• Santa Fe/ Maternity Leave for High School Students? 
• ABQ/ ACLU Proposes Teen Maternity Leave in New Mexico 
• Santa Fe/ SFPS School Board Seeks Consistent Calendar 
• ABQ/ EDITORIAL: Student Interest Should Be the Common Core 
• Santa Fe/ OPINION: All-Online K-12 Needed in NM 

NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL NEWS

 Santa Fe/ Maternity Leave for High School Students?

 

By Deborah Ziff

ABQ Journal Staff Writer

November 21, 2012  

 

The state Legislature may take up a bill in the next session to allow teens to take maternity leave from school, said the chairman of a legislative committee on education.

 

Currently, New Mexico does not have a statewide policy that gives leave to pregnant or parenting students.

 

A coalition of groups including the American Civil Liberties Union called for up to 10 days of maternity leave, in addition to 14 days in absences per semester for pregnant and parenting teens, in a presentation before the Legislative Education Study Committee last week.

• "I really feel, especially for young parents, that we need to take a closer look at how much and how long they should be gone with a child without having any drawback from their schooling," said Rep. Rick Miera, D-Albuquerque, who chairs the committee. "They definitely have to make it up, but should be given chance to do so."

New Mexico had the second highest teen birth rate in the country in 2010, with 53 births per 1,000 teenagers aged 15-19, compared with the national average of 34.2 births per 1,000 teens, according to the most recent numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

• In New Mexico, state law defines students as "habitually truant" if they have 10 or more unexcused absences in a school year. Students who are habitually truant must meet with school officials and may be referred to a school police officer.
• Students are considered "in need of early intervention" under the law after five unexcused absences, which triggers a school liaison to begin working with the student's family to identify causes of truancy and find solutions.

Rep. Dennis Roch, R-Texico, said he wants to make sure that students who get a high school diploma can fulfill the expectations of future employers.

• "I would have to make sure it strikes that balance," he said of the proposal. "That we're not watering down expectations, simply because someone has put themselves in a position where they may be unable to complete the requirements."

Elisiana Montoya, 19, got pregnant her sophomore year at West Mesa High School. When her daughter, Evelytte, was born three months early, she had to miss school for her medical care.

 

"Having a premature baby, you have to miss a lot of days of school to be able to take care of your baby," she said. "To take her to all her appointments, to make sure she's on the right track for her developmental care."

 

Montoya said she had to drop a few classes her junior year while her daughter had frequent appointments for a variety of conditions associated with the premature birth. She found herself short of credits after her senior year and had to take classes from an online school over the summer to graduate. She's now a student at Central New Mexico Community College.

 

Albuquerque Public Schools offers students the option of attending New Futures, a school for pregnant and parenting teens, which has more generous attendance policies.

• New Futures students are given two weeks of maternity leave after a baby is born, and are given two weeks after that to make up their coursework.
• After that, students are allowed up to nine absences per nine-week quarter for appointments and other parenting obligations.

Other Albuquerque public high schools do not offer maternity leave.

 

Micaela Cadena, campaign coordinator for Young Women United, one of the groups involved in the effort, said schools around the state have adopted diverse absence and leave policies for pregnant and parenting teens, which are arbitrarily enforced.

• "It's especially important that pregnant and parenting students are able to finish education, so their families will have access to better paying jobs and financial stability," she said.

The only state that currently has an absence and leave policy for pregnant and parenting students is Massachusetts, according to Cadena.

 

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ABQ/ ACLU Proposes Teen Maternity Leave in New Mexico

 

The Associated Press

The New Mexican

November 20, 2012

 

The American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico is vowing to push for a new state law that would give pregnant teenagers maternity leave from school.

 

KRQE-TV reports the group plans to support the proposal in the next legislative session this January.

• Under the plan, pregnant and parenting students, boys and girls, would get up to 14 days of absences a semester.
• Currently, students typically get up to 10 days of excused absences per semester.
• Another part of the proposal would give new teen moms an additional 10 days of maternity leave.

Alexandra Smith, a staff attorney with ACLU of New Mexico, said the time would allow mothers to bond with children and recover from births.

 

"Pregnant and parenting students have more need to go to the doctor more than normal students," Smith said.

 

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, New Mexico has one of the highest birth rates for teenagers between the ages of 15 to 19 in the nation.

• The state had a teen birth rate of 53 per 1,000 female teenagers in 2010, the agency said.
• The national average was 34.2 per 1,000, numbers showed.

Elisiana Montoya, 18, said she wished she had more time off after she had a baby when she was 15 years old. Because her daughter, Evelytte, was born three months early and suffered through some medical issues, Montoya said she saw her promising high school career suffer as her grades dropped.

 

"I was pretty much having a meltdown every single day," said Montoya, who eventually graduated from high school. "I was crying, saying that I wouldn't make it."

 

In Colorado, an attempt in 2008 to make maternity leave mandatory at Denver Public Schools met resistance from the national group Concerned Women for America. A group of teens was seeking changes that would allow maternity leave of four weeks before having to return to school.

 

But Concerned Women for America argued that extended teen maternity leave rewarded teens who get pregnant and promoted sex among teenagers.

 

ACLU New Mexico spokesman Micah McCoy said the ACLU of Massachusetts has suggested to school districts in that state to consider maternity leave for students but isn't pursuing a state law for changes.

 

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Santa Fe/ SFPS School Board Seeks Consistent Calendar

 

By T.S. Last

ABQ Journal Staff Writer

November 21, 2012 

 

The debate over when Santa Fe Public Schools begins its school year probably isn't over.

