PSFA Daily News Digest

29 November 2012

www.nmpsfa.org 

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

Rio Rancho/ RRPS Looks to Conserve Water

By Elaine D. Briseño

ABQ Journal Staff Writer

November 29, 2012 

The Rio Rancho school district has adopted a conservation plan that could save millions of gallons of water a year when it's fully in place.

The Rio Rancho Public Schools Board adopted the plan, which includes water-saving recommendations, during its Monday meeting.

• The plan was presented by Elena Kayak, the district's energy/environmental specialist. Kayak said she's been working on the plan for two years, and that following its recommendations will save the district millions of gallons of water a year.
• "We are one of the city's largest users of water," Kayak told the board. "And we can do better. This plan allows us to be more efficient."
• RRPS was the city's 3rd-highest water user for the fiscal year that ended on June 30, using 140.9 million gallons, according to city records. Intel was the largest consumer, and the city was the second.

Kayak said the district's primary goal is reducing the amount of water used to maintain athletic fields.

• The plan calls for installing a system that would allow the district to remotely control sprinklers on its fields and campuses.
• The system also would be able to detect moisture so the sprinklers would not turn on, for instance, when it's raining. The measure could be somewhat costly, but Kayak said it would be worth the investment because of the money and water the district could save.
• "It would cost between $100,000 to $150,000 to do this district wide," Kayak said. "It would pay for itself in 5 to 7 years."
• Another idea involves retrofitting faucets with new aerators, which come in various sizes and control the amount of water flow.

The district has already saved 4.4 million gallons of water since January by participating in the New Mexico Gas Co.'s Schools Conserving Resources (SCORE) pilot program. The company installed aerators, for free, at eight school sites and the district office to reduce hot-water use. It will install new aerators at Puesta del Sol Elementary School by the end of this year.

Kayak said the aerators are projected to save at least $1.7 million by the end of the fiscal year in June.

The district hopes to install new aerators at the remaining schools in the near future, Kayak said.

"It's a low-tech, effective way to save on water use," she said.

Other ideas are that the district switch from evaporative cooling units to refrigerated air, which uses less water. When designing new buildings, the district would make water conservation a high priority.

The Bureau of Reclamation awarded the district a $12,500 grant to draft the plan. It's possible the district could get more money later to help pay for water conservation projects.

Mary Carlson, spokeswoman for the bureau, said school districts with water conservation plans are given bonus points in the bureau's grant process.

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ABQ/ New America School: Student Danny Lueras Speaks at Groundbreaking

By Aurelio Sanchez

ABQ Journal Staff Writer

November 29, 2012  

Danny Lueras could almost feel his mother looking on with pride as he nervously delivered the main address Tuesday at New America School in the South Valley.

After a long fight with lung cancer, Lueras' mother died in February. On Tuesday, Lueras took another step toward fulfilling a deathbed promise to her that he'd finish high school and earn his diploma.

"It's funny because today, while I was giving my speech, I could almost feel my mother watching me, smiling with pride," he said.    

Though it wasn't graduation, the event served as a rehearsal for the real thing in June, when he's scheduled to graduate after compiling a 3.0 grade point average at New America School.

Tuesday's celebration marked the groundbreaking for a new gymnasium to be built at the charter school, where the mantra could be "a place where I can learn English, finish high school and earn my high school diploma."

Seventeen-year-old Lueras is convinced he wouldn't be in high school, much less be a featured speaker at a groundbreaking, if he had not found New America, and if he had been supported and encouraged by his mother to finish high school.

Born and raised in Martineztown, Lueras struggled in ninth grade at Rio Grande High School and then again at two other high schools before dropping out as a sophomore.

"I was in depression, my mother was really sick with her lung cancer, and I wanted to be close to her," he said."But it felt like I wasn't going anywhere, and my mom still really wanted me to go back to school."

She constantly prodded him, promising to throw him a big graduation party, get him a class ring, or maybe even buy him a car if he followed the example of his two older brothers and finished high school.

His younger sister, who was enrolled at New America, told school principal Latricia Mathis about her brother and her mother's wishes, and Mathis contacted Lueras.

"The next day, I was back in school," Lueras said.

After graduation, Lueras has set his sights on pursuing a college or post secondary education in hopes of becoming a paramedic.

The New America School is a system of publicly funded charter high schools with three campuses in the Denver metro area, one in Albuquerque and one in Las Cruces.

• Its mission includes teaching English to new immigrants and assisting non-traditional students, some in their 40s and 50s, earn a high school degree.
• Now in its fourth year, the Albuquerque campus at 1734 Isleta SW began with 100 students and has expanded to more than 400 in grades 9-12.
• The new $1 million gymnasium will allow students to have physical education classes without having to walk to a nearby community center to borrow a gym, Mathis said.

The gym will be about 8,600-square-feet and is being built by Klinger Corp. of Albuquerque. It is funded by Charter School Development Corp., and is scheduled to be completed in April 2013.

Amelia Reyes Sandoval, 42, the school's receptionist, earned her high school diploma at the school last year.

"It was the hardest thing for me to do, but thanks to the opportunity this school gave me, I'm a very proud graduate and a very proud mom," she said, adding that she's got four children either on track or already graduated from college and high school.

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Clovis/ On Fast Track: Dual Credit Courses Give Students College Experience

By Benna Sayyed

Clovis News-Journal Staff Writer

November 28, 2012

Alexis O'Leary said taking dual credit college courses at Clovis Community College gives her a sense of independence and makes her feel grown up.

By completing dual credit classes at CCC, the Clovis High senior will be on her way to the Air Force Academy with 25 college credits under her belt after graduating in May.

