Las Cruces/ US Department of Education: NM Graduation Rate 1 of Nation's Lowest
By Lindsey Anderson
Las Cruces Sun-News
December 1, 2012
New Mexico has one of the worst four-year high school graduation rates in the nation and falls at the bottom of the pack when analyzing rates across nearly every demographic, according to 2010-2011 preliminary data released this week by the U.S. Department of Education.
The data are the first under the department's new method of calculating graduation rates across states.
Only Nevada, the District of Columbia and the Bureau of Indian Education rank below New Mexico on the percentage of all students graduating in four years.
- 63 percent of New Mexican students in the Class of 2011 graduated in four years.
"It's a compelling example of why we need to have a sense of urgency for our kids," Education Secretary-Designate Hanna Skandera said.
Though the rate is 4.3 percent lower than previous years, the Department of Education report cautioned such changes are not measures of progress or decline but merely a more accurate view under the new system.
Twenty-six states reported lower graduation rates and 24 reported unchanged or higher rates, according to the department.
NM behind in most demographics
- New Mexican students with disabilities were the least likely to graduate, at 47 percent of students. The rate is more than double that of the lowest, 23 percent in Mississippi and Nevada, but far from South Dakota's high at 84 percent.
- 14 percent of New Mexican students have disabilities.
Education for all students is a civil rights issue, Skandera said.
"New Mexico is fundamentally failing our students on that civil rights issue," she said.
Elsewhere across the board, from low-income to Native American to black students, New Mexico always fell in the bottom quarter nationwide.
Even the demographic most likely to graduate in the state, Asian and Pacific Islanders at 78 percent, fell toward the bottom when compared with other states.
About 1 percent of New Mexican students are Asian or Pacific Islander.
Only when it came to students with limited English proficiency, 16 percent of New Mexican students, did the state rank about midway with a 56 percent graduation rate.
But Skandera said she won't focus on a "silver lining, because I don't see it yet."
- White students were the second most likely to graduate in four years at 70 percent. They make up 26 percent of New Mexican students.
- Black students, 2 percent of the student body, had a 60 percent graduation rate.
- Hispanic students, the majority of students at 59 percent, posted a 59 percent graduation rate.
- Native American and Alaskan Native students, who make up 10 percent of the New Mexican student body, had a 56 percent graduation rate.
- Low-income students saw a 56 percent graduation rate. They make up a significant chunk of the New Mexican student body at 67 percent of students compared to 48 percent nationally.
New calculation method
Overall, Iowa saw the highest percentage of all students graduate with 88 percent, followed by Wisconsin and Vermont with 87 percent.
The District of Columbia had the lowest with 59 percent. The Bureau of Indian Education saw 61 percent and Nevada 62 percent.
Data for Idaho, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Puerto Rico were not available.
The new calculating method requires schools to have written confirmation before removing a student from their count, aiming to ensure students who drop out aren't counted as transfers if they don't enroll elsewhere.
Even if students are on a five-year individual education plan, they are counted against the school as students who don't graduate in four years, said Tracie O'Hara, director of the Las Cruces Public Schools assessment, accountability and research department.
Addressing the rates
LCPS officials say they are working to intervene in students' lives when they aren't achieving or when they aren't attending school.
LCPS's three traditional high schools, excluding the new Centennial High School, have about a 72 percent graduation rate, compared to about 54 percent five years ago, said Steven Sanchez, LCPS associate superintendent.
One initiative identifies high-school students struggling in Algebra I, a graduation requirement, and places them in an "intervention" class with the same teacher for Algebra I and II.
Another program helps kindergarten through second grade students struggling with reading so they're on track for third grade, O'Hara said.
The best indicator of whether students will graduate high school is whether they were proficient readers in third grade, Skandera said, noting that those who aren't proficient are four times more likely to drop out.
"It's not just about that graduation rate," O'Hara said. "We have to keep our kids in school and engage them from kindergarten."
