PSFA Daily News Digest

30 November 2012

www.nmpsfa.org 

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

Española / Mill-Levy on Ballot (Again) Next February

By Louis McGill

Rio Grande Sun Staff Writer

November 29, 2012

Despite getting voted down 700 to 445 just three months ago, on Feb. 5 the Española Public School District's two-mill levy is getting a second chance.

The Board of Education voted Nov. 20 for the second time in six months to put the two-mill levy question to a public vote.

The vote will be held simultaneously with the vote for Board member Coco Archuleta and Board President Floyd Archuleta's seats on the School Board, though those votes will only be open to the residents of school board districts 2 and 3.

The vote for the mill levy will be held district-wide.

District financial advisor Leo Valdez said the local charter schools have once again signed on to participate.

Superintendent Art Blea said the two-mill levy doesn't have as much latitude for spending as a general obligation bond, though it still has wiggle-room. However, he maintained that the District's primary concern is the upkeep of their buildings.

• "You can buy furniture, you can buy technology, but I think our biggest need is just having maintenance money so we don't have to drain the operational budget for such purposes," he said.

Floyd Archuleta said the District is in "dire need" of this funding to continue the maintenance of its facilities.

• With the short budget this year and the impending drop in funding next year, the District's operational budget will be stretched thin to both pay for the heavy price of instruction and bear the full brunt of maintenance costs on the District's aging facilities.
• While salaries cannot be funded by the mill-levy, the funds could pay for much of the $5,278,822.07 allocated to maintenance in the operational fund.

The challenges will likely be the same, Blea said. He predicts to run into similar problems with the anti-tax sentiment of the voters, the people who don't think the District is going in the right direction, and the property owners who have no stake in the quality of the schools and don't want their taxes raised.

"Those are the tough obstacles in an election," he said.

Blea predicted coupling the mill-levy election with a board election may bring out more voters.

"Of course, the fact that there's more voters doesn't mean they're going to vote for it, but it does bring in more of a voting public than the two-mill levy by itself," he said.

Floyd Archuleta declined to make any prediction on how the public would vote this time around, but he stressed the importance of getting information out to the public and implementing the lessons they learned from the attempt in September. Those lessons, he said, include the need for better communication with the public and the need for more involvement from the charter schools.

To improve their communication with the public, Blea said they will be getting airtime on local radio station KDCE to spread the word, along with public meetings and sending flyers home with students.

Blea said he felt some were confused about what affect the two-mill levy has on property taxes, which is a charge two dollars for every thousand dollars of taxable value. Taxable value is one third of a property's assessed value.

"The margin of defeat was so wide, though, that I don't think it was a winnable election at the time, regardless of information," he said. "But, we can do better."

As far as involving the charter schools, Coco Archuleta said they failed to participate much in the last election.

"If the mill gets passed, they'll tag along on the money train, and that's it," he said. "But they're not willing to come out and speak up and say why it needs to pass."

Floyd Archuleta said he was surprised by the lack of support for the last mill-levy in places which have benefited from the success of the general obligation bond.

"I'm disappointed to see that there's so much being done in people's communities and they didn't support it," Floyd said.

Building projects or not, voters have shot down the two-mill levy four times since 2007. In the most recent attempt, the opposition increased. In 2009, it lost by a scant 52 votes. In 2011, the measure failed by a similar margin of 50 votes. In September, 62 percent of voters went against the mill levy.

Regardless of history, Coco Archuleta said he feels the measure has a good chance of passing when it goes to a vote in February, because people will realize the need for it with the District's dire finances.

"It's a necessary thing. This school District is going to have to make some harsh decisions in the next year," he said.

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ABQ/ EDITORIAL: NCAA's Online Rule Backs Student Athletes

ABQ Journal

November 30, 2012  

The National Collegiate Athletic Association has thrown some public schools that offer online classes a curve ball. The ones dedicated to learning will make the necessary adjustments to catch it.

As of October, the NCAA no longer accepts online classes from charter school Southwest Secondary as well as some from Independence High in Rio Rancho and Oñate High in Las Cruces.

The change came about after critics of online courses called a foul on an APS senior who paid $200 to re-take his English class online through Southwest Secondary; he completed a semester of English in one weekend. While the state Public Education Department upheld the credit, APS has since restricted its students' non-APS online credits to those not reasonably offered by the district.