O'Leary is one of 350 high school students in New Mexico earning dual credit through CCC, which it has offered since 1990.

• The dual credit program allows high school students to earn high school and college credits while taking college courses. Tuition and textbooks are free for all dual credit students in the state.
• CCC uses an Accuplacer placement test, ACT scores, teacher recommendations or high school grade point averages to determine if students are ready for college courses.
• Once students go through admissions screening, they work with high school counselors to determine which college classes will work best.

Dual credit students take classes at the CCC campus during the day, at night and online.

• Students also use the CCC vocational school for disciplines such as welding, cosmetology and nursing. T
• here are also dual credit classes set up exclusively for high school students.

O'Leary believes taking dual credit classes helps her with time management and pushes her to work at a higher academic level.

"My college class is once a week so I'm forced to teach myself to read without actually getting help," O'Leary said. "I feel like it's easier for me to take it (English) at the college because I won't have homework every single day. I'll just have one assignment for the week instead of several assignments everyday like at high school."

O'Leary said she has taken dual credit classes at CCC since 10th grade. She juggles CCC classes, high school classes, varsity soccer in the fall and track in the spring.

O'Leary said managing her workload was difficult as a junior, but she handles her academics easily as a senior. She plans to join the Air Force academy and major in aeronautical engineering.

According to CCC president Becky Rowley, students who have decided on their college major and plan carefully can complete basic college courses in high school.

Rowley said some students graduate from high school with 30 credits. She said she has seen students graduate from high school, take one or two essential summer classes and enroll in the nursing or radiology tech program directly after graduation.

Rowley said before the dual credit option, students would graduate from high school and spend at least another year completing prerequisite courses.

"It really does improve the success rates for students when they become full-time college students," said Rowley, who started her teaching career as a dual credit teacher.

"When you go to college as a full-time student when you're 18 and you've taken 15 or 20 hours of college credits, you're much more likely to be successful than if you're coming into college with no experience at all."

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ABQ/ School Boards Prepare for State Convention

By Joshua Kellogg

Farmington Daily Times

November 28, 2012

As students and faculty return from Thanksgiving break, area school districts are preparing for this year's annual state school board convention this weekend in Albuquerque.

Starting Friday morning at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in downtown Albuquerque, the New Mexico School Board Association will be hosting its annual convention with the objective of providing information to school board members and administrators from around the state.

With a mixture of speakers, general and breakout sessions, the convention provides an opportunity for board members to continue required training for their positions.

Association business like electing officers, receiving committee reports and adopting the NMSBA's 2013 Legislative program also will take place.

• Bloomfield School District Board of Education President Jim Conyers said the convention provides a good avenue for discussion about matters occurring in the state legislature relating to education and handling day-to-day school business like policy, procedures and legal matters.

"Usually, we come back with ideas and meet with the administration and ask them, "What are we doing in this area and how are we addressing this?'" Conyers said.

Covering a wide variety of topics like administration, board membership, facility management and community relations, the breakout sessions on Saturday morning help the board members receive training for professional development required to hold their seats.

Conyers said the training also helps when agenda items come up for approval by the board members.

"If something comes up before the board, we know what questions to ask and be sure things are done correctly," Conyers said. "(It) Helps us be more knowledgeable about the business that comes before the board and make better decisions."

• Farmington Municipal Schools Superintendent Janel Ryan said she enjoys the occasion to spend time her fellow board members outside of the boardroom.

"I think it's a good opportunity to learn as a board and superintendent," Ryan said. "I don't see them unless it's at a meeting and we have a set agenda. Hearing their personal opinion is important to me."

Another important action taking place is the adoption of the legislative platform for the NMSBA, in which important topics are brought up in order to provide some traction towards action in the next state legislative session.

"I know this is a concern of every school district but we've not had enough money for raises for teachers or anyone really, for the last four years," Ryan said.

For Ryan, the convention provides an opportunity to voice concerns about funding and other issues along with other school districts which might be in the same boat.

"We look at what is presented to the legislature and the issues we might have with something like federal reimbursements," Ryan said. "Maybe timely reimbursements is an issue in your district and you can talk with the Secretary of Education for the state about it."

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Clovis/ COLUMN: Schools Open Doors to Parents After Hours

By Cindy Kleyn-Kennedy [Instructional technology coordinator for the Clovis Municipal Schools]

Clovis News-Journal

November 28, 2012

Generally, around 3 p.m. school is out, and students head home, but not always. More and more of our schools are opening doors to parents and community members outside normal school hours for learning-related activities.

At the end of October, La Casita Elementary held its Fall Literacy Festival and, along with a variety of related activities, students dressed up as characters from their favorite books. Kids and parents alike loved this, and the stories were made memorable.

More recently, La Casita held Parent Night literacy workshops with great success. Sylvia Martinez, principal, kicked off the evening in the school cafeteria, which was filled with parents, students and staff. La Casita's own student Folklorico Dancers, decked out in brightly colored costumes, opened the evening. The dancers were followed by Clovis High School students' dance routines, students from Patricia Natividad and Rodolfo Arceo's Spanish classes. Arceo, in "vaquero" style, also demonstrated his remarkable lassoing skills.

Following these lively events, the parent workshops began.

• Individuals received color-coded passes and rotated through different classrooms, participating in the literacy exercises teachers had prepared for parents to support student learning at home.
• Every classroom workshop was conducted in English and Spanish, and teachers guided parents through practical tips, providing creative tools and resources for more effectively supporting literacy at home.

Lockwood Elementary is doing breakfast.