 

School board member Steven Carrillo brought the matter up again during discussion at Tuesday night's board meeting.

 

At an August meeting, Carrillo raised the issue and advocated for school to start after Labor Day, saying he thought it was "patently ridiculous" that Santa Fe schools started school on Aug. 15, especially in a town that relied so much on tourism.

 

Carrillo said the early start date shortens the tourism season and hurts the local economy. He said it inhibits local businesses that employ students because they lose a part of their work force just prior to Indian Market, one of the biggest weeks of the year in Santa Fe.

 

Carrillo also argued that the early date makes it hard on families in that it limits opportunities for them to take vacations.

 

At the time, board members Linda Trujillo and Barbara Gudwin spoke out against the idea, saying the later start would put students at a disadvantage for state-mandated student performance tests, the dates of which are set by the Public Education Department. Board member Glenn Wikle took a neutral stance and board President Frank Montaño suggested perhaps a compromise might be worked out.

 

On Tuesday, Carrillo reiterated some of his earlier arguments.

 

"There's a growing trend to start after Labor Day because more and more state legislatures are recognizing the economic benefits, when there's no value whatsoever to starting in the middle of August," he said.

 

Carrillo said school districts in other destination locations, such as White Sands and Carlsbad Caverns, would also benefit from later starts.

 

"We can be the trend setters in the capital city," he said, "and other parts of the state would benefit, too."

 

Carrillo urged the district to get started working on the calendar for the next school year early in 2013, so people can start planning their schedules.

 

Recalling the discussion back in August, Gudwin remarked that she felt the consensus was to start school the week after Indian Market. She said she would still be opposed to starting school after Labor Day.

 

The other board members also chimed in.

 

Trujillo said the dates set for student testing by PED were a big factor in determining the schedule. She said she would support a longer school year with longer breaks at Christmas and in the springtime and move toward a year-round calendar.

 

Wikle said maybe they should ask PED to set its calendar further in advance, so they knew what dates they'd have to plan around.

• "If PED is driving us into a one-year-at-a-time planning cycle, maybe we should push back and ask that they give us a five-year calendar," he said.

Consistency was the key issue for Montaño and others.

 

"We need to choose a calendar and stick to it," he said. "We keep going back and forth and back and forth. It needs to be more consistent."

 

Montaño said Albuquerque Public Schools seems to maintain a consistent schedule and he didn't see why Santa Fe couldn't do the same.

 

Earlier in the meeting, Amy Summa, the district's arts education coordinator, spoke on the topic during public forum. She said she came to the meeting when she saw discussion of the school calendar on the agenda and wanted to urge the board to come up with a calendar as soon as possible and make it "predictable and consistent." As a mother of two children, she said knowing the school schedule well in advance would help her, and others, for planning purposes.

 

As a discussion item, no action was taken.

 

In Santa Fe, a calendar committee works on outlining a schedule for the next two years and recommends a final version to the school board for approval.

 

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ABQ/ EDITORIAL: Student Interest Should Be the Common Core

 

ABQ Journal

November 21, 2012 

 

Kudos to the Common Core curriculum that this year will start incorporating the building blocks of learning across subjects.

 

And kudos to the teachers who did not buckle under misguided mandates to focus solely on reading and mathematics at the expense of science and social studies.

 

Stephanie DeBellis, who teaches kindergarten at Emerson Elementary School, says she "still taught science and social studies, but I had a lot of fear that I was doing something wrong." Under Common Core, science lessons like DeBellis' block on hatching chicks will be taught at every grade level, integrated into other standards.

 

Those are the kinds of lessons, as Albuquerque Teachers Federation President Ellen Bernstein says, that get students engaged with the world around them by providing something real to read about and something real to compute - from tracking a life cycle to estimating a due date.

 

It can't be done at the expense of proficiency in math and reading, but re-integrating science and social studies into the core subjects is what U.S. education - and thus the U.S. economy - need to restore global competitiveness.

 

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Santa Fe/ OPINION: All-Online K-12 Needed in NM

 

By Mark Boitano and Patrick Lopez  [Sen. Mark Boitano, an Albuquerque Republican, helped craft the 1999 Charter School Act. Patrick Lopez is the director at Explora and is a former public schoolteacher and administrator, Both are founding board members of New Mexico Connections Academy]

ABQ Journal

November 21, 2012

 

One size doesn't fit all. This is a key principle in public education reform and why charter schools - with their innovative approach to decision-making, scheduling, staffing, curriculum and filling in the gaps in traditional education - have energized students and parents in New Mexico.

 

Technology is revolutionizing our culture, including our educational system. Nationally, public virtual schools are utilizing technology to transform and personalize learning, improve academic performance and reduce dropout rates.

 

The New Mexico Public Education Commission recently shut the door on giving parents the option of the state's first K-12 statewide virtual school, New Mexico Connections Academy, despite support from a bipartisan group of commission members, including all those from Albuquerque, and a recommendation for the Public Education Department to approve the academy.

 

Our founding board recently voted to appeal the commission ruling to the secretary of Public Education because New Mexico Connections Academy is good for Albuquerque - where there is strong demand for a virtual school - and New Mexico. There are many profound gaps in public education. With state-certified teachers, actively engaged learning coaches, individualized learning programs, standards-aligned curriculum and the leading digital learning resources, New Mexico Connections Academy will fill those gaps and bring educational success to New Mexico students who, for a variety of reasons, have not thrived in a traditional classroom setting.