The NCAA ruling will most likely impact APS students who have been paying Southwest Secondary for online classes to maintain athletic eligibility, for retakes of classes they did poorly in, or to graduate. It could make students ineligible to play Division I or II sports or get athletic scholarships.

Southwest Secondary director Scott Glasrud says he hopes to prove the school's classes meet NCAA standards. That's the right call.

In 2010 the NCAA adopted legislation setting out requirements for nontraditional coursework to help ensure student athletes aren't just phoning it in, including that students taking online courses have ongoing access to a teacher for instruction, evaluation and other help. That means a real engaged teacher, not just a "help desk" where a teacher is on call. The NCAA also requires schools to establish a time period for course completion, including a minimum and a maximum.

These moves support the goal of ensuring that courses are rigorous enough to prepare high school student athletes to be college students. It makes sense. Southwest Secondary and other affected schools should step up their games as needed to comply.

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Washington DC/ Education Secretary Sharpens 2nd-Term Agenda, Stresses Teacher Quality

By Michele McNeil

Education Week [Edweek.com]

November 28, 2012

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan continued to lay out his priorities for the next four years in a speech today, emphasizing that he thinks teacher preparation is broken and that the best educators need to be teaching the highest-need children.

In remarks at the two-day forum in Washington of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, run by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Duncan said he has an "ambitious" second-term agenda that includes holding the line on initiatives he started during his first four years. He cited specifically the tough road ahead for common standards, common tests, and teacher evaluations.

"Do we have the courage to stay the course there?" he asked during his 30 minutes of remarks, which included a question-and-answer session.

As for renewed areas of emphasis, he clearly wants to focus on teacher and principal quality.

• He said teacher education programs are "part of the problem." Without getting specific, Duncan said there are a "number of things we plan to do," and said the department is looking at some sort of competitive initiative to foster innovation in schools of education.
• He continued, "We need to push very, very hard in schools of education." (This isn't a new area of concern, as the administration has pushed teacher-prep reform before.)

He also said he was extremely troubled that no schools or districts that he knows of work "systemically" to identify the best teachers and principals, then place them with the children with the highest needs. "We're not even in the game. We're not there yet," he said. So be on the lookout for a new initiative there, too.

Duncan also indicated that early education would get a renewed focus in his second term.

This marks the most widely viewed speech from Duncan since President Barack Obama was re-elected to a second term. Previous speeches to the Education Trust and to the Council of Chief State School Officers were to smaller audiences, and not broadcast online.

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Newark NJ/ Newark Global Village School Zone: School Turnaround Strategy Changes Course

By Sara Neufeld

Hechinger Report [Hechingerreport.org]

November 29, 2012

She thought of herself as an ordinary mother of four, one who did what she could to advocate for her kids in Newark public schools.

But Carol Tagoe's advocacy caught the eye of a New York University education reformer. And suddenly, the disarmingly friendly Trinidad native was working for the Newark Global Village School Zone, a partnership that heralded the promise of both educational and community revival in the city's impoverished Central Ward.

Tagoe's role was community mobilization.

• Over the 2011-2012 academic year, she organized dozens of "Chat and Chews" for hundreds of parents who came out to discuss how to support their children.
• There was even a "spring training" just for dads. Momentum built and as Tagoe helped other parents find their voices, she strengthened her own.
• "Who would've thought that me, an average mom, could mobilize parents to come out and seek the best interests of their children as well as the community?" said Tagoe, who is married to a manufacturing company manager and describes herself as "40ish."

Then last August, out of nowhere, Tagoe got an email from NYU saying her services would no longer be needed. The university had pulled the plug, citing a lack of responsiveness from the district. The Global Village initiative was over.

Global Village had arrived in Newark with great fanfare just three years earlier.

• During its short life, it extended the school day for many children at the seven schools it served,
• provided eyeglasses to students who needed them,
• distributed books to build home libraries, and
• connected parents with a variety of social services, from mental health care to housing assistance.

Much like the highly publicized Harlem Children's Zone, Global Village focused on the needs of entire families. It aimed to strengthen academics and help lift children in one of Newark's toughest neighborhoods out of poverty.

The partnership between Newark public schools and NYU would be less expensive than the one in Harlem, potentially making it a model to be replicated nationwide.  During the 2008 presidential campaign, then-candidate Barack Obama said he wanted to create 20 such zones around the country.  Foundations were willing to pay for it.