• Kiwanis members are headed to Lockwood to prepare a pancake breakfast for parents who come to the school to participate in literacy activities.
• Each classroom room has specific literacy-supporting activities organized through the school's Leadership Team.
• Books with character-building themes have been chosen for the activities.
• Groups of parents and students rotate through classrooms and, at the completion of the activity, parents enjoy pancakes with their children.
• Parent volunteers, recruited from each class, are also helping out with making pancakes.

This should prove to be a wonderful, literacy-rich experience shared by students, parents, staff, and community members. Perhaps this is what education should look like, with literacy more important than ever in this age of digitized lives.

Author Pat Conroy noted: "The world of literature has everything in it...I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in "Lonesome Dove" and had nightmares about slavery in "Beloved" and walked the streets of Dublin in "Ulysses" and made up a hundred stories in the Arabian nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in "A Prayer for Owen Meany." I've been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career, all because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up every single thing those magnificent men and women had to give. I cherish and praise them and thank them for finding me when I was a boy and presenting me with the precious gift of the English language."

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Washington DC/ Report on Civil Rights Enforcement and Educational Equity Released

U.S Department of Education Press Release [Ed.gov]

November 28, 2012

Today, the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) released a report describing OCR's progress and activity over the last four years on civil rights enforcement and educational equity.

The report,  "Helping to Ensure Equal Access to Education," describes how OCR has transformed its enforcement approach to better promote and advance educational equity for all students, while maximizing the office's efficiency and impact, even as the number of complaints received by OCR has grown by almost a quarter over the last four years.

OCR both received and resolved over 28,500 complaints during this time period, a record figure compared to past four-year periods.

The report also discusses OCR's work to:

• support the equal rights of students to a safe school environment and to resources and programs they need to be prepared for college and careers;
• revamp the Civil Rights Data Collection to provide educators and the public with a clearer picture of the "equity health" of schools; and
• align its efforts with President Obama's goal of restoring this nation's position as a global leader in the proportion of college graduates by 2020, by improving educational equity and excellence.

"OCR's work over the last four years has moved us closer to equal access and opportunity for all students, no matter what their race, sex or disability status," said Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. "The OCR team has accomplished a lot through its innovation and its passion for equity."

In addition to investigating resolving complaints, OCR has protected students' civil rights by launching over 100 proactive, systemic investigations at schools and colleges across the country. In both its complaints and its proactive investigations, OCR has placed a priority on developing robust remedies that attack discrimination at its roots.

OCR has also catalyzed improved compliance across the education community by issuing groundbreaking policy guidance on questions regarding the civil rights laws OCR enforces, such as:

• the obligations of schools and colleges to prevent and address bullying, harassment and sexual violence;
• the equal rights of all students to a public education regardless of their race, national origin or citizenship status or that of their parents;
• and the obligation of schools and colleges to ensure that students with disabilities have equal access to the new technologies that are playing an increased role in classrooms.

The report also documents a range of systemic improvements OCR has made in how it operates, and highlights the impact of those improvements by describing numerous important cases OCR has resolved during the last four years.

"We have transformed our approach to enforcement to make it more targeted and efficient, while fielding more complaints than ever before. We've revamped our technical assistance, and expanded our outreach to new heights," said Assistant Secretary Russlynn Ali. "Removing barriers to equal educational opportunity will help ensure all students have a fair chance at a good education - a goal that is not just a moral imperative, but an economic necessity as well."

Today's report fulfills a requirement of Section 203(b) of the Department of Education Organization Act of 1979, Pub. L. No. 96-88, which provides that the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights shall make a report to the Secretary and the President "summarizing the compliance and enforcement activities of the Office for Civil Rights and identifying significant civil rights or compliance problems as to which such Office has made a recommendation for corrective action and as to which, in the judgment of the Assistant Secretary, adequate progress is not being made."

The mission of the Office for Civil Rights, which comprises nearly 600 staff located in a headquarters office in Washington, D.C., and 12 regional offices around the nation, is to ensure equal access to education and to promote educational excellence throughout the nation through the vigorous enforcement of civil rights. Among the federal civil rights laws OCR is responsible for enforcing are Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; Title IX of the Education Amendment Act of 1972; Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973; and Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

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Washington DC/ Brookings Study: Standardized Testing Costs States $1.7 Billion Annually

By Andrew Ujifusa

Education Week, Vol. 32, Issue 13  [Edweek.org]

November 29, 2012

Standardized-testing regimens cost states some $1.7 billion a year overall, or a quarter of 1 percent of total K-12 spending in the United States, according to a new report on assessment finances.

• The report released Nov. 29 by the Washington-based Brown Center on Education Policy, at the Brookings Institution, calculates that the test spending by 44 states and the District of Columbia amounted to $65 per student on average in grades 3-9 based on the most recent test-cost data the researchers could gather. (The Brown Center report was not able to gather that data from Iowa, Oklahoma, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Wyoming.)
• It also says that the District of Columbia spends the most on its assessments per student-$114-of the 45 jurisdictions Brookings measured, followed by Hawaii, Alaska, Delaware, North Dakota, and Massachusetts. New York, where test scoring is a local responsibility, spent the least-$7 per student-followed by Kansas, North Carolina, Oregon, and Utah.

Despite the relatively small amount states spend on tests overall, compared with total education spending nationally, the report, written by Brown Center fellow Matthew M. Chingos, warns that the testing costs take on growing importance during difficult budget periods for states.

While the two consortia developing tests for the Common Core State Standards in English/language arts and mathematics (adopted by 46 and 45 states, respectively) may help reduce overall costs for states, the report says, "it is not yet clear whether larger consortia ... are a better choice than smaller ones formed more organically" from a cost standpoint.