 

Here are four reasons why New Mexico Connections Academy should be authorized by the secretary:

• New Mexico's persistently disappointing educational outcomes require a new approach. Our state ranks 49th out of all the states in education, according to the 2012 Kids Count project from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Almost four in 10 students don't graduate, and that's unacceptable. By harnessing technology's ability to personalize education, we have a chance to reach students we're losing and restart many students' educational lives.
• New Mexico has a large, underserved student population that will benefit from this individualized educational program. Brick-and-mortar traditional and charter schools reach students only within their physical proximity, but a high-quality virtual school can leverage teachers and curriculum to meet the needs of students anywhere in our state. Many students who live in rural communities will gain an attractive new public education alternative. Our school will help meet the diversity of geographical and technological needs, linguistic structures and unique cultures that are valued in New Mexico.
• New Mexico families, educators and community leaders want fully online learning options. New Mexico families have shown a strong interest in our full-time virtual charter school. More than 3,200 New Mexico families independently reached out to NMCA to learn more about our proposed school.
• New Mexico lags behind the rest of the country. Keeping Pace with K-12 Online Learning/2011, the well-respected annual e-learning report, gave New Mexico low marks for the relative paucity of virtual learning opportunities available to our K-12 students.

There is a large body of education research demonstrating how technology is modernizing education and helping students achieve academic success by delivering engaging, student-centric learning.

 

The gaps in public education are getting wider and the demands for reform and results are stronger. Let's stop playing catch up and move quickly into the 21st century.

 

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Washington DC/ Literacy Instruction Expected to Cross Disciplines

 

By Erik W. Robelen

Education Week, Vol. 32, Issue 12 [Edweek.org]

November 20, 2012

 

The 4th graders in Mason A. Kuhn's classroom recently wrapped up an unusual assignment: Write a science-themed book and make the target audience not their teacher but 2nd graders at Shell Rock Elementary in northeastern Iowa.

 

One student wrote and illustrated a cartoon about a feline named Space Kat trying to figure out how to power up her rocket ship to get back home. Along the way, the story explored concepts such as gravity and friction.

 

At Lewis County High School in Vanceburg, Ky., science teacher Sara M. Poeppelman asks her chemistry students to closely read and analyze an essay Albert Einstein penned in 1946 for a popular science magazine.

 

The two science-related assignments dovetail with the call in the Common Core State Standards to teach literacy across the curriculum. The English/language arts standards adopted by all but four states specifically highlight the teaching of reading, writing, and other literacy objectives in science, history/social studies, and technical subjects.

 

Around the nation, education leaders are grappling with how best to help teachers and schools reflect this cross-disciplinary dimension.

• If not exactly a new idea, educators and experts say the standards offer a clear articulation of the notion-including detailed learning objectives-and may well spark an expanded and more deliberate emphasis in schools.
• In fact, the standards say students should read equal amounts of fiction and nonfiction "informational texts" in elementary school, and by high school, the balance should tip to 70 percent nonfiction.

In a sign that word is getting out, more than two-thirds of some 400 science teachers who replied to a recent online survey from the National Science Teachers Association said they're being asked by administrators to spend class time on the common core's objectives for reading in science.

 

Mr. Kuhn sees a natural nexus. "So much of science is reading and writing and communicating about what you discover," he said.

 

Kathleen A. Hogan, a social studies coordinator for the Lexington-Richland district, near Columbia, S.C., said she welcomes the attention in the common core to her discipline.

 

"We've been doing this all along if we were doing good social studies teaching," she said.

 

Last month, the South Carolina education department hosted a best-practices seminar on teaching literacy across the curriculum under the common core.

 

Lewis E. Huffman, an education associate for social studies at the state agency, said one challenge is helping to clarify "what's going to be expected and required" of social studies and ELA teachers, noting that he sees some misunderstanding among those who teach both subjects.

 

"If we can get more of that cross-fertilization between English/language arts and social studies teachers, this is going to be beneficial to both disciplines," he said.

 

But he admits it won't be easy, noting that, oftentimes, teachers in those disciplines don't collaborate. "It's going to require some sitting down and working together," he said.

 

Hundreds of Examples

The common standards for English/language arts espouse a vision of literacy instruction that involves virtually all teachers.

• "The standards insist that instruction in reading, writing, speaking, listening, and language be a shared responsibility within the school," the document says.
• In grades K-5, the literacy objectives across disciplines are embedded with the rest of the ELA expectations.
• But for grades 6-12, there's a special seven-page section, "Standards for Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects."

For example, it calls for students to compare and contrast treatment of a topic in several primary and secondary sources, and determine the meaning of symbols, key terms, and phrases as used in a scientific or technical context.

 

The standards document has an appendix with nearly 150 examples of informational texts, or "text exemplars," that might be used, organized by subject and grade level, such as Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address," Thomas Paine's "Common Sense," and an article, "Amusement Park Physics," from Scientific American. There's even an excerpt of federal guidelines for home insulation with a table of information.

 

Several educators praised the appendix as a valuable resource to help teachers get started.

 

Ms. Hogan from the Lexington-Richland district said that at a recent meeting of school department chairs in the social studies, "I pulled out all the exemplars that match the social studies standards." She wanted those attending to "have a whole list of the kinds of informational texts, the kinds of primary sources that the common core is expecting kids to have an opportunity to ... do a close read on," she said.

 

Under revisions to South Carolina's social studies standards finalized last year, Mr. Huffman said, one addition was a suggested set of social studies literacy skills, some of which were derived from the common core.

 

At the same time, a set of common science standards being developed by 26 states-in collaboration with educators and experts-are expected to reflect an emphasis on literacy goals.