But as with so many prior attempts at reform, things didn't go according to plan.

• On the national scale, President Obama shifted strategy to provide immediate direct aid through an economic stimulus package rather than investing a few billion dollars a year to create anti-poverty zones that would take longer to show results.
• And in Newark, what had been billed as one of this downtrodden city's most ambitious reforms collapsed just before this school year started.
• NYU blamed the failure on a lack of support from Newark Superintendent Cami Anderson and Mayor Cory Booker.  Anderson has since begun a new reform initiative absorbing many Global Village concepts, notably the extended school day.

Among them is Quitman Street Renew School, with its 550 students in pre-kindergarten through eighth grade, where two of  Tagoe's children are enrolled. Quitman's population is more than 90 percent black and low income.

Long struggling academically, Quitman has been subject to many a turnaround effort. It survived a district proposal to shut it down two years ago. It is the only Global Village elementary school with the same principal as when the initiative began in 2010.

Pedro Noguera, the NYU professor who spearheaded the initiative and is widely considered one of the nation's leading authorities on urban school reform, says Anderson never got behind Global Village when she became Newark's superintendent in 2011, nor did Booker.  This year, Anderson closed three Global Village schools.

Now the remaining Global Village elementary schools, including Quitman, are targets of a new effort. They are among eight "renewal schools" in Newark that received building and technological upgrades last summer. Their principals were allowed almost free rein to hand-pick their own staff. They are also slated to have longer days.

Anderson's administration said foundations will work directly with the renewal schools to fund the services they need without NYU taking a cut as middleman. And those services will be provided against a backdrop of much stronger principal and teacher accountability for academic outcomes, including the new teacher performance bonuses included in a historic contract ratified in mid-November.

"For the first time, Newark Public Schools is putting forth a comprehensive turnaround strategy," Assistant Superintendent Peter Turnamian said. With Global Village, he said, NYU had assumed many functions of a school district-it provided strategic direction and valuable training in addition to being an intermediary for social service grants-and the district was no longer willing to outsource its responsibilities.

Low-performing schools tend to get stuck in what Noguera calls "reform churn," where nothing stays in place long enough to take hold. Although components of Global Village continue under the renewal school initiative, services were disrupted during the transition and parents felt let down again.

"Newark's been through so much in terms of  having  promises made and not fulfilled, and I think that's the worst part of this," Noguera said.

At the same time, schools like those in the Global Village zone are often subject to many reform efforts at once, resulting in inefficient and impractical measures that can be confusing and maddening for staff.

Quitman is now a renewal school.

• It is also getting state monitoring and money through yet another program, Gov. Chris Christie's initiative for low-performing schools.
• As November drew to a close, Quitman's principal was finalizing details on how he will use money from the state program combined with funding from the new teachers contract to restore the extended day for the rest of the academic year.
• Beyond bureaucratic complications is the difficulty of tackling education in tandem with poverty.
• The philosophy behind Global Village was that poverty is inextricably linked with academic performance, a force more than schools are able to handle on their own.

"If you want to really build sustainable school reform then you have to take into account poverty, the conditions of communities, and you have to work intentionally and systemically to weave all kinds of relationships and supports," Lauren Wells, who administered Global Village for NYU, told WNYC last spring.

It was Wells who hired Tagoe to work with the community in support of its children.

Rather than using poverty as an excuse, Wells said, "you have to consider poverty and the impacts of poverty in everything that you do to support kids' success in the schools."

'The Most Ambitious Reform'

In a July 2010 article in The New York Times about the launch of Global Village in Newark, educators and parents called it "the most ambitious reform to be tried here in decades."

The idea was to focus intensely on the needs of students and families at the city's Central High School and its six feeder elementary/middle schools. There would be longer school days, summer classes, health clinics and access to healthy food for the zone's 3,500 students, in addition to extensive professional development for teachers and principals to improve academics.

"We're going to give them every opportunity to succeed," then-Superintendent Clifford Janey told The Times. "We're going to get out of the way when necessary and enable leadership to grow and flourish."

A widely distributed PowerPoint presentation outlining the plans included a slide titled "Our Challenge."

"Our challenge," it said, "is to ensure that bureaucratic policies [and] political agendas ... do not overwhelm this potentially powerful seedling before it has an opportunity to take hold."