Risking 'Backlash'

The report, titled "Teaching Children to Read," also notes that while only 9 percent of Americans in a poll said they disapprove of federal mandates for state tests like the math, reading, and science tests required by No Child Left Behind Act, "there is the risk of multimillion-dollar assessment contracts contributing to a political backlash against testing among parents and taxpayers who oppose the use of standardized testing for accountability purposes or object to public dollars flowing to for-profit companies (as most of the testing contractors are)."

• If the money for standardized assessments was instead put toward teacher raises, the report estimates that each teacher in the country would receive, on average, a raise of $550, or 1 percent, based on data about teacher salaries and other factors from the 2012 Digest of Education Statistics.

The report also includes information on the major contractors that provide services for the states' primary assessment contracts, although they don't represent all state spending on tests.

• It found that 6 vendors overall accounted for the bulk of the states' $669 million of annual spending for tests required under the No Child Left Behind Act in grades 3-8 and once in high school.
• That spending amounted to $27 per student on average.

Of all the contractors, the report says that:

• New York City-based Pearson Education received the most money (39 percent),
• followed by McGraw-Hill Education, also in New York (14 percent), and
• the Maple Grove, Minn.-based Data Recognition Corp. (13 percent).

Of the roughly $1 billion in remaining testing costs, the Brown Center calculates that amount would consist of the data it did not receive from the five states, as well as testing costs that are not contracted out and costs not included in primary assessment contracts, such as state exams not mandated by the NCLB law.

Common-Core Wrinkle

In an interview, Matthew M. Chingos, fellow in the Brookings Institution's Brown Center on Education Policy, said that comparing current state assessment costs against the projected costs of administering and scoring the common tests now being developed would not be meaningful, given the different numbers of students involved and the different way the work is being parceled out.

A few factors could drive down the cost-per-student of the standards-aligned tests.

• In addition to the larger number of students the consortia will be dealing with when the common-core standards are fully implemented, the market for providing services to the consortia will remain relatively competitive, Mr. Chingos said, since each group will likely use more than one contractor.
• Examples set by Kansas and North Carolina, which use public universities for their primary assessment contracts, could also encourage more nonprofits to enter the market, in Mr. Chingos' view.

 "It stands to reason that, all else equal, these consortia should be able to produce savings. But where those savings go is an open question," he said, adding that one significant move would be to plow that money back into crafting higher-quality tests.

At the same time, Mr. Chingos said the field of companies and nonprofit groups vying for common-core consortia work is relatively small and mostly impervious to new, outside competition, a dynamic that could reduce potential savings for states.

The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, for example, estimates a cost of $20 per student, less than many of its member states are spending but an increase for six of its members, the report says.

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Washington DC/ New Literacy Research Infuses Common Core

In the 15 years since the National Reading Panel convened, the knowledge base on literacy has grown

By Sarah D. Sparks

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

November 14, 2012 [posted online 11/29/12]

The truism that students "learn to read, then read to learn," has spawned a slew of early-reading interventions and laws. But the Common Core State Standards offer a very different view of literacy, in which fluency and comprehension skills evolve together throughout every grade and subject in a student's academic life, from the first time a toddler gums a board book to the moment a medical student reads data from a brain scan.

In doing so, the common-core literacy standards reflect the research world's changing evidence on expectations of student competence in an increasingly interconnected and digitized world. But critics say the standards also neglect emerging evidence on cognitive and reading strategies that could guide teachers on how to help students develop those literacy skills.

• "In our knowledge-based economy, students are not only going to have to read, but develop knowledge-based capital. We need to help children use literacy to develop critical-thinking skills, problem-solving skills, making distinctions among different types of evidence," said Susan B. Neuman, a professor in educational studies specializing in early-literacy development at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
• "The Common Core State Standards is privileging knowledge for the first time. To ensure they are career-and-college ready, we have to see students as lifelong learners and help them develop the knowledge-gathering skills they will use for the rest of their lives. That's the reality."

Response to Findings

It's been 15 years since Congress convened the National Reading Panel to distill knowledge about how students learn to read.

That group, in the heat of the so-called "reading wars" between whole-language and phonics approaches to instruction, focused on 5 fundamental literacy skills:

• the word-decoding skills of phonemic awareness and phonics,
• fluency,
• vocabulary, and
• text comprehension.

The panel's seminal 2000 report, "Teaching Children to Read," was used as the touchstone of the $1 billion-a-year federal Reading First grant program, established under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.

Eight years later, the U.S. Department of Education's research arm found that schools using Reading First did devote significantly more time to teaching the basic skills outlined by the panel, but ultimately "reduced the percentage of students engaged with print," both fiction and nonfiction. The study by the Institute of Education Sciences found students in Reading First schools were no better at drawing meaning from what they read than students at other schools, and the program eventually was scrapped.

• "One of the things we're seeing with the common core is, there was general disappointment with the NRP report's five critical skills as part of the Reading First initiative," said Ms. Neuman, who was an assistant secretary of education during the first term of President George W. Bush, when the federal reading program was rolled out.
• "When the evaluation came out and the results were very modest, people said, 'Well, what's next, what do we do?' We have not seen the emergence of a new model, and now, that's on the verge of happening.

Peggy McCardle, the chief of the child development and behavior branch-which includes literacy research-at the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development, said comprehension became the "next great frontier of reading research" after the National Reading Panel.

There have been other, narrowly focused panels on early reading and English-language learners, but the National Reading Panel still stands as the last comprehensive, Congressional task force on reading.

• "What the National Reading Panel had to say about comprehension was, we do need to teach kids strategies, and it's better if you teach them in combination-and we've taken that much further," Ms. McCardle said. "While we don't have reading comprehension completely figured out in every way, ... we have it much more figured out than we did in 2000."