 

A framework for the standards, crafted by a National Research Council panel, spotlights the issue and explicitly references the common core. "Reading, interpreting, and producing text are fundamental practices of science in particular," the NRC says, "and they constitute at least half of engineers' and scientists' total working time."

 

Science reading is often challenging for several reasons, the NRC says, including the use of unfamiliar "jargon," complex sentence structure, and different modes of representation, such as diagrams, charts, and symbols. From reading to writing, the NRC says, "every science or engineering lesson is in part a language lesson."

 

E=MC²

Several science education experts say they've encountered resistance from some secondary science teachers to the notion that it's also their job to teach reading and writing.

 

But Ms. Poeppelman, the Kentucky science teacher, said it's nothing new to her. Literacy, she explained, has long been viewed as a school-wide affair for her school and district.

 

"Even before the common-core standards, we had that mindset in our building," she said. "But now with the common-core standards," she added, teachers are taking it "up a notch."

 

One big change, she said, is that students are expected to tackle a higher level of text complexity than before. "You're basically bumping up things by two years in a lot of cases," she said.

 

That's what led her to introduce Einstein's article for Science Illustrated magazine, "E=MC²: The Most Urgent Problem of Our Time."

 

Using the text is "one of the best ways that we have found" to address content goals in a unit on nuclear chemistry, Ms. Poeppelman said, while also "incorporating and weaving in common-core-standards goals." In particular, she identified two reading standards, one on analyzing text structure, the other on author's purpose.

 

She typically spends four to five classroom periods on the article, which is read along with another piece published on the PBS website in 2005 about the legacy of E=MC².

 

To help students with the Einstein article, she engages the class in a close-reading approach that asks them to read one paragraph at a time and summarize it before moving on.

 

But Ms. Poeppelman is strategic about when to introduce such texts. "We try to be judicious and smart about it," she said.

 

She also spends considerable time on writing. A recent chemistry assignment explored the use of X-ray scanners in airports to combat terrorism. Each student researched and wrote a paper making the case for or against the technology, focusing on scientific debates over potential health risks and alternatives.

 

"They're coming up with their thesis and supporting their claim with evidence and using citations, which is all in the common-core standards," Ms. Poeppelman said.

 

In Mr. Kuhn's 4th grade class in Shell Rock, Iowa, a recent science unit culminated with the writing assignment for a younger audience.

 

"They have to break it down and explain it in a way their audience would understand," he said. "Science has such difficult vocabulary, and a kid can memorize vocabulary words and match them up on a quiz and completely forget."

 

The task is informed by his participation for several years in a project to promote the Science Writing Heuristic, or SWH, an approach that uses language and argumentation to teach science, and that promotes critical-thinking skills.

 

Recent state and federal grants have supported the SWH, including a U.S. Department of Education award in 2009 of $4.8 million to field test it in 48 Iowa elementary schools.

 

Brian M. Hand, a professor of science education at the University of Iowa and a co-developer of the SWH, said Mr. Kuhn's technique in the assignment fits with this approach to writing as "an act of learning."

 

He explained, "We use writing as a learning tool, not writing as a recording tool."

 

Mr. Kuhn is now sharing his experience with the SWH with fellow teachers in the 2,300-student Waverly-Shell Rock district.

 

Bridgette Wagoner, the district's director of educational services, said the SWH is the focus of one of the four strands of professional development that her district currently offers teachers as they work to implement the common core.

 

She said she likes the approach because it is "literacy intensive" and embraces "an inquiry-based science approach" that engages students "as scientists in the work of asking and answering questions."

 

In Boise, Idaho, history and social studies teachers recently got a dose of professional development to get a firmer grasp on the common core's literacy objectives.

 

"We expect all of our history and social studies teachers to implement [them]," said Russ Heller, an education services supervisor for the 25,000-student district.

 

One goal of the workshop was to ease teachers' anxiety about the common core, he said, noting that most of the district's history and social studies teachers already bring a literacy focus to instruction.

 

"It's not a matter of doing these things, but doing them with diligence," he said, "intentionally, consistently, and in the right way."

 

Mr. Heller highlighted the standards' explicit reference to such matters as fostering close reading, understanding the difference between claims and evidence, building persuasive and reasoned arguments, and communicating clearly.

 

"The effort is to create a culture in which every day, a teacher walks into the classroom ... conscientiously applying these principles," he said.

 

'Historical Context'

Fritz Fischer, a past president of the National Council for History Education, said the common core meshes well with a push in history education over the past 15 to 20 years to focus more on the ability to understand primary and secondary texts and the differences between them, and on making use of them in writing to provide evidence and argument.

 

"I'm glad they've given a nod to history, and at least recognized its importance and the fact that it is unique," he said.

 

At the same time, Mr. Fischer, a history professor at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, has concerns with the standards.

 

"They are much too narrow and incomplete" when it comes to literacy in history, he said. "There is so much more to reading historical texts than is in that section, and some of it leans too much toward literacy and not enough toward issues of historical context."

 

Another concern Mr. Fischer has is whether teachers who lack history expertise will get the support they need to effectively teach more history texts, such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s, "Letter from Birmingham Jail," which is cited as a text exemplar in the appendix.

 

"I'm afraid that an elementary teacher who doesn't have any training in or understanding of history will just go to Wikipedia, and that will be their historical context," he said.

 

Several other experts also offered cautions about implementation.

 

"With science and literacy, don't force the issue," said Christine A. Roye, a professor of science education at Shippensburg University in Shippensburg, Pa. "There will be natural places where it will be a great match. ... Maximize those [rather than] trying to make everything connected."

 

Dennis L. Schatz, a program director at the National Science Foundation who is on leave from the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, said he hopes the standards don't lead some teachers to move away from valued science practices.