Shortly after the start of the Global Village initiative, Janey had stepped down as superintendent, forced out by the governor who saw him as not strong enough on systemic reforms and too soft on teachers unions.

The American education reform world is often divided:

• One camp wants increased accountability for the adults in schools, and
• the other believes change must start at home.
• The first puts a premium on reforms like merit pay and charter schools and often butts heads with unions. The second, backed by unions, prioritizes social interventions.

Global Village was clearly part of Camp No. 2. The Newark Teachers Union was an enthusiastic supporter.

Noguera said it might have failed because its agenda "was not sexy enough" in a city where the mayor is a major charter school advocate and the governor is pushing stronger school accountability. Although the test scores of Global Village schools remained low, he said the schools were undergoing structural changes needed for an academic turnaround.

When Cami Anderson replaced Janey as superintendent, "she kept thinking of what we were doing as just about community engagement, which was marginalizing it because therefore it wasn't about academics,"  Noguera said. "Urban superintendents know they're going to be judged by test scores so unless something bumps up scores, it takes a much lower priority for them."

Neither Anderson nor Booker would respond to Noguera's comments directly. But Anderson's administrators say she is deeply committed to community engagement and providing social services-in the context of academic progress.

• Besides the tensions between the district and NYU, several people involved in the Global Village initiative point to other issues involved in its collapse and raised questions about its sustainability.How much money was necessary to be effective? The Harlem Children's Zone has an annual budget of $70 million. Noguera said Global Village raised and spent about $1 million in three years. The cost structure was still in flux, but was it unrealistically low
• Should a separate nonprofit have been created to run daily operations rather than allow NYU to manage the program and take a cut of the funding
• Could Global Village have survived in the face of dwindling enrollment due to factors including the recession and the growth of charter schools
• Finally, was it worth investing in professional development when some staff members, tired and burnt out, didn't appear invested in the process?

Needs on All Fronts

With Global Village funding in the past two years, Quitman staff received extensive professional development supervised by Wells and NYU. Glover said the training was extremely high quality, so high that he hopes to be able to dip into his own budget to keep Wells on as a consultant. But it didn't change the fact that several teachers on his staff were not putting their all into their jobs.

"I see people working really, really hard, and not getting movement, and I know that's a difficult place for a person to exist," Wells said in her May interview with WNYC. (She left NYU in July and has declined to comment since.) "I also see people not working very hard at all, and that's just beyond comprehension to me."

This year, thanks to the power that Anderson granted Glover through the renewal school process, the principal replaced more than half the teachers on staff. He said the changes were a prerequisite for success at Quitman and vital if the school is to stand a chance of turning around.

With an energetic shift ushered in by the new teachers, Glover said, "you would've seen the results very quickly this year" if the professional development provided by Global Village had continued. Now he's leading teacher training on his own.

Glover said he believed the Global Village initiative could have worked well alongside the renewal school process; with funders still willing and enthusiastic, he didn't see why they had to be mutually exclusive.

• He said he needs help meeting the many social, emotional and health challenges that his students bring to school. "It's very hard when you have one social worker for 500 students to make sure you meet all of the needs," he said.

Many Quitman students benefitted from Global Village's ability to connect families with existing community resources, Glover said.

• One Global Village partnership did free vision testing for hundreds of Quitman students and provided eyeglasses to about 75 children found to need them.
• Another provided books that helped families build home libraries.

Global Village funded an extended school day for first- through fourth-graders at Quitman. From September until now, that extra time has been on hold.

Glover just figured out a way to restore and expand the extended day with the state and contract money. Starting in mid-December, all kindergartners through fifth-graders will stay until at least 4 p.m. instead of 2:55. More than 100 middle school students targeted for academic intervention will also be required to stay late, and the remaining middle school students can participate in optional clubs and tutoring.

A longer day is important to help students with academics and to keep them off the streets during the hours when young people are most likely to get into trouble.

Irene Cooper-Basch, executive officer of the Victoria Foundation, said she and other Global Village funders are still giving money but it is being redirected. They are contributing $1.2 million this year for the Newark Education Trust to divide among the renewal schools and a handful of other initiatives.

It's too soon to say whether that will reinstate all the other services that were lost. Turnamian, the assistant superintendent, said some consolidation in positions as well as school closings were necessary to fund the renewal schools.