The common core's emphasis on more complex text with higher-level vocabulary at younger ages-and particularly the use of informational, non-narrative texts as opposed to overwhelmingly narrative texts-also puts into practice research showing that there is no bright line for when students start to read to learn, Ms. McCardle said. Setting one would be "an artificial distinction," she said, "because the ramp up to learning from reading starts earlier and is just that, a ramp-up, not a quick switch or a dichotomy."

Comprehension and the Standards

The Common Core State Standards take a holistic view of comprehension, asking students to derive meaning from a mix of texts, illustrations, and digital media at the same time.

"Our knowledge of comprehension is changing. We used to teach strategies, on the assumption that those strategies would translate to any text. Now we recognize that transferability has real problems; we need to teach in the context of the text," said Susan B. Neuman, a professor of educational studies specializing in early-literacy development at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

This is one area in which the standards have staked a position on the bleeding edge of research on learning, said Nell K. Duke, a professor of language, literacy, and culture at the University of Michigan School of Education in Ann Arbor.

• "How do you teach kids to read a diagram, how do you teach kids to read a time line?
• What typically goes wrong with reading a graphic?"

Viewing comprehension as a sequential skill rather than a continuously evolving one "also implies they don't need ongoing instruction after 3rd grade, and we clearly know they do," she said.

The Alliance for Excellent Education's 2006 report "Reading Next" helped spark the common core's approach. Education professor Catherine A. Snow and then-doctoral student Gina Biancarosa of the Harvard Graduate School of Education found that explicit comprehension instruction, intensive writing, and the use of texts in a wide array of difficulty levels, subjects, and disciplines all helped improve literacy for struggling adolescent readers.

"There are two really big ideas underlying the common core," said P. David Pearson, a professor of language and literacy, society, and culture at the University of California, Berkeley.

• The standards first set out that children build knowledge through their close reading of texts, a concept "consistent with the last 20-30 years of research," Mr. Pearson said.
• "But the second big idea is its grounding in the disciplines," Mr. Pearson added. "If you think of science and history and even literature as disciplines, you can see why they have separate standards in reading for literature, informational text, science, and technical areas. You're not just learning to read; you're learning to read within a rich content area. This reflects a huge refocusing of reading research in the last 10 to 15 years on reading in the disciplines. It's been timely; they've hit a theme in the realm of education policy and practice."

Content and Complexity

• Mr. Pearson pointed to research by Cynthia L. Greenleaf, a co-director of the Strategic Literacy Initiative at the San Francisco-based research group WestEd, which identified specific literacy skills required in science and history classes.
• Timothy Shanahan, the director of the Center for Literacy at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a member of the common-core literacy-standards committee, likewise has found differences not just in the content knowledge but the approach to reading and getting information from text by professional scientists and historians.
• While "reading across the curriculum" research in the mid-1990s also stressed text in different content areas, Dorothy Strickland, a reading professor and education professor emeritus at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., said the common core leverages emerging research on how students analyze and verify what they read in different types of text, from literature to a lab report or an Internet blog.

"One of the key elements of executive function is holding more than one thing at a time" in mind, she said. "Kids have to read across texts, evaluate them, respond to them all at the same time. In office work of any sort, people are doing this sort of thing all the time."

The "Reading Next" report also highlights labor studies that show the 25 fastest-growing professions from 2000-2010-computer software engineers, database administrators, and medical assistants, among them-require higher-than-average literacy skills, particularly in informational texts.

• In a series of experiments across several grades beginning in 2000, Nell K. Duke, a professor of language, literacy, and culture at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, found elementary classrooms spend on average only 3.6 minutes a day reading non-story-based informational, as opposed to narrative texts. In classrooms with high numbers of poor children, informational reading occupies less than two minutes a day.

"Even if there hadn't been one stitch of research on informational text with young children, it's still conceivable the common core would have had an incredible emphasis on informational text because that was what colleges and employers were saying students needed to be able to read," Ms. Duke said.

"Fortunately, there was a nice alignment between the concerns of researchers and the concerns of the college and business community."

The fundamentals discussed in the National Reading Panel are still there, too, but have been given different weight.

• For example, vocabulary gets much more attention in the common core, not just individual words, but their meanings in different contexts and the nuances in families of related words.
• In part, that's because a student's depth and complexity of vocabulary knowledge predicts his or her academic achievement better than other early-reading indicators, such as phonemic awareness.

"There was a big push on academic vocabulary and the discourse of the disciplines. It's likely come from that whole tradition of making sure kids not only have general academic language but deep vocabulary of history, social studies, science," Mr. Pearson of UC-Berkeley said.

The common core also marks a sea change in the way researchers and teachers think about a child's reading level.

• For example, in a 2010 study in the Journal of Educational Psychology, researchers assigned two groups of poor readers in grades 2 and 4 to practice reading aloud text either at or above their reading level; a third group, the control, had no additional practice.
• They found students who practiced reading, even when it was difficult, were significantly better 20 weeks later at reading rate, word recognition, and comprehension, in comparison with the control group.

"It flies in the face of everything we'd been doing. Since the 1940s, the biggest idiots in the field-like me-were arguing that you couldn't teach kids out of books they couldn't read," Mr. Shanahan said. "We were setting expectations of such a modest level of learning being possible. We were unintentionally holding them back, and the common core called us on that."

Standards and Grades

Ms. Strickland and Mr. Pearson said the common core's strength comes from integrating many factors that have been identified as vital to adult literacy-such as facility with complex text or academic vocabulary-across all grades and academic subjects. "I think the idea of 10 standards that play themselves out grade after grade across different disciplines is a powerful thing," Mr. Pearson said.