 

"The basic idea is great," he said of the science-literacy connection in the standards, "but the reading [focus] could easily make people think, 'Oh, I don't have to do hands-on science.' "

 

More broadly, he said: "It's easy to talk about integration, but the challenge is making that model come alive."

 

Building Knowledge

"Note on range and content of student reading," in the Standards for Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science and Technical Subjects:

"Reading is critical to building knowledge in history/social studies as well as in science and technical subjects. College- and career-ready reading in these fields requires an appreciation of the norms and conventions of each discipline, such as the kinds of evidence used in history and science; an understanding of domain-specific words and phrases; an attention to precise details; and the capacity to evaluate intricate arguments, synthesize complex information, and follow detailed descriptions of events and concepts."

 

The Common Core State Standards include a 7-page section for grades 6-12 explicitly on literacy in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects.

Grades 6-8 Excerpts

• Distinguish among fact, opinion, and reasoned judgment in a text.
• Support claim(s) with logical reasoning and relevant, accurate data and evidence that demonstrate an understanding of the topic or text, using credible sources.
• Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.

Grades 9-10 Excerpts

• Cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources, attending to such features as the date and origin of the information.
• Determine the meaning of symbols, key terms, and other domain-specific words and phrases as they are used in a specific scientific or technical context relevant to grades 9-10 texts and topics.
• Conduct short [and] more sustained research projects to answer a question ... or solve a problem; narrow or broaden the inquiry when appropriate; synthesize multiple sources on the subject, demonstrating understanding of the subject.

Grades 11-12 Excerpts

• Evaluate authors' differing points of view on the same historical event or issue by assessing the authors' claims, reasoning, and evidence.
• Synthesize information from a range of sources (e.g. texts, experiments, simulations) into a coherent understanding of a process, phenomenon, or concept, resolving conflicting information when possible.
• Develop and strengthen writing ... by planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a new approach, focusing on addressing what is most significant.

SOURCE: Common Core State Standards

 

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Washington DC/ Experts Say Accountability Focus Stymies Assessment Research

Commission says too many tests are used to gauge basic skills

 

By Sarah D. Sparks

Education Week, Vol. 32, Issue 12 [Edweek.org]

November 14, 2012 [posted online 11/21/2012]

 

The use of testing in school accountability systems may hamstring the development of tests that can actually transform teaching and learning, experts from a national assessment commission warn.

 

Members of the Gordon Commission on the Future of Assessment in Education, speaking at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Education here Nov. 1-3, said that technological innovations may soon allow much more in-depth data collection on students, but that current testing policy calls for the same test to fill too many different and often contradictory roles.

 

The nation's drive to develop standards-based accountability for schools has led to tests that, "with only few exceptions, systematically over-represent basic skills and knowledge and omit the complex knowledge and reasoning we are seeking for college and career readiness," the commission writes in one of several interim reports discussed at the Academy of Education meeting.

• "We strongly believe that assessment is a primary component of education, ... [part of] the trifecta of teaching, learning, and testing," said Edmund W. Gordon, the chairman of the commission and a professor emeritus of psychology at Yale University and Teachers College, Columbia University.

The two-year study group launched in 2011 with initial funding from the Princeton, N. J.-based Educational Testing Service and a membership that reads like a who's who of education research and policy. Its 32 members include:

• author and education historian Diane Ravitch of New York University,
• former West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise of the Washington-based Alliance for Excellent Education, and
• cognitive psychologist Lauren Resnick of the University of Pittsburgh, among others.

The panel is developing recommendations for both research on new assessments-for the Common Core State Standards and others-and policy for educators on how to use tests appropriately.

 

The final recommendations, expected at the end of the year, will be based on two dozen studies and analyses from experts in testing on issues of methods, student privacy, and other topics.

 

Stopping Overlap

Education policymakers understandably want to develop multimillion-dollar tests as efficiently as possible, said Lorrie A. Shepard, the education dean at the University of Colorado at Boulder and part of the commission's executive council. However, she said, they often confuse

• summative tests-large-scale snapshots such as the standardized tests states use for accountability-with
• formative tests  used to diagnose specific learning problems in individual students and improve instruction over time.

"This set of misbeliefs is actually fostering worse and worse tests," which assess only surface details that can be gathered for quick turnaround, rather than more-nuanced measures of deep knowledge, retention, and the ability to transfer knowledge to other subjects, she said.

 

Because teachers are accountable-and increasingly evaluated professionally-on the basis of those tests, Ms. Shepard added, "the way math and reading are taught are disabling because they are taught for recognition and taught for memorization, and even comprehension is being postponed. The way those subject matters get presented is the harm of those teaching-to-the-test regimes."

 

Both Ms. Shepard and Elena Silva, a senior policy analyst at Education Sector, a Washington think tank, said commercial testing companies increasingly offer electronic versions of tests that don't gauge deeper learning. Ms. Shepard said that education needs a Consumer Reports to identify tests being used for purposes for which they were not designed.

 

Test developers and policymakers alike should think of tests as a framework to create feedback loops for improvement, argued Robert J. Mislevy, the chairman for measurement and statistics of the ETS and part of the commission's executive council.

• "Who needs the information at what time?" Mr. Mislevy said. "Sometimes feedback loops are very tight-when you're playing a learning game, for example, feedback loops are taking place in a second or two. There are other feedback loops that are much bigger, like those used by chief state school officers looking at policy over the course of years."

Those assessments, rather than being used simply to rank students, could help educators identify learning patterns, he said.