New Mexico 2010-2011 Four-year Graduation Rates:
- All students: 63 percent (low: D.C. 59%, high: Iowa 88%)
- Native American: 56 percent (low: Minn. 42%, high: Tenn. 89%)
- Asian/Pacific Islander: 78 percent (low: S.D. 45%, high: Texas 95%)
- Black: 60 percent (low: Nev. 43%, high: Mont. and Texas 81%)
- Hispanic: 59 percent (low: Minn. 51%, high: Maine: 87%)
- White: 73 percent (low: Ore. 70%, high: Texas 92%)
- Children with disabilities: 47 percent (low: Miss. and Nev. 23%, high: S.D. 84%)
- Limited English proficiency: 56 percent (low: Ariz. 25%, high: S.D. and Vt. 82%)
- Low-income: 56 percent (low: Nev. 53%, high: S.D. 86%)
Source: U.S. Department of Education
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ABQ/ Teacher Theresa Sandoval Brings Agriculture to Kindergarten Class
By Glen Rosales
ABQ Journal
December 1, 2012
Dolores Gonzales Elementary School kindergarten teacher Theresa Sandoval must be doing something right, as she recently earned two prominent honors.
Within the past three weeks, Sandoval was named the New Mexico Agriculture in the Classroom Teacher of the Year and also was one of seven New Mexico elementary teachers to earn the Golden Apple Award for Excellence in Teaching.
"I was honored," Sandoval said of the recognition. "Everything I do is all for my kids. I want them to come to school every day. Kindergarten is the foundation of coming to school and enjoying it. I want to do the best I can for them. I want them to enjoy school and accept school and succeed in life."
She received the agriculture award from the New Mexico Farm & Livestock Bureau for her work in teaching the importance in agriculture, said Denise Williams, who directs the bureau's Agriculture in the Classroom program.
Holding a basket, Theresa Sandoval teaches the students in her classroom. Sandoval has agriculture-related events each Friday. "I want students to see the big picture of where our food comes from," she said.
Sandoval "makes each day an incredible educational journey that her students won't soon forget," Williams said. "She definitely has that magic touch. Luckily for the members of New Mexico Farm & Livestock Bureau and the agriculture community, this amazing teacher is also one of your biggest fans."
Sandoval met Williams at the New Mexico State Fair in 2011 and the teacher learned quite a bit from that experience.
Williams helped Sandoval and four other teachers create an Agricultural Day at the school in April. Students in all grades were able to participate.
Parents with animals took part by bringing goats and sheep, and a teacher with an in-law who has horses brought one to the Barelas-area school.
New Mexico Game and Fish provided information about protecting and conserving wildlife and Southwest Dairies donated coloring books for the students.
It went so well, "I decided it was going to be a tradition," Sandoval said.
But that was just the start for her, as this school year Sandoval has specific agriculture-related events each Friday.
- "I want students to see the big picture of where our food comes from," she said. "I asked them where it comes from and they said, 'the store.' I explained about the soil and the sun and water and ranchers and farmers."
It was that dedication to an all-important topic that led to Sandoval's recognition, Williams said.
- "Sandoval does an exceptional job of helping students see agriculture beyond the grocery store shelves," she said. "Her students know that farmers and ranchers are important, and that is why we are celebrating her."
As the world population continues to balloon, "it's going to be very important to get more students into agriculture," Williams said. "We have to supply that demand."
Sandoval earned an all-expenses-paid trip to Minneapolis, Minn., next summer for a four-day conference where she has a chance to be the National Agriculture in the Classroom Teacher of the Year.
"I was honored," Sandoval said about the recent recognition of her work. "Everything I do is all for my kids. I want them to come to school every day. Kindergarten is the foundation of coming to school and enjoying it."
In addition, she'll get to network with other teachers and professionals to come up with new ideas to further the cause.
"I couldn't have been able to do this without my principal's support," Sandoval said, referring to Lori Stuit. "She has really supported me."
Sandoval's overall performance in the classroom also resulted in a Golden Apple Award, selected from 144 applicants.
Nominated by parents of a student she had last school year, Sandoval said she had to fill out an extremely extensive application, then was visited for a full day in the classroom by award representatives.
Those representatives also interviewed her, students, other teachers and Stuit. They checked students' work and examined lesson plans.
When it was over, Sandoval was one of seven teachers in the state selected for the honor from the Golden Apple Foundation of New Mexico.
- "I really believe in community involvement and parent involvement," she said in explaining her success. "The community has so much to offer and they're willing to do it, if you ask."
