was particularly interested in seeing that data.
And it doesn't include a breakdown of which states made the best use of the program-states took radically different approaches to distributing the funds, as this report by the Center for American Progress found.
The department is aiming to release more complete data in January. (Right now, researchers are "scrubbing it" to make sure nothing can be traced back to individual students.)
Implications for Policy
The data tracks closely with what Terry Holliday, the education commissioner in Kentucky, is seeing in his home state. He said he's witnessed gains in about two- thirds of his schools, especially where there is a strong building leader.
But he added, "We just have some schools that aren't making the move." He said in those schools, the state may have to take more aggressive action, such as taking over more site councils, which have a lot of authority over school decisions.
The SIG program is on shaky footing on Capitol Hill. Some Senate Democrats have supported allowing states to come up with their own turnaround remedies. And House Republicans have tried more than once to eliminate the program. It's unclear how-or whether-the department's analysis will impact those discussions, particularly as some lawmakers look to trim spending in the wake of discussions over the looming fiscal cliff. (For more on the cliff, see this story.)
U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, the chairman of the panels that oversee K-12 funding and policy, has fought to preserve SIG's funding, even as he pushed for adding additional models to its menu of options.
- "This data is an important preliminary assessment of the first full year of implementation," he said in a statement in response to my queries about the data. "While it shows the effectiveness of the models for some schools, it also presents an opportunity to dig deeper into what is happening in SIG schools, and to explore other possible models that may address the needs of all students."
Analysts, Researchers Split
Researchers and analysts who have studied SIG and turnarounds offered radically different interpretations of what the early results might mean when it comes to the program's effectiveness.
Diane Stark Rentner, the deputy director of the Center on Education Policy, in Washington, said the data looked rosier than she expected.
- "I'm surprised that the numbers were so positive. I would have thought we'd see more stagnation," she said. "What we found in our research was that schools were focusing on climate" in the first year of the program and saving their "achievement-focused efforts for the second and third year."
SIG schools have gone through "a lot of turmoil and churn," including finding new principals and teachers, she noted. While those steps can lead to achievement gains down the road, they might have an impact on initial data.
But Andrew Smarick, a partner at Bellwether Education in Washington, who has written about school turnarounds, called the data "heartbreaking."
- "We spent several billion dollars, and more than a third of schools went backward," said Smarick, who recently was the deputy commissioner in the New Jersey Department of Education, and served in the federal Education Department under President George W. Bush.
Smarick said that, in his experience, schools are most likely to post gains in the beginning years of a turnaround. The trouble, he said, is sustaining the turnaround. If schools in the program "couldn't even see a bump in year one, what is that going to tell us about future years? This just shows hope is not a strategy."
And Robin Lake, the director of the Center of Reinventing Public Education, at the University of Washington in Seattle, said it's pretty tough to tell if SIG schools are living up to the program's promises because the department never laid out a clear vision for what success should look like.
- "They've talked about bold, dramatic change, but never really defined it," she said. It's unclear, she said, whether schools will be able to sustain the gains they've made after the first year of the program. Policymakers should think carefully about whether the SIG models are the best use of scarce federal funding for improving schools, she added.
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New York NY/ College of Future Could Be Come One, Come All
By Tamar Lewin
New York Times
November 19, 2012
Teaching Introduction to Sociology is almost second nature to Mitchell Duneier, a professor at Princeton: he has taught it 30 times, and a textbook he co-wrote is in its eighth edition. But last summer, as he transformed the class into a free online course, he had to grapple with some brand-new questions: Where should he focus his gaze while a camera recorded the lectures? How could the 40,000 students who enrolled online share their ideas? And how would he know what they were learning?
In many ways, the arc of Professor Duneier's evolution, from professor in a lecture hall to online instructor of tens of thousands, reflects a larger movement, one with the potential to transform higher education. Already, a handful of companies are offering elite college-level instruction - once available to only a select few, on campus, at great cost - free, to anyone with an Internet connection.
Moreover, these massive open online courses, or MOOCs, harness the power of their huge enrollments to teach in new ways, applying crowd-sourcing technology to discussion forums and grading and enabling professors to use online lectures and reserve on-campus class time for interaction with students.
The spread of MOOCs is likely to have wide fallout. Lower-tier colleges, already facing resistance over high tuition, may have trouble convincing students that their courses are worth the price. And some experts voice reservations about how online learning can be assessed and warn of the potential for cheating.
MOOCs first landed in the spotlight last year, when Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford professor, offered a free artificial-intelligence course, attracting 160,000 students in 190 nations. The resulting storm of publicity galvanized elite research universities across the country to begin to open higher education to everyone - with the hope of perhaps, eventually, making money doing so.
The expansion has been dizzying. Millions of students are now enrolled in hundreds of online courses, including those offered by Udacity, Mr. Thrun's spinoff company; edX, a joint venture of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Coursera, a Stanford spinoff that is offering Professor Duneier's course and 200 others.