The district took a heavy hit financially to give principals staffing autonomy since it must pay salaries of tenured teachers who were not given placements. About 200 teachers remain in that pool, according to district officials. They are being paid even though they don't have daily teaching assignments.

Glover had been looking forward to his students receiving access to organic food through Global Village. There was also talk of mobile dental vans to do teeth cleaning. Glover said many of his students don't go to the dentist, and those who do often don't have quality dental care, as evidenced by the preponderance of silver caps on their teeth. It's a small point but it bothers him.

While Quitman has its own on-site health clinic funded by the Jewish Renaissance Medical Center, children at other Global Village schools were relying on the initiative for access to health care beyond emergency room visits.

Tagoe's assistance with parental involvement was a key component in the Global Village initiative. Although district officials noted that each renewal school already had a full-time parent liaison, in places where parents historically have not been engaged, such efforts hardly seem duplicative to those in the trenches.

Quitman's liaison, Stephanie Ruff, pitches in on everything from cafeteria duty to subsidized lunch applications to getting children school uniforms and shoes and then enforcing that they wear them. Late into the evenings, she and the school social worker march into housing projects and pound on doors to track down parents.

The liaisons also organize events: a year-end luncheon to promote summer reading, a back-to-school barbeque and a voter registration drive, plus district-mandated meetings about the renewal school process.

Tagoe's meetings, aimed at parents from all seven schools in the zone and throughout the Central Ward, gave an opportunity to discuss the particulars of parenting. "I just offered something different from what a parent liaison would offer," Tagoe said.

Power for Parents

Andrea Peters is the mother of two girls at Quitman, in first and fifth grades. Last year she attended several Global Village "Chat and Chews" and found the sessions useful in her parenting.

"At one they had a doctor there that discussed children's attitudes and how you can go about, instead of yelling at them, trying to do a different technique," she recalled. "I got a lot of helpful information that I could use at home as far as reading with the kids ... opening up more of a dialogue with the kids so if they have a bad day they're not afraid to tell you."

Peters said she appreciated the information that Tagoe regularly provided to parents about the activities of schools in the zone. "It was good to communicate with other parents from different schools and other parents in general," she said.

Noguera said Global Village sought to right the wrongs of prior urban school reform efforts, and that meant empowering and organizing parents.

"If you go into affluent communities and you ask the educators who they're accountable to, they always say, 'to the parents we serve,'" he said. "That's important because it means the parents they serve matter... If you feel as though you can disregard the parents, it's probably going to influence the way you treat their children, too."

When Erskine Glover thinks about the differences between Newark and the suburban district in North Brunswick where his own two children go to school, stability is the first thing that comes to mind. "There's an element of consistency that exists in their schooling," he said. "There's a system and structure in place." Turnover among superintendents, principals and academic programs is extremely rare in North Brunswick.

On the flip side, Glover sometimes worries that his son, 15, and daughter, 12, miss out on "the hardcore challenge of really having to stretch that rubber band."

"I mean, there's something about being a child growing up in a tough community. There's a level of resilience that makes you who you are, and you bring it into the classroom. You're faced with an obstacle and you fight harder," he said. "My son's fight is to be a starter on the soccer team... My daughter's fight is to make sure she stays in cool with her circle of friends. It's not the same."

Tagoe is a Central Ward resident-she has a son and a daughter at Quitman and a son at Central, plus a daughter in college-and found that much of her job took place at the supermarket and the laundromat. The point, she said, was to "meet the community where they're at."

Sometimes her role was simply to lend an ear or offer a welcoming smile and hello to parents who weren't used to getting a warm reception at school. "Even saying a good morning breaks the ice of any parent," she said. "Just say, 'Hey, how's it going?' and all of a sudden they become like putty in your hand."

She gets frustrated by the stereotype that "we as parents don't care and we don't know what we want."

"We do know what we want," she said, "but no one ever took the time to ask us."

It pains her now when parents ask when the Chat and Chews will start up again. Glover, too, said he's been getting inquiries.

Tagoe is searching for another job but still volunteers to help when parents and students seek assistance or information, as many did in the days following Hurricane Sandy. Even though she isn't being paid anymore, the community's needs remain.

"I do what I do," she said. "I'm still there, but not on the grand scale."