Sandoval, who has been teaching for 12 years at Dolores Gonzales, tries to take her students on as many field trips as possible to get hands-on learning. So she has become an expert at finding grant money to pay for the trips.
As part of the award, Sandoval earned $1,500 as a personal stipend "but that's probably going to field trips to pay for bus trips," she said. "We always do some type of activity connected with the trip."
Sandoval also earned $4,000 for personal development and a laptop computer.
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Taos/ Tierra Lucero Raising Funds for School Greenhouses
By Matthew van Buren
Taos News
December 2, 2012
Taos nonprofit Tierra Lucero is seeking financial help to get a new educational collaboration off the ground.
The fundraising effort, which Executive Director Bob Pedersen said is one of the largest in the organization's history, centers on establishing farms at school sites in order to get students involved in local food and supplement school nutrition programs with healthy, student-grown food.
"I think I have a solution that is starting to get some traction," Pedersen said.
The initial goal is to build "mini-sliding greenhouses" at six schools, including four in Taos, as well as acquire the equipment needed to establish a workshop to carry the project into the future.
"I've been putting in school gardens for a decade, at least," Pedersen said.
He said lately there is a greater amount of community interest and that Superintendent Rod Weston has been "very supportive" of Tierra Lucero's work with the schools. Tierra Lucero was involved in establishing the garden at Parr Field, near Enos García Elementary School; that site also includes a rolling greenhouse like the ones being proposed.
According to information Pedersen prepared, the 5-foot-tall, 7-foot-wide greenhouses slide into three different positions "to produce multiple crops from one greenhouse structure." They can also be used year-round.
"They produce at least twice as much food annually as compared to a stationary greenhouse structure," Pedersen's statement reads.
If the new project is funded, the first greenhouses would be constructed at Taos High School, Enos García Elementary School, Taos Charter School and Taos Academy, as well as two Albuquerque school sites.
Children help in the construction of the greenhouses, and the farms are "designed to produce a meaningful portion of the school's cafeteria needs." Pedersen said the project also has applications for the culinary and vocational programs at Taos High. He said he was approached by vocational and "green building" instructor Mark Goldman, who is also chair of UNM-Taos' Construction Technology Department, about students helping with the fabrication of the greenhouses.
Taos High culinary arts instructor Benjie Apodaca said he sees the potential for such a partnership to benefit his students.
"We have been talking about it for some time," he said.
Pedersen said he has spoken with a number of other interested schools. He said the project could take off regionally and result in job creation in Taos.
"We believe this thing has potential way beyond Taos," he said.
Tierra Lucero is attempting to raise a total of $36,000 for the project by Dec. 31. Pedersen said:
- a "big chunk" of the funds raised would go toward the purchase of tools and equipment used in greenhouse construction;
- a share would fund the construction of the gardens themselves, including materials and installation;
- some would be spent on an interactive Web presence, which would allow program participants to track the project's progress and communicate with each other; and
- a portion would go toward administration and labor.
Some of the funds raised would also be used to send "rewards" to doors. They include consultations with Pedersen regarding farming and gardening, Tierra Lucero's "Beyond Organic" compost and mini-sliding greenhouse kits, including compost, an assortment of seeds, drip irrigation and instruction manual.
Pedersen said the all-or-nothing fundraising model developed by the Kickstarter organization, based in New York, appealed to him in part because of its ability to reach anyone with Internet access. He said he is depending on those interested in the project to solicit funds from friends and relatives who live outside of Taos.
"We've got a pretty large dollar goal," he said, adding that there is a lot of competition among local nonprofits. "I think we're tapped out (in Taos)."
Pedersen said Kickstarter is "circumventing the foundation" by cutting administrative costs and allowing donors to see the results of their giving in a more direct way.
- According to information from Kickstarter, it applies a 5-percent fee to funds collected but encourages a direct relationship between donors and the organizations they fund.
- Under the "all-or-nothing" model Kickstarter employs, if a project falls short of its fundraising goal, none of those who pledged funds are charged.
If Tierra Lucero meets its $36,000 goal, those who pledged donations will be charged Dec. 31.
Pedersen said donations made to Tierra Lucero are 100 percent tax-deductible.