Still, researchers said, while individual standards are backed by evidence that students' level of mastery of them can predict their eventual literacy in college and work, there is much less research supporting the grade-level descriptors of how those skills look through the years, or the most effective instructional strategies at each grade. Mr. Pearson said descriptors at transition grades, such as in upper elementary and middle school, may become the "Achilles heel of the standards."

"As you move through the grades, it changes in funny ways, and I don't think the changes are based on any actual research, but on professional consensus," Mr. Pearson said. "We may end up in the strange position of having a standard in 8th grade easier than one in 6th grade."

Mr. Shanahan agreed that "some of the targets are a little goofy," noting, for example, that the common core requires children to compare two texts in kindergarten, but there is no specific evidence that this skill should develop in that grade versus, say, grades 1 or 2. On the other hand, Mr. Shanahan said, "I think what the learning progressions tell us is a 4th grade teacher can no longer be a 4th grade teacher, or even a grades 3-4-5 teacher. They need to be a teacher of literacy and understand the precedents and antecedents of what a student needs to know."

Getting There From Here

Much of the criticism of the common core's research base comes from what it leaves out rather than what it includes.

In the years since the National Reading Panel, reading researchers have made significant advances in the development of strategies for reading and comprehension, as well as metacognitive factors that contribute to reading success, such as attention and motivation.

In its preface, the literacy standards bluntly limit their scope to "required achievements"-the outcomes of reading, as opposed to strategies for comprehension.

• "The standards do not mandate such things as a particular writing process or the full range of metacognitive strategies that students may need to monitor and direct their thinking and learning," the common core states.

Rather, it says, teachers should use their professional judgment and experience to decide how to help students meet the standards.

• "It's not because [the common-core designers] rejected that research," Mr. Shanahan said.
• "The notion was that you wanted to focus on outcomes, not the inputs. It might be helpful to teach a student whether he's paying attention or not, and if not, to do something. The common core isn't saying you shouldn't do that kind of thing, but that's not an outcome."

Maureen McLaughlin, the president-elect of the Newark, Del.-based International Reading Association, sees the lack of reading-strategy research in the curriculum as tantamount to having no research base where it counts most.

• "I see a gap between the standards and school curriculums, because typically when [previous]state standards were developed, they basically became the curriculum," said Ms. McLaughlin, who also chairs the reading department at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania. "If the states that adopted the common core say to their school districts, 'This is the curriculum,' and teachers feel they must teach to the test, the curriculum as it exists would not include the metacognitive strategies, the writing-process strategies... and that's a problem."

Ms. Neuman, the former assistant education secretary, disagrees.

• "I like the idea of focusing on outcomes," she said. "Comprehension strategies and metacognitive techniques have often been talked about as repair strategies, but you have to actually know you are not reading well to use those. So it's a little bit of a Catch-22 here. What this new approach is saying is focus on the text, because many remedial readers rely too much on their background knowledge and think they understand what they are reading when they actually do not."

The University of Michigan's Ms. Duke echoed the researchers' general concern that there has not been enough study of what good comprehension looks like and how to teach it in new contexts required by the common core, such as Internet articles, data tables, and texts that also include graphics.

"When a standard calls for us to get kids proficient at something we don't yet know how to get students proficient at, we really have to scramble a little bit," she said. "Hopefully, in a decade, we'll have really nice research on effective ways to go about this."

Mr. Shanahan agreed.

"I don't know of any studies or lines of research that might make us decide three or five years from now, let's take out these items or put these in," he said. "In many ways, the common core is silent on that. They're taking it on trust that we'll either know how to do it or we'll figure it out, and, as a field, I'm not sure we do know how to do it."

The common core's vision of how students ought to learn, grade by grade, to comprehend meaning differently across different media is sketched out in one strand of the reading standards-part of "integrating knowledge and ideas."

• Kindergarten: With prompting and support, describe the relationship between illustrations and the story in which they appear (e.g., what moment in a story an illustration depicts).
• Grade 1: Use illustrations and details in a story to describe its characters, setting, or events.
• Grade 2: Use information gained from the illustrations and words in a print or digital text to demonstrate understanding of its characters, setting, or plot.
• Grade 3: Use information gained from illustrations (e.g., maps, photographs) and the words in a text to demonstrate understanding of the text (e.g., where, when, why, and how key events occur).
• Grade 4: Interpret information presented visually, orally, or quantitatively (e.g., in charts, graphs, diagrams, time lines, animations, or interactive elements on Web pages) and explain how the information contributes to an understanding of the text in which it appears.
• Grade 5: Draw on information from multiple print or digital sources, demonstrating the ability to locate an answer to a question quickly or to solve a problem efficiently.
• Grade 6: Integrate information presented in different media or formats (e.g., visually, quantitatively) as well as in words to develop a coherent understanding of a topic or issue.
• Grade 7: Compare and contrast a text to an audio, video, or multimedia version of the text, analyzing each medium's portrayal of the subject (e.g., how the delivery of a speech affects the impact of the words).
• Grade 8: Evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of using different mediums (e.g., print or digital text, video, multimedia) to present a particular topic or idea.
• Grades 9-10: Analyze various accounts of a subject told in different mediums (e.g., a person's life story in both print and multimedia), determining which details are emphasized in each account.
• Grades 11-12: Integrate and evaluate multiple sources of information presented in different media or formats (e.g., visually, quantitatively) as well as in words in order to address a question or solve a problem.

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Washington DC/ SAT, ACT No Longer Required for Admission to 800 U.S. Colleges & Universities

Huffington Post Report

November 28, 2012

A growing number of colleges are stepping away from the standardized exams traditionally required of admissions applicants.