One reform begets another: A breakdown of the initiatives at Quitman Street Renew School

• Newark Global Village School Zone: an anti-poverty program run by NYU and funded by foundations that brought professional development, parent organizing, an extended academic day and a host of social services to Quitman and six other schools. Ended in the summer of 2012
• Newark Renewal Schools: Superintendent Cami Anderson's turnaround strategy for eight low-performing schools that began in 2012 as Global Village was ending. Quitman received technological and building upgrades and, more significantly, principal autonomy over staffing. More than half the school's staff was replaced this year as a result. An extended school day will play a role with support from some of the same foundations that funded Global Village.
• New Jersey Priority Schools: increased monitoring and funding from Gov. Chris Christie's administration for 75 low-performing schools statewide.

The life and death-and now, the reincarnation-of Global Village illustrate the complexities of turning around the nation's lowest performing schools.

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Los Angeles CA/ No Consensus on Which Skills Should Be Included in Teacher Evaluations

Hechinger Report [Hechingerreport.org]

November 29, 2012

At least 30 states are launching new systems to evaluate teachers using more rigorous criteria about what makes a good teacher, but so far there is little consensus on what the criteria should be.

Teacher evaluations have become highly controversial as states introduce increasingly different models.

Can the quality of a teacher be measured by looking at just a few key skills, such as setting academic goals and running an effective class discussion?  Or should teachers be evaluated based on a broader range of abilities, including lesson-planning and content knowledge?

• In Los Angeles, teachers will soon be evaluated on a list of 61 criteria during classroom observations conducted by school administrators.
• Louisiana, by contrast, requires principals to look at just five skills in the observation portion of the state's new teacher evaluations.
• In most classrooms in Tennessee, principals use a checklist that includes 19 skills during observations that are part of a new, more intensive evaluation system launched last year. In each place, a teacher's rating will be based on a combination of classroom observations and student achievement data.

Both the longer and shorter observation checklists have met with criticism. The Los Angeles Times reports that while teachers participating in the roll-out of a new evaluation system planned for the Los Angeles Unified School District are generally optimistic about it, many administrators are concerned about the time it takes to observe and rate teachers on 61 skills. In Louisiana's case, Charlotte Danielson, the architect of a longer checklist on which Louisiana's observation tool is based, warned that the state's truncated version is simplistic and may lead to lawsuits.

The Los Angeles checklist is also based on Danielson's framework, but the district added extra skills to some of the evaluation areas to reflect the local context and California standards for teachers. And although the framework being piloted in Los Angeles is lengthy, the district is only focusing on a handful of areas while piloting the program this year, including "classroom climate" and "teacher interaction with students."

These two indicators appear in other observation rubrics across the country, but the importance they are given in different rating systems varies.

• Florida's Miami-Dade school district has also made teacher-student relationships a priority. There, teachers are rated on eight performance standards including "learning environment," which holds more weight in the evaluation score than the standards evaluating professionalism and communication. In Louisiana, assessments and procedures, or the extent to which the class "runs itself" through routines, are the priority, and separate indicators measuring a classroom's climate and learning culture were dropped.

Despite the lack of agreement about the details, the evaluations are becoming increasingly important as more states are using new evaluations to determine who can stay in the classroom. Under Louisiana's new system, teachers could lose their certification if they receive an "ineffective" rating for two years in a row.

• In Washington, D.C., 7 percent of the teaching force was fired after a controversial new evaluation system was launched two years ago. (The District of Columbia Public Schools originally included a total of 22 standards in its observation framework, but dropped the number to 18 after teachers complained that the number of requirements was overwhelming.)

When the Measures of Effective Teaching project, a study in six districts funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, observed nearly 3,000 teachers using five different observation systems, researchers found that it didn't really matter which practices were emphasized on an evaluation. Teachers who more effectively demonstrated the types of practices emphasized in any given system had greater student achievement gains than other teachers. (Disclosure: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is among the many funders of The Hechinger Report.)

But educators and researchers say the observation process is not meant just to identify which teachers are high-performing. It's also supposed to help low-performing teachers improve their practice.

• "The goal of supervision and evaluation should be to develop expert teachers who are self-correcting," said Michael Toth, CEO of the Learning Sciences Marzano Center for Teacher and Leadership Evaluation, an organization that develops teacher evaluation tools, in a press release.

Toth cited results of a study that found teachers assessed with more detailed observation tools are more likely to change their classroom practices. "The more specific the model is ... the better the model will be in driving teacher development," Toth said.