If the funding comes through, work is expected to begin Jan. 1, and the six school mini-farms should be completed by April 15, weather-permitting.
For information or to donate online, visit www.kickstarter.com/projects/2023463435/going-beyond-organic-with-backyard-and-schoolyard. Those interested in donating may also contact Pedersen by phone at (575) 779-5457. For more information about Tierra Lucero, visit www.tierralucero.org.
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Santa Fe/ COLUMN: A Welcome Taste of Teaching
By Robert Nott [Learning Curve columnist]
The New Mexican
December 2, 2012
''Teaching is not a lost art, but regard for it is a lost tradition," said the late French-born educator and scholar Jacques Barzun, who passed away in October.
Last summer, a local representative from Citizen Schools - a national organization that partners with individual schools to offer extended learning time that includes remedial training, college-pathway workshops and apprenticeships in career-related topics - asked me if I would teach a journalism class to seventh-graders at De Vargas Middle School. Citizen Schools is in its fifth year of operation there, and it offers another 90 minutes-plus of schooling to students every day.
It's a volunteer position that requires participants to be in the classroom for about 90 minutes one day every week and requires at least another 90 minutes of preparation and post-class feedback. I sought advice on the offer. One friend told me, "Middle school kids? You're nuts!" Another said, "You'll fit right in. You generally act like a seventh-grader yourself."
I said yes because I wanted to get at least a 1 percent taste of what teachers experience. And I got it.
I quickly found out what it is like to try to manage a room of 20 kids. One is an English-language learner who transferred here from another country and reads at about the fifth-grade level. I can speak passable Spanish, but every time I slowed down to speak directly to this student, it threw off the rhythm of the class. Engaging a student translator seemed a smart idea, but then I'd have to slow the lesson plan to give the translator time to convey the message.
There was the really sharp kid, who I knew I could count on, who transferred to another school midway through the semester. And the equally sharp kid who wouldn't possibly let me down who decided to skip/miss a couple (or maybe three) classes - before coming through with flying colors.
There was the kid I immediately wrote off by his/her looks - I can spot trouble from a mile away - who made me realize within just one class that I had stupidly judged a book by its cover. That student is brilliant and ready to learn and work.
There was the news that I would lose a day of teaching due to parent/teacher conferences. I blew a gasket over that one. There was the day midway through the semester when I walked into class without a lesson plan, figuring I could wing it. I paid for that one, and learned my lesson.
Not one of these issues is a negative. And as far as I am concerned, the job has a ton of positives - working with a caring, giving, supportive mentor teacher in Amanda Worrell, and watching the kids take chances and offer suggestions and take ownership of the newspaper that the class will produce. They named it De Vargas Buzz.
There was the pride I took in watching the class work together to prepare, rehearse and then ask questions of school board President Frank Montaño and Superintendent Joel Boyd, among other visitors. There was incredible joy in seeing two of the class's quietest, shyest kids go off on their own to jointly research and write a story on Citizen Schools' programs within De Vargas.
And a bonus point: Walking through the halls at lunchtime (to work with the kids on various stories) and hearing them call out my name, seemingly in pride and excitement (one hopes). For some reason, they took to calling me "Mr. Robert." I didn't correct 'em.
De Vargas Principal Diane Garcia Piro paid me a huge compliment one day after I ran into her at a school board meeting and recited a litany of my own failings, challenges and success stories. "You sound just like a teacher," she said.
In truth, I doubt I experienced even 1 percent of what a teacher goes through day after day.
I'm not praising or criticizing Citizen Schools with this column. But the Citizen School apprentice teachers - all volunteers - and their students will showcase and demonstrate their work during a WOW! event from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Friday, Dec. 7, at De Vargas Middle School on Llano Street. The public is invited.
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ABQ/ COLUMN: Child's Reading Raises New Horizons
By Joline Gutierrez Krueger [UpFront columnist]
ABQ Journal
December 3, 2012
Her eyes widen and a smile - minus one front baby tooth - spreads across her face when she sees what's inside the grocery bag I have brought her.
"Books! Books!" she squeals as she grabs one to show her mother. "I want to read, Mama."
And so Zi'On Liberti reads, nestled in her mother's arms, ignoring any attempt by me to engage her in a conversation about how she, as a 6-year-old, has come to read so well and so voraciously.
"She reads everything," mother Antoinette Liberti beams. "Signs at the bus stop, ingredients on lotion bottles, even what's written on the fire alarms here."
Oh yes, that.
Two days before our meeting, Zi'On read the words "PULL DOWN" on the handle of a fire alarm, and so she pulled down, setting off sirens, forcing residents to scurry outside and summoning a phalanx of screeching firetrucks to the place she calls home.
"Sometimes," father Jon Liberti chuckles, "she reads too much."
Home since July for Zi'On, her parents and little sister, Alfreda, 4, is Joy Junction, the largest homeless shelter in New Mexico, located in a sprawling, spare compound on Second SW in Albuquerque.
Antoinette Liberti beams with pride as she listens to daughter Zi'On, 6, read. The mother says she was once a good student herself until a meth addiction derailed her plans to be a pediatrician.
"I have probably gotten to spend more time with my family here than I ever have," Jon Liberti says. "They are what keep me going."
Reading, it appears, is what keeps Zi'On going when she is not attending first grade at the nearby Mountain View Elementary or involved in the various children's programs at Joy Junction.
Reading is what takes Zi'On to other lands, away from here.
It is how I found her. A photo of her reading was posted on Facebook by Joy Junction founder and CEO Jeremy Reynalds. The book in the photo, the caption said, was the fourth she had tackled that day.
Such a ravenous reader, I figured, could use a few more books. So I piled a couple dozen my children had outgrown and brought them along.
As Zi'On reads, her parents - both well-spoken and gregarious, if slightly frenetic - tell me about what brought them to Albuquerque.
They hail from Sacramento, where Jon worked for the county picking up bodies from crime scenes, suicides, hospitals, homes. It was a hard job because of the long hours, not the cargo, he says.
"I don't know. For some reason, the bodies didn't bother me," he says. "Even the babies."
Antoinette was a dispatcher for the county, and that's how the two met. They married seven years ago. He was 31; she was 21.
Jon says he started using methamphetamines to keep up with the long work hours; Antoinette used them to become thin like the women on "America's Next Top Model," one of her favorite reality TV shows.
"Next thing we know we are buying meth instead of paying the gas bill," she says. "It became everything. We lost everything."
Including Zi'On and Alfreda.
The girls were 2 and 1 in the fall of 2009 when their parents were arrested on charges of child endangerment and drug possession. According to a Sacramento police news release, the girls were found half naked, crying and wandering in the cold near their apartment complex. Police located the family's apartment, which was in disarray, with no food but plenty of drug paraphernalia, meth and a tweaked-out Jon Liberti.
"They took my babies away from me," Antoinette says. "That's when I knew we had to change."
Both served jail time, entered drug rehab and took parenting classes. They left Sacramento to find jobs and break away from the meth culture.
They arrived in Albuquerque in June 2012, but the lure of meth proved too great and they succumbed. Their car broke down, money ran out and Antoinette's purse with all their identification and important documents was stolen.
"The worst night was when we had no more money for a hotel and we had to sleep in the Greyhound Bus station downtown," Jon says. "That's when we had to let go of our pride and ask for help. We realized we couldn't do this on our own."
So they called Joy Junction.
The couple says they are now in the facility's recovery program, though they admit they continue to fight a craving for meth.
"I'm not going to lie," Antoinette says. "I liked it."
But they love their girls more.
Jon found temporary work during the State Fair and is hoping for a job ringing a Salvation Army bell while he waits for his IDs to be replaced.
Antoinette worked for the Obama campaign and plans to attend CNM next semester.
The family is on a waiting list for Section 8 housing.
In the meantime, they say they are thankful for Joy Junction, thankful to be clean, thankful to be together.
Recently, Alfreda started attending Peanut Butter and Jelly Therapeutic Preschool. Education, they say, is something they stress.
"I was smart once," Antoinette says. "I love how Zi'On loves reading like I do."
With that, Zi'On lifts her head briefly from her book - her third since I arrived - and then goes back to reading, lost in the pages.
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Santa Fe/ OPINION: Hats Off to New Mexico School for the Arts Cindy Principal Montoya
By Nancy Bowman [Bowman has a son who has attended the New Mexico School for the Arts during its entire three years]
The New Mexican
December 1, 2012
I am writing this little note to brag gently yet sincerely about Cindy Montoya. She is our most excellent principal at New Mexico School for the Arts here in Santa Fe. Recently, she was named Principal of the Year for all New Mexico public charter schools.
New Mexico School for the Arts, a public charter high school with an academic and arts focus, has been open three years. Montoya came to us during the second year. The school had an exciting first year and yet was still new enough when Montoya became principal that all the challenges and growing pains involved in the process of becoming an excellent school were ever-present. New Mexico School for the Arts needed leadership that was able to not only deal wisely with the challenges, but to imagine and hold steadfast to a vision of what the school needed to be, now and eventually.
Montoya came into her role as principal with ability, intelligence, honesty, humbleness and a willingness to learn, grow and lead. She actually seems to know how to be that definition of a true leader - a servant/leader. She has proven time and time again her level of commitment to the present and future excellence of our school.
The students, parents and families of New Mexico School for the Arts had our own vision of what we expected it to offer the students. Academically and in the arts, we expected a community atmosphere of excellence, with kindness, and strong mentoring with dignity, respect and skill. The ideal was not just a philosophy we spoke of - we expected that it would be experienced and practiced.
Our principal has proven that she is dedicated to doing all she can to assure that the whole of the school community provides a nurturing and inspiring atmosphere that encourages students to thrive as individuals and as respected members of that community. It is never work that is finished: Human beings are complex, and often apparently impossible challenges appear. We are grateful that Montoya has role-modeled that with kindness, patience, willingness and wisdom, solutions and inspired resolutions can manifest. And she is a great one for a laugh when a laugh is needed!
She works endlessly with students, staff and families to keep communication open and helpful, respectful and useful. She is able to hold a vision of what New Mexico School for the Arts represents, and works steadily and endlessly to nudge and direct minor and major communications and actions to stay in alignment with that overall standard of excellence. As principal, Montoya is committed to having a staff that also reflects the passion our students and families have for balancing the intelligence of the mind and heart. This school, as all schools, requires much volunteer efforts from the families; we give willingly and have a principal who gives beyond measure.
As principal, Montoya continues to prove that she actually likes and is dedicated to her "job," her staff and, without doubt, her students! She often is the last person out of the school and never is out of range if she is needed. The New Mexico School for the Arts family of students and their at-home supporters are impressed and grateful to Cindy Montoya for who she is, as well as the skills, dedication, leadership and love that she has brought to our school and children.
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New York NY/ New Graduation Data Shows Lower Rates, Wide Achievement Gap
By Jackie Mader
Hechinger Report [Hechingerreport.com]
November 30, 2012
New federally-compiled graduation rates for 47 states and the District of Columbia left many states reeling this week as more rigorous and uniform standards highlighted wide achievement gaps and lower numbers than previously reported.
While the U.S. Department of Education said the new rates can't be compared to previous numbers, officials said the graduation rates provide an accurate ranking of states.
- Georgia, which has previously boasted graduation rates of about 80 percent, found itself near the bottom, with a graduation rate of 67 percent, even lower than neighboring states Alabama and Mississippi. "It's disappointing," Tim Callahan, spokesman for the Professional Association of Georgia Educators, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "We were using sort of a feel-good calculation."
- And in Ohio, where state-calculated graduation rates have been climbing for several years, the state's interim superintendent Michael Sawyers told the Newark Advocate that he's "surprised and somewhat disheartened" to see that the graduation rate for black, Hispanic and low-income students is far lower than the 85 percent rate for white students.
- New Jersey, which had the highest graduation rate in the nation in a ranking by Education Week in June, tied with six other states for 12th place. "I'm not sure there is any material difference between being in the top 12 versus the top eight," said State Education Commissioner Chris Cerf to The Record. "It shows New Jersey is doing extremely well compared to the rest of the nation, and has significant room to improve."
The move to a uniform system reflects a broader trend in education reform, as states also launch the new Common Core State Standards, which will allow more accurate comparisons of academic achievement.
- Under the new graduation metrics, all state scores