 

For example, the ETS' Global Integrative Summative Assessment, now in field-testing as part of the federal Reading for Understanding program, uses scenarios to differentiate a student's comprehension ability from his or her background knowledge.

• Each scenario in the test is a cycle.
• Students first are tested on vocabulary and concepts related to a topic.
• Then they read a passage on the topic and summarize the main idea and key details of the text.
• Finally, the students report on how they incorporate what they have read into what they already knew about the topic,

for example, by completing an interactive graphic, according to Barbara Foorman, an education professor and the director of the Florida Center for Reading Research at Florida State University in Tallahassee. She spoke in an interview with Education Week.

 

Nuanced test design would not replace the need for separate formative and summative tests, Mr. Mislevy of the ETS said, but it could help educators and policymakers think differently about what can be learned from tests.

 

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Los Angeles CA/ Empower Academy: 1st School in KIPP Network to Embrace Blended Learning

 

By Ian Quillen

Education Week, Vol. 32, Issue 12 [Edweek.org]

November 20, 2012

 

The original blueprint for the KIPP Empower Academy read something like this: five teachers per grade; 100 students per grade; very few classroom computers.

 

But when a plummeting economy led to the elimination in 2009 of California state funding that rewarded elementary schools for keeping their class sizes at around 20 students or fewer, founding Principal Mike Kerr felt forced to shift in a different direction to preserve the central principle of small-group instruction in his not-yet-opened K-2 charter elementary school in southern Los Angeles.

• "In essence, we lost about $115,000 in one swoop with losing class-size-reduction funding," said Mr. Kerr. He added that additional cuts resulting from the ongoing financial crisis had cost the school an additional $85,000 for a total of $200,000, roughly the equivalent of three teacher salaries. "We discussed whether blended learning could be a vehicle to allow us to first and foremost preserve the small-group instruction and see how we could make that happen."

What resulted was the first school to embrace a fully blended learning model in the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, charter school network, a 125-school organization that is among the largest and best-known charter operators in the nation.

 

The focus of the nonprofit network since the organization's inception in 1994 has been on creating schools capable of preparing students from underprivileged areas to gain admission to college, through five organizational principles:

• high expectations,
• parental and student choice and commitment,
• more time spent learning and studying,
• leadership autonomy, and
• a focus on achievement results.

The early success of KIPP Empower-its 100 percent teacher-retention rate through its third year of operation, and its work at the K-2 level, an age group often thought to be too young for the blended rotational model of schooling-could potentially lead to imitators throughout the network, especially at more recently founded schools. In a blended rotational model, students in a classroom move between stations that include working online on classroom computers, as well as working face-to-face with teachers or paraprofessionals.

 

Mr. Kerr, who also utilized blended learning to a lesser degree when he served for five years as founding principal of the Achievement First Crown Heights Elementary Charter School in New York City, acknowledges that, in today's budget climate, his current school's success is only possible through the blended model. Yet he takes every opportunity to also express caution about the larger movement for blended learning.

• "We're skeptics here, and we're not folks who are toeing the party line for blended learning," said Mr. Kerr, whose school has used adaptive software to enable a more affordable instructional model, in which four teachers are assigned per grade of 110 students, down from the originally proposed 5-to-100 ratio.
• A case study from the Austin, Texas-based Michael & Susan Dell Foundation estimated a savings of $965 per student gained through the reimagined model for the 2011-12 school year.
• "I think everyone is looking for the shortcut and looking for that quick fix, and there is never going to be a shortcut or a quick fix in education," Mr. Kerr said. "It's always going to come down to hard work, trying to be smart, and trying to do what's best for kids."

Laptop Lessons

Even some of his own teaching staff at first feared that using adaptive-learning software would amount to babysitting, rather than productive supplemental work. But Mr. Kerr insisted that the approach can yield a productive experience even for entering pupils as young as age 4 or 5, provided the model is deliberate and not too time consuming.

 

At KIPP Empower, that model calls for kindergartners to spend roughly 11 percent of their extended, 8 1/2 -hour school day working on reading or math exercises on a laptop computer.

• The school has phased in a new grade each year, and the proportion of computer time climbs slowly to 16 percent by 2nd grade.
• But classes at the school feel, by and large, similar to other early-elementary classrooms around the country, with equal parts carpet squares, group songs and rhymes, and colors and shapes designed to appeal to the young soul as well as mind.
• The rotational blended model is meant to be an extension of that approach.

"I feel like we are meeting the students at their levels, so there's definitely an emotional part of that" model, said Alonda Casselle, the school's dean of culture and after-school-program coordinator.

• The adaptive software used in the model is generally designed to log student progress on individual concepts and respond to that progress by either accelerating or easing the difficulty of the content depending on a student's needs.
• Further, the set of 15 laptops in each of the school's 12 classrooms stays anchored within the classroom to help keep a community atmosphere within the room even when the children are using the computers.
• For teachers, that means exceptional classroom management-skills are imperative, perhaps even more so than technological acumen.

"You really as a teacher have to think of every single step that they're going to do and break it down," said Karla Cienfuegos, a kindergarten teacher who was one of the four founding lead teachers when the school welcomed its first kindergarten class in August 2010.

 

Kindergartners in Ms. Cienfuegos' class are broken into two or three groups for all of their core subjects-reading, writing, math, and science-and in the first three subjects spend blocks of time rotating between workstations led by herself, intervention teacher Monica Gallo, or an automated laptop lesson. Ms. Gallo, along with paraprofessional teaching assistants, is a shared resource for Ms. Cienfuegos and her three kindergarten lead-teacher colleagues.