Some teachers in Los Angeles told the Los Angeles Times that their new evaluation system does just that by focusing on specific areas and encouraging collaboration and reflection. Last year, 450 teachers and 320 administrators tested the system. By the end of this school year, every principal and one volunteer teacher at each school in the district will be trained, with a district-wide roll-out date still to be determined.

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New York NY/ Not Just 4 Texting: 1 in 3 Middle-Schoolers Uses Smart Phones for Homework

A new survey by the Verizon Foundation finds that middle-schoolers, across income levels, are using mobile apps to learn math, do 'virtual' labs, and collaborate with peers on projects.

By Stacy Teicher Khadaroo, Staff Writer

CSMonitor.com

November 29, 2012

A new survey finds that about a third of middle-schoolers now use smart phones or tablets not just for entertainment and communication, but also for homework.

Paired with young people's interest in science, math, and technology, it's another sign of the potential for digital learning that educators are slowly beginning to tap.

"Most people talk about STEM subjects and technology at the high school level, [but] the critical intervention really should be happening in the middle school, because that's the age when kids either can get excited about science and technology and math ... or they can get turned off," says Rose Stuckey Kirk, president of the Verizon Foundation, which commissioned the new survey.

The national survey of 1,000 students in Grades 6 through 8 found that:

• 39 percent use smartphones for homework.
• 26 percent use smartphones at least weekly for homework.
• 31 percent use tablets for homework.
• 29 percent of those with household incomes under $25,000 use smartphones for homework.
• Hispanics and African-Americans are more likely than whites to use smartphones for homework, at 49 percent, 42 percent, and 36 percent, respectively.

Beyond accessing information over the Internet on such devices, students often turn to free apps to play games to help them master math concepts, to virtually "dissect" an animal or analyze clouds and condensation, and to collaborate with peers on projects, Ms. Kirk says.

Yet schools and teachers struggle to keep up with students' interest in the ever-changing technology landscape.

Some educators are hesitant to embrace more digital devices for fear it will open up a Pandora's box beyond their control, education experts say. For some, concerns may be based on reports of teens being distracted by games in class or using technology to bully other students, while others may simply not have the confidence that they can master the new technology and harvest it for productive purposes, especially given time and budget constraints.

But some schools and whole districts are jumping into digital technologies to try to engage both students and teachers in a new way, one they see as better adapted to the demands of 21st-century jobs.

• Among the middle-schoolers surveyed, 88 percent said they are not allowed to use smartphones for learning purposes in school, and 68 percent said the same about tablets.
• Such restrictions on technology use are even more common among low-income students, the survey found. Yet half of African-American and Hispanic middle-schoolers, who are more often concentrated in low-income schools, report an interest in science and computer science.

"We have an opportunity inside of those environments to be very deliberate in how we engage students," Kirk says. "Digital devices can have an impact. But we can also make it about the STEM subjects, and move these kids onto a pathway that could result in higher incomes."

The Verizon Foundation already offers training to educators on integrating mobile technology into lesson plans.

Now it is partnering with the Technology Student Association and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to sponsor the Innovative App Challenge.

Hundreds of teams of students are conceptualizing mobile applications that incorporate STEM activities and contribute to solving a problem in their schools or communities.

Five teams from middle schools and five from high schools will be chosen as winners. In addition to winning Samsung Galaxy Tabs for themselves and $10,000 grants for their schools, they'll be given assistance to create their apps and bring them to the public.

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Washington DC/ Online Charter Schools Spent Millions of Taxpayer Dollars on Advertising to Recruit New Students

Huffington Post Report

November 29, 2012

An analysis by USA Today has revealed that 10 of the largest online charter schools spent an estimated $94.4 million in taxpayer dollars on advertising over the past five years. The largest, Virginia-based K12 Inc., spent approximately $21.5 million in just the first eight months of 2012.

The estimates are based on advertising rates and buys compiled by Kantar Media, a New York-based provider of "media and marketing intelligence," according to the paper. K12 spokesman Jeff Kwitowski declined to comment to USA Today on whether the estimates are accurate, but defended the company's marketing strategy.

"We try our best to ensure that all families know that these options exist," Kwitowski told USA Today. "It's really about the parents' choice - they're the ones that make the decision about what school or program is the best fit for their child."

According to the Colorado consulting firm Evergreen Education Group, about 275,000 students nationwide attend school online full-time.