• More than 800 colleges and universities across the country no longer mandate score submissions from SAT or ACT college admissions exams, according to the latest survey by the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, otherwise known as FairTest and a longtime critic of the SAT.
• The number of test-optional institutions grew after the most recent revision of the SAT and ACT, in 2005.
• Of those schools, some exempt applicants who meet GAP or class-rank criteria while others require scores only for course placement purposes or for internal research.

"[Colleges and universities] recognize that neither the SAT nor ACT measures what students most need to succeed in higher education," FairTest Public Education Director Bob Schaeffer said in a statement Wednesday. "Even the tests' sponsors admit that an applicant's high school record remains a better predictor of college performance than either exam is."

• Among the test-optional schools are Middlebury College and Bowdoin College, both of which were ranked in U.S. News & World Report's top 10 liberal arts colleges in America. Nearly 150 institutions with test-optional admissions rank in the "top tier" of their respective academic categories, Schaeffer said.
• Wake Forest University, for example, also found that dropping the SAT requirement further diversified its student body.

"We expect the ACT/SAT optional list to continue growing as more institutions recognize that the tests remain biased, coachable, educationally damaging and irrelevant to sound admissions practices," Schaeffer said.

Even so, the vast majority of college-seeking teens are still taking the exams.

• The Louisiana Department of Education, for example, has launched a new initiative that requires all high school juniors to take the ACT.

For the first time ever, the ACT proved more popular this year among test takers than the SAT - by a narrow margin of less than 2,000 test-takers out of 1.65 million who took each.

The FairTest survey results also come as the two companies that administer the tests, the College Board and ACT Inc., recently implemented stricter security measures to curb cheating following the discovery last fall of a cheating scandal among 20 students from Great Neck, N.Y.

Even as exam officials point to the scores as basic numerical indicators of college readiness, FairTest officials maintain SAT and ACT scores are not well-rounded predictors of college success. Student scores on the tests, either fell slightly or remained stagnant this year, indicating stalled achievement and large likelihood of merely average achievement in a student's first year of college.

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New York NY/ A Lie on Facebook Has Consequences for Children

By Somini Sengupta

New York Times

November 28, 2012

A federal law intended to protect children's privacy may unwittingly lead them to reveal too much on Facebook, a provocative new academic study shows, in the latest example of how difficult it is to regulate the digital lives of minors.

• Facebook prohibits children under 13 from signing up for an account, because of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or Coppa, which requires Web companies to obtain parental consent before collecting personal data on children under 13.
• To get around the ban, children often lie about their ages.
• Parents sometimes help them lie, and to keep an eye on what they post, they become their Facebook friends. 
• This year, Consumer Reports estimated that Facebook had more than five million children under age 13.

That relatively innocuous family secret that allows a preteen to get on Facebook can have potentially serious consequences, including some for the child's peers who do not lie.

The study, conducted by computer scientists at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, finds that in a given high school, a small portion of students who lie about their age to get a Facebook account can help a complete stranger collect sensitive information about a majority of their fellow students.

In other words, children who deceive can endanger the privacy of those who don't.

The latest research is part of a growing body of work that highlights the paradox of enforcing children's privacy by law.

• For instance, a study jointly written this year by academics at three universities and Microsoft Research found that even though parents were concerned about their children's digital footprints, they had helped them circumvent Facebook's terms of service by entering a false date of birth.
• Many parents seemed to be unaware of Facebook's minimum age requirement; they thought it was a recommendation, akin to a PG-13 movie rating.

"Our findings show that parents are indeed concerned about privacy and online safety issues, but they also show that they may not understand the risks that children face or how their data are used," that paper concluded.

Facebook has long said that it is difficult to ferret out every deceptive teenager and points to its extra precautions for minors. For children ages 13 to 18, only their Facebook friends can see their posts, including photos.

That system, though, is compromised if a child lies about her age when she signs up for Facebook-and thus becomes an adult much sooner on the social network than in real life, according to the experiment by N.Y.U. researchers.

The key to the experiment, explained Keith W. Ross, a computer science professor at N.Y.U. and one of the authors of the study, was to first find known current students at a particular high school.

• A child could be found, for instance, if she was 10 years old and said she was 13 to sign up for Facebook.
• Five years later, that same child would show up as 18 years old-an adult, in the eyes of Facebook - when in fact she was only 15.
• At that point, a stranger could also see a list of her friends.

The researchers conducted their experiment at three high schools. They were able to construct the Facebook identities of most of the schools' current students, including their names, genders and profile pictures.

The researchers identified neither the schools nor any of the students. Their paper is awaiting publication.

Using a publicly available database of registered voters, someone could also match the children's last names with their parents' - and potentially, their home addresses, Professor Ross pointed out.

The Coppa law, he argued, seemed to serve as an incentive for children to lie, but made it no less difficult to verify their real age.

"In a Coppa-less world, most kids would be honest about their age when creating accounts. They would then be treated as minors until they're actually 18," he said. "We show that in a Coppa-less world, the attacker finds far fewer students, and for the students he finds, the profiles have very little information."

How children behave online is one of the most vexing issues for parents, to say nothing of regulators and lawmakers who say they wish to protect children from the data they scatter online.

Independent surveys suggest that parents are worried about how their children's social network posts can harm them in the future. A Pew Internet Center study released this month showed that most parents were not just concerned, but many were actively trying to help their children manage the privacy of their digital data. Over half of all parents said they had talked to their children about something they posted.

Teenagers seem to be vigilant, in their own way, about controlling who sees what on the pages of Facebook.

A separate study by the Family Online Safety Institute that was released in November found that four out of five teenagers had adjusted privacy settings on their social networking accounts, including Facebook, while two-thirds had placed restrictions on who could see which of their posts.