 

The result is an intricate scheme of student movement that works only if the children are comfortable both in their logged-on and logged-off surroundings.

 

"If you want them to stand up and go one way, you do that, and you practice and you practice and you practice until you get it right," Ms. Cienfuegos said.

 

Technology and Achievement

Educators can also feel some frustration with the quality of available software for students as young as those at the KIPP Empower Academy, Mr. Kerr said. That's partly because the industry simply doesn't focus as much on the early grades, he said, but also because the school is attempting to move toward programs that give students consistent and constructive feedback on their own progress, not just provide usable data for teachers.

 

And while teachers say they have learned valuable information about their students from data provided through a range of about a half-dozen math and reading programs the school uses, they haven't yet gained an ability to directly mesh the work on student laptops with lessons led by teachers. That's something Ms. Cienfuegos said she would like to move toward.

 

Her colleague M.J. Mathis said, though, that as long as computers allow more individualized instruction, it's OK if they are only an imperfect match for the lessons she delivers.

• "I appreciate and I know that a lot of research has been done looking into what games are going to be effective for the kids," said Ms. Mathis, who was also a founding kindergarten teacher. "Honestly, from a teacher's perspective, I am not as concerned on what they are doing on the computers, but I am more concerned with the fact that I can have small groups, because they are on the computers for such a short amount of time in the grand scheme of the day."

Perhaps for that reason, KIPP Empower has become one of the KIPP organization's best-known elementary school models. Its teachers appear satisfied with their job descriptions, as well as their students' progress, and not one teaching-staff member has left in the school's first two years, though some have grown into more senior positions.

 

Meanwhile, the school has shown potentially promising achievement results as well.

• On the Strategic Teaching and Evaluation of Progress, or STEP, literacy test, an assessment designed by the University of Chicago's Urban Education Institute, the proportion of KIPP Empower pupils reading at a "proficient" or "advanced" level jumped from 36 percent to 96 percent during the course of its inaugural 2010-11 school year, according to the Dell Foundation case study.
• On the Measure of Academic Progress, or MAP, test created by the Portland, Ore.-based Northwest Evaluation Association, 96 percent of that same 110-student inaugural class scored above average in both reading and mathematics, according to the study.

As a result, more educators from across KIPP's 125 schools and 31 regional consortia are hoping to learn from what is happening at KIPP Empower, as are potential future KIPP school leaders who are progressing through the Fisher Fellowship educational leadership program that Mr. Kerr completed before launching KIPP Empower. That is so, despite his repeated emphasis on being skeptical of doing any sort of blended learning model simply for blended learning's sake.

 

"In the presentations that those Fisher Fellows gave for their school design plans this August, over half of them talk about blended learning," Mr. Kerr said. "Two years ago, no one was talking about it."

 

Steve Mancini, KIPP's public-affairs director, echoed Mr. Kerr's stance that neither blended learning nor any other trend in education should be perceived as an easy fix to the problem of creating pathways to college for students in underserved communities.

 

And mostly, schools launched under the KIPP umbrella have emphasized a fairly traditional classroom environment and pedagogy, combined with extra resources, time, quality, and effort sometimes not always available in district-run public schools in the same communities.

• "There is no magic bullet, and there is no secret sauce," Mr. Mancini said. "It's about great teaching, and more of it."

But he also said the impression that KIPP in any way had been against technology or blended learning in the past is false. He added that because Fisher Fellows visit already-operating KIPP schools as part of their education, and because of the organization's emphasis on allowing educators within the network to learn from one another, the KIPP Empower Academy's success may be pushing other educators from the organization in a way they hadn't been before.

 

If anything, KIPP schools have lagged behind the trend of blended learning, which Mr. Kerr said may not necessarily be a bad thing, considering how "faddish" educational models can be. Still, the KIPP Washington Heights Middle School, in its first year of operation in New York, and the KIPP Ascent Primary and Middle schools in Chicago, in their third and 10th years of operation, respectively, are all implementing portions of Mr. Kerr's blended learning model for their mathematics instruction.

 

At KIPP Empower, the greatest success of the blended model may be in how well it's camouflaged with the rest of school. While kindergartners generally need a week of practice to learn logging on and logging off their individual portals, the work with the adaptive program soon becomes just another measure of children's academic success and their progress toward long-term goals.

 

Pupils such as Darryl Lewis, now a 2nd grader, immediately understood the importance of learning how to function on the new technology when he started kindergarten a few days late. "I was worried that I wouldn't be as smart as the other kids" on the computer, he said.

 

"So I thought when the other kids in my class were going to go to college, I wouldn't," he recalled. "I was going to have to stay in kindergarten."

 

Darryl found, though, that it only took "a few days" to catch up.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~

 

Washington DC/ OPINION: Should Schools Set Sliding Scales for Student Achievement?

 

By Emily Richmond [Education Writers Association public editor]

The Educated Reporter [Educatedreporter.com]

November 19, 2012

 

It would be tough to find a slope that's potentially more slippery than this one: public schools setting different achievement expectations for students based on their race and ethnicity.

 

But that's exactly what's happening in dozens of states that have received waivers from the U.S. Department of Education, allowing them to replace the more onerous provisions of No Child Left Behind with more flexible accountability measures.

 

NCLB's core premise was that all students - regardless of ethnicity, socioeconomic or special education status - would have to be proficient in reading, writing and math by the 2013-14 academic year. States were given leeway in setting their definitions of proficiency, and in deciding how best to move students toward the final goal.

 

But with the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act more than seven years overdue (and a congressional stalemate unlikely to be solved anytime soon), U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan began authorizing waivers. In exchange, states agreed to adopt specific reform measures that were in line with President Obama's education reform agenda, and to establish accountability measures for charting student progress.