No one knows just how these massive courses will evolve, but their appeal to a broad audience is unquestioned: retirees in Indiana see them as a route to lifelong learning, students in India as their only lifeline to college-level work.
The professors involved face new challenges. "It was really intimidating at the beginning to do these lectures with no live audience, no sense of who was listening and how they were reacting," Professor Duneier said. "I talk about things like racial differences in I.Q., Abu Ghraib and public bathrooms, and I worried that my lectures might come across as examples of American ethnocentrism."
Feedback came quickly. When his first lecture went online, students wrote hundreds, then thousands, of comments and questions in online discussion forums - far too many for Professor Duneier to keep up with. But crowd-sourcing technology helped: every student reading the forum could vote questions and comments up or down, allowing him to spot important topics and tailor his lectures to respond.
Bigger Audiences
Top universities with courses like Professor Duneier's stand to gain, both in prestige and in their ability to refine their pedagogy; few seem worried about diluting their brand-name appeal. The risks are greater for lesser colleges, which may be tempted to drop some of their own introductory courses - and some professors who teach them - and substitute cheaper online instruction from big-name professors.
"We've reached the tipping point where every major university is thinking about what they will do online," said Peter McPherson, the president of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities. "In a way, the most important thing about these MOOCs from the top universities is that they provide cover, so other universities don't need to apologize about putting courses online."
In the rush to keep up, elite universities are lining up to join forces with a MOOC provider. Coursera, which began with Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford and the University of Michigan in April, currently leads the field with 33 university partners. But edX, too, is expanding rapidly - the University of California, Berkeley, has joined, and the University of Texas announced that it would use edX courses for credit. Already, students in one Udacity class can get credit through the Global Campus of Colorado State University. Most MOOC providers are making plans to offer credit - and charge fees for certificates and proctored exams.
This crowd-sourced version of college is seeping into every corner of academia. While the earliest MOOCs were concentrated in computer science and engineering - subjects suited to computer grading - Professor Duneier is one of the pioneers offering humanities courses, in which the whole grading process, from essays to exams, is handled by the students using grading criteria designed by the professor.
There are courses on modern American poetry (Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, is a student), health care policy and the Affordable Care Act (taught by Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a former health adviser to the Office of Management and Budget) and Introduction to Improvisation.
Professors delight in reaching more students in one course than they could otherwise teach in a lifetime. Dr. Ezekiel shows off a postcard from a student in Sri Lanka. Al Filreis, the poetry professor, tells of an 81-year-old Greek shut-in who got 180 responses to his essay on Emily Dickinson. There are stories of elderly students doing homework together at their assisted-living facility and Capitol Hill staff members taking the health policy course.
'The Wild West'
Professor Duneier has been thrilled. "Within three weeks, I had more feedback on my sociological ideas than I'd had in my whole teaching career," he said. "I found that there's no topic so sensitive that it can't be discussed, civilly, in an international community."
The online discussion forum spawned many global exchanges. Soon after Professor Duneier talked about social norms, using as his example the lack of public restrooms for street vendors - including an embedded video of New York vendors - students in Hong Kong, India, Russia and elsewhere commented on the situation in their own cities.
Meanwhile, around the world, study groups were forming. In Katmandu, Nepal, Dipendra K.C., who is 22, connected with four older classmates, meeting in person to prepare for the midterm and final. "We were looking at the lectures and the discussion forum and pointing out topics the professor was highlighting, to try to predict the questions on the exam," he said.
To create the feel of a Princeton seminar, Professor Duneier used a video chat room in which six or eight students - Dipendra was one, and others came from Siberia or Iran or Princeton - discussed the readings; other students, over the course of the week, could replay the video and comment.
For Doug MacKenzie, 34, a Philadelphia firefighter who was part of the seminar, the video chats with far-flung classmates were the highlight. "I was just thinking, this is really neat, to be able to talk to someone in Siberia," he said. "This class opened my eyes a little about how my parents raised me and why I behave in a certain way."
The price tag - zero - was crucial. "I've always wanted to go into a degree program, but the problem is that I don't have the money," said Mr. MacKenzie, who has taken four MOOCs.
Most MOOCs package their lessons in short segments, with embedded quiz questions to keep the viewer engaged, and provide instant feedback. But the approach is still experimental - especially in the humanities.
"This is still brand new," Professor Duneier said. "It's still the Wild West."
And while there is a belief that students learn from assessing their classmates' work, no one knows how well the process works. The concept is simple: each student must score the work of five classmates to get their own score, the average of what their peers gave them. But the reality is trickier. What if students do not take scoring seriously? What if the rubric is unclear? Do peer assessments match the scores the professor would have given?
To find some answers, Professor Duneier and his assistants have painstakingly graded thousands of midterms and finals, comparing their scores with the peer graders'. When he saw the first batch of midterms, he realized that some students had provided unexpected responses that would not have earned many points on his planned rubric, despite their clearly understanding the material. So he tweaked the rubric, allowing for extra "makeup" points on some questions. But the computer tallied the regular and makeup points together, giving some students more total points than the exam was worth.