While charter schools claim they need to spend money on advertising to make parents and students aware of their institutions, critics contend the public dollars the schools receive could be better spent helping current students learn, rather than recruiting new ones.

In Ohio, critics of the online charter school system also argue that local taxpayer support would be better served funding public schools in districts that are facing budget crises. An NPR report that online schools can operate by spending just $3,600 per student, but Ohio pays online charter schools close to $6,300 per student, leaving companies with a substantial amount to devote to advertising.

That advertising money is spent on popular websites, as well as on ads directed at students.

• According to NPR, the Ohio Distance and Electronic Learning Academy is one of several online charter schools that advertise on Facebook, and the organization also has banner ads that show up on sites for students seeking help coping with depression.
• Similarly, Connections Academy, which is operated by Pearson, purchased Google ads that show up next to a search for "bullied at school."
• USA Today reports K12 strives to target children with its television and web ads; the for-profit online learning company spent an estimated $631,600 to advertise on Nickelodeon, $601,600 on The Cartoon Network and $671,400 on MeetMe.com. It also bought $3,000 worth of ads on VampireFreaks.com, which claims to be "the Web's largest community for dark alternative culture."

Critics also point to the low success rates of online charter schools. K12's Ohio Virtual Academy has a four-year graduation rate of just 30 percent, while its Virtual Academy in Colorado only graduates 12 percent of its students.

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Denver CO/ Board OKs Charter School on North High School Campus Despite Protests

By Karen Augé and Joey Bunch

The Denver Post

November 29, 2012

About 30 North High School students, parents and community supporters formed a conga line of sorts outside the Denver Public Schools headquarters Thursday afternoon as they chanted, "Hey, hey, ho, ho, co-location's got to go."

But despite their protests, North will share its historic campus with a charter high school. By a vote of 4 to 3, the DPS board decided late Thursday that STRIVE Preparatory Schools' new high school will join the traditional one on the northwest Denver campus.

Board members Arturo Jimenez, Andrea Merida and Jeannie Kaplan voted against the proposal.

The vote capped months of impassioned protest by a group of northwest Denver parents, who charged that putting the STRIVE charter school at North would jeopardize progress the traditional school is making.

Those opponents, many part of a group called Choose North Now, said the district hasn't come to grips with the fact that northwest Denver's demographics are changing and more affluent young families are moving into the area.

• The district looked at different numbers and saw that currently, only 45 percent of the 1,366 high school students in North's boundary area attend that school
• Enrollment at North has plummeted from 1,800 in 1993 to 744 this fall, as the school has struggled academically.
• The district agrees that the decline in enrollment has stopped but says even if new families move into the area, it's unlikely all the empty space at North will ever be filled again with noncharter students.

The STRIVE school will accommodate up to 500 students.

Thursday afternoon, before the board meeting, dozens of opponents protested outside district headquarters.

Students carried homemade signs reading, "Demand equality now" and "North is a rising star."

Angie Valdez, a sophomore at North, said she was concerned that an influx of more students at a STRIVE school would drain resources from hers.

Jimenez, the school-board member for the area, told the group he, too, opposed the plan. "We don't want to set up one school that's for one set of students and another high school for another group of students," he said.

Renee Martinez- Stone, one of the protest organizers, said the opposition was not aimed at the STRIVE school but, rather, stems from concern that housing two schools in one building will derail efforts to revive North.

Putting a second high school on the campus sends a message that North is a lesser school and would create instability on campus, Stone said. Such instability on campus could very well drive off parents thinking of enrolling their children there, she said.

At the board meeting, Superintendent Tom Boasberg said the district will work with residents to build the traditional school at North.

"We will, under no circumstances, place any constraints on North's growth," he said.

If North enrollment grows to the point that both schools can't exist on one campus, "we will find and pay for a new building for STRIVE," he said.

In June, the board put off voting on the issue to look for alternative locations, but none of the proposed sites worked out.

STRIVE, formerly known as West Denver Prep, already operates a middle school of 312 students on the North campus. That middle school will be moved to the vacant Remington Elementary School building, near Interstate 70 and Pecos Street.

Before the final vote, Merida proposed locating STRIVE at North for two years, or at Remington permanently. That proposal was voted down.

STRIVE Preparatory Schools operates seven tuition-free charter schools that serve 1,750 sixth- through ninth-graders. STRIVE charter schools typically perform well, despite a student population that is 90 percent low-income.