 

So far 34 states and the District of Columbia have been granted NCLB waivers, and were permitted to reset the achievement bar for academic performance.

• And now it gets tricky: While all individual students are ostensibly still expected to reach proficiency in core subjects, some states have adjusted their "annual measurable objectives" for schools so that the percentage of students that must show progress on standardized tests varies by race and ethnic groups.
• In Florida, for example, 90 percent of Asian students, 88 percent of whites, 81 percent of Hispanics and 74 percent of blacks will be expected to demonstrate proficiency on the state's reading assessments by 2018. A similar sliding scale has been set for mathematics.

Supporters of such measures contend this approach is the only realistic path to wide-scale school improvement. Critics argue that lower expectations for minority students will ultimately translate into lower outcomes.

 

Drawing particularly fierce opposition was Virginia's initially proposed new policy, which would have required just 57 percent of black students to be proficient in math by 2017. An early critic was Andy Rotherham of Bellwether Education Partners, a national nonprofit in Washington, D.C. that focuses on improving opportunities for low-income students. Writing in the Washington Post, Rotherham argued that the "debilitating message" the Dogwood State was sending to students, parents and educators was "together but unequal." (The U.S. Department of Education has since ruled that Virginia's policy went too far and worked with the state to renegotiate a more ambitious plan.)

 

Here's what we do know:

• There is a stubborn achievement gap for Hispanic students and black students nationwide.
• In turn, that's translated into an opportunity gap, as well.
• Minority students are not just scoring lower than their white peers on high-stakes tests, they are also getting less access to the most qualified teachers, the best schools, and the most expansive academic opportunities.

So, how did addressing those gaps translate into resetting the achievement bar by student ethnicity?

 

When Congress was still actively debating the ESEA reauthorization back in 2010, the Education Trust, an advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C., proposed a comprehensive set of recommendations. Those included a requirement that states cut in half the gap between where each group of students start and 100 percent proficiency within six years, and to aim to reduce their student achievement gaps by 50 percent. While the reauthorization stalled, the U.S. Department of Education decided to include "cut the gap in half" as one of the options states could choose to satisfy the accountability requirement of the waiver application process.

 

Some states are hewing closely to the Ed Trust's original blueprint. Others have appropriated the name but are not operating within the initiative's suggested framework. (More on that problem in a just a moment.)

 

Education Secretary Arne Duncan, speaking at Ed Trust's recent national conference in Washington, D.C., praised the organization for taking the lead in developing the "cut the gap in half" approach, calling it "very ambitious" but "also achievable."

 

I spoke with Amy Wilkins, Ed Trust's vice president for government affairs, who said she's keenly aware that "when you put race and education in the same sentence and it gets volatile pretty quick -- but the fact is unless we set higher goals for kids of color, and demand quicker progress, we're never going to close that gap. And that means we have to name it, we can't pretend that all kids start and the same point and that everything is OK."

 

The Ed Trust-endorsed blueprint calls for schools to set expectations that students of color show greater - and faster - progress than what's expected of their white classmates. While the final goal remains eliminating the gap entirely, Ed Trust argues that it makes more sense to set a realistic course for schools to chart over the next six years.

• "Students of color start further behind, and even if they make more progress they're still going to be behind at the end of six years," Wilkins said. "But by 2018, the gap could be half of what it is today. If school and states are doing what they need to do, they'll be educating these kids better than they ever have before."

Wilkins estimated that there are about 15 states that have set up parameters that align with Ed Trust's recommendations. But on the flipside, there are probably an equal number of states that claim their policies are intended to "cut the gap in half," but "that's not what they're doing at all," Wilkins said. "We're working with state-based education reform groups and state and local chapters of national civil rights groups to help them know what's real and what's faux."

 

An example of a state that has set up appropriate goals for specific ethnic groups - at least in Ed Trust's view - is Florida, Wilkins said. What remains to be determined is the state's plan for boosting achievement of Latino, Black and low-income students, and what consequences those schools will face if they fall short.

 

With the exception of a tiny percentage of students with cognitive disabilities, "We believe all students can achieve at high levels," Wilkins said. "What's holding them back is they're being poorly served by their schools. Students from low-income families and students of color get less of everything that matters."

 

In the wake of the debate over the waivers, Wilkins said she's "keenly aware" that there are misunderstandings about what "cut the gap in half" is seeking to accomplish. The revised goals, Wilkins said, are to "hold school and districts accountable for accelerating academic progress, not diminishing expectations for any individual students or groups of students."

 

I put the question of states adjusting expectations based on a student's ethnicity to Carla O'Connor, an associate professor in the School of Education at the University of Michigan. O'Connor, who specializes in African-American student achievement and urban education, said the new sliding bar for expectations is a huge step backward.

• "No Child Left Behind presumed that all students would be able to learn and perform at similar levels - the current efforts suggest that not all kids have that ability, and we shouldn't even try," O'Connor said. "Once we shift to different standards, we're institutionalizing the notion that's not even feasible."

O'Connor said there's another problem to consider.

• The standards as they currently exist were already "pitching relatively low," O'Connor said.
• "The tests we're using aren't capturing higher-ordered thinking. These are basic-level skills and now we're saying we don't think certain populations of students can even meet those expectations."

To be sure, states will have to tread carefully to ensure that equity isn't a casualty of the reconfigured standards for student achievement. At the same time, the debate over how to define that achievement - and whether students in traditionally underserved populations might actually benefit from a sliding scale of expectations - is just getting started.