"I had to announce to the students that some had gotten scores that were higher than they should have been," he said. "And as data, the midterm scores are useless. But it helped us learn more about writing rubrics."
Testing, Testing
Now, months after the course ended, he and his assistants are hand-scoring the final exams, checking the scores they assign (he avoids the word "grades") against those given by students. So far, he has found an impressive correlation of 0.88. The average peer score was 16.94 of 24 possible points, compared with an average teaching-staff score of 15.64. Peer graders give more accurate scores on good exams than bad ones, they found, and the lower the score, the more variance among graders.
As with other MOOCs, less than 5 percent of those who enrolled in the sociology course completed it: 2,200 midterm exams and 1,283 final exams were submitted. Some students listened to all the lectures and did all the readings but did not take exams. There was no practical reason to take the exams, since Princeton - unlike Udacity, edX or other universities working with Coursera - does not give certificates of completion.
"I wouldn't be comfortable giving any kind of certificate until we know more about how it's working," Professor Duneier said.
Christopher L. Eisgruber, Princeton's provost, said that while his university's first four MOOCs were going well, he had no plans to offer credentials.
"Our primary goal in doing this is to find ways to improve education on our own campus, to take the passive experience of students scribbling notes while a professor talks, and have some lectures they can watch, to free up classroom time for more interactive activities," he said. "It's terrific that we can put information online for people to share, but we don't want to mislead them into thinking it's the same as a Princeton course."
In hand-grading the midterm, Professor Duneier and his assistants found that about 3 percent of the students had plagiarized from Wikipedia, lecture notes or other sources - and that two students with the same last name submitted identical answers. (Even with thousands of exams, plagiarism was noticeable, since one person scored all responses to a particular question.)
So right before the final, Professor Duneier detailed the rules for a closed-book exam, realizing that international students might not share American concepts of plagiarism. As he recalled his instructions, it was clear how close he felt to this online class, these students he has never met.
"I said, 'Don't use your notes, don't Google, don't ask your wife,' " he said. "When I said, 'Don't ask your wife,' I pictured this couple, or maybe brother and sister, who had submitted identical papers, and I imagined them watching and being surprised, like, 'Hey, the professor's talking to us.' "
And on the final, the hand-scorers have not yet detected a single example of plagiarism.
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Washington DC/ OPINION: What Happened to Magnet Schools?
By Walt Gardner [Gardner taught for 28 years in the Los Angeles Unified School District and was a lecturer in the UCLA Graduate School of Education]
Education Week [Edweek.org]
November 14, 2012
Once considered the most promising way to voluntarily integrate schools while at the same time provide a challenging curriculum, magnet schools have since been eclipsed in popularity by charter schools.
What is taking place in Los Angeles is a case in point.
- Although magnet schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District have been in existence since 1977, they have not been able to keep pace with the growth in charter schools since 1993 when they first started.
- At present, there are 197 charters, enrolling about 110,000 students-far more than any other district in the nation.
- This compares with 173 magnets, enrolling a little over 59,000 students.
Despite the number of magnet programs, 27 are under-enrolled, while others have long waiting lists ("More than 2 dozen L.A. Unified magnet schools are under-enrolled," Los Angeles Times, Oct. 23). The most likely explanation for the disparity among magnets is the location of the school and its offering.
In the case of the LAUSD, it's also about the rules that involve a complicated point system and racial quotas. Parents can't assume that applying guarantees acceptance. To address their concern, the district recently changed its policy to allow parents to choose up to three magnet programs in the hope that by doing so their children's chances of being accepted will improve.
It's this disconnect between supply and demand that is given too little attention in the parental choice debate. Opening new schools-whether charters or magnets-is not like opening a new branch of a business. It's always expensive because there are no economies of scale in education. Retrofitting old schools that have been closed, or buying/leasing new space are costly, no matter how often the process is repeated. That's because in both cases new teachers who possess the necessary qualifications have to be hired, and schools by their very nature are labor-intensive.
Although both magnet schools and charter schools offer a choice to parents who believe that traditional public schools do not meet their children's needs and interests, there is one major difference between the two.
- Charter schools operate outside most Education Code requirements and board of education rules. As a result, they possess far more flexibility in hiring and in innovation.
- On the other hand, magnet schools usually provide transportation, while most charter schools do not. This may not seem significant in the overall scheme of things, but in sprawling cities like Los Angeles it is a major consideration.
I hope more magnet schools will open across the country because I think they represent the best of both worlds.
They are public schools with unionized teachers, but they offer a focus on a specialized aspect of the curriculum. At the same time, however, I urge caution in expectations. In 1985, for example, a federal district court judge ordered Missouri to fund magnet schools in the Kansas City Public Schools to reverse white flight. Nevertheless, despite a tripling of the budget, magnet school test scores did not improve, and the black-white achievement gap did not narrow.