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New York NY/ With 'Social Reading,' Books Become Places to Meet

Stephen Duncombe, a professor who has created an online version of Thomas More's "Utopia," says he wanted to make a book of the future, "not just something bound between two covers, and words on a page."

By Jennifer Howard

The Chronicle of Higher Education

November 26, 2012

Stephen Duncombe thought he knew what he was going to do with his time off. "It was my sabbatical year, and what you do during a sabbatical year is you sit down and write a book," said Mr. Duncombe, an associate professor of media and culture at New York University. "I had a book planned, and I walked into a bookstore and thought, 'I can't do that.'"

Instead of writing a conventional monograph, he decided to experiment, aiming to move toward "what a book might look like in the future, when it's not just something bound between two covers, and words on a page."

• The result of his sabbatical labors has just gone live.
• Called Open Utopia, it's a free, online version of Thomas More's Utopia that anyone can browse-and annotate.

An example of what's sometimes called social reading, Open Utopia builds on the idea that a book doesn't have to be a static text.

Online, a book can be a gathering place, a shared space where readers record their reactions and conversations. Those interactions ultimately become part of the book too, a kind of amplified marginalia.

"We live in a world where people can talk back to their books," Mr. Duncombe told me.

More's classic work, published in Latin in 1516, explores what a perfect society might look like. It's been a staple of political philosophy for almost five centuries. A co-founder of the independent Center for Artistic Activism, Mr. Duncombe works with activists on how to use aesthetics to bring people to their cause. A couple of years ago, he traveled to Moscow to teach a Fulbright seminar on the political imagination. To prepare, he revisited Utopia.

"I read a completely different book than I remembered," he said. "I think it's because I was reading it in the context of the failed utopia of the Soviet Union."

That got him thinking about what More was really trying to do. For 500 years, readers have been debating the question "Is More serious or is he not serious?" Mr. Duncombe said. "I think they're missing the point." In his view, More is arguing that "if you want a new world, you're going to have to imagine it yourself."

More's text seemed like a good place to start reimagining. As a starting point, Mr. Duncombe used a free translation available on the Project Gutenberg Web site. He asked colleagues to help translate additional material not already in the public domain. The NYU scholar did fresh footnotes. He used Kickstarter to ask strangers for donations-bringing in about $4,500 to cover Web hosting, design, and other expenses.

Mr. Duncombe published the results online using CommentPress, open-source software by the Institute for the Future of the Book.

• Online discussion and commenting is made possible by Social Book, a social-reading platform created by the institute. Bob Stein, its founder, has been a vocal proponent of social reading for texts of all lengths.
• Open Utopia is one of several pilot projects now in progress. Social Book appealed to Mr. Duncombe because it aims "to create communities of people talking to each other."

In addition to serving as editor, sometime translator, and de facto publisher, Mr. Duncombe also did the early technical work himself. "I'm not a technical wiz at all, but I put together the first version of it myself," he told me. "These are tools that are well within the grasp of a literature professor or, in my case, a sociologist."

Utopian Project

Does the world really need one more edition of a book that's been steadily available for five centuries?

"It takes a bit of audacity to introduce yet another version of Utopia," Mr. Duncombe writes in the introduction to Open Utopia. "Yet I have done so here because what the world does not have, and what I believe it needs, is a complete English-language translation of Utopia that honors the primary precept of Utopia itself-that is, that all property is common property."

In that spirit, Open Utopia is published under a Creative Commons license, "open to read, open to copying, open to modification," the site announces.

Hoping to take the idea of reimagining even further, Mr. Duncombe also created a wiki called Wikitopia, where users can create their own visions of utopia.

It's too early to say whether the masses will take up the invitation. "I love the idea that there's a world out there of people clamoring" for an open, online edition of a 16th-century text, Mr. Duncombe said. "But that's a utopian idea itself."

The approach may play best in the classroom.

• Tara Gellene, an adjunct professor of English at NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, teaches a first-year writing course centered on utopian texts. Her students are using Wikitopia to dream up more-perfect societies.

Open Utopia made its debut too late for Ms. Gellene to assign, but she thinks that the social-reading approach could help solve a recurring challenge.

"Keeping the discussion around the text is always a problem, especially with something like Utopia, where people want to have political debates," she told me. With a shared reading platform, "the discussion becomes part of the text," which helps students stay focused.

• Another of Social Book's pilot projects took place at the University of Pennsylvania. Kenneth Goldsmith, a poet who teaches in the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, used the platform to have his "Uncreative Writing" class read Roland Barthes's essay "The Death of the Author."

Mr. Goldsmith told the class he expected everyone to comment. They did. The approach "generated enormous discussion," he told me. "Everybody was making comments as they were reading, which was kind of fascinating."

The experiment was almost too big a hit. "We couldn't get through everything," he said. But too much discussion is not a bad problem to have, and Mr. Goldsmith said he plans to use Social Book again.

For Open Utopia, Mr. Duncombe is managing expectations. "In my darker moments, I think maybe I've created a tool for a job that doesn't need to be done, or that may need to be done 10 years from now," he said.

Copyright creates a barrier to social reading's catching on in a big way. Mr. Duncombe had a public-domain text to build on, but many readers want recent material. So far publishers haven't rushed to provide copyrighted works to gather around online.

Even more critical, though, is how sociable readers really want to be. Conversation in the digital margins makes a lot of sense as a way to draw students into reading assignments. Will scholars and other booklovers embrace the idea?

A conventional book invites readers to shut out the world while they read. Social reading asks them to connect with others as they encounter the text. Whether that sounds like a more perfect world depends on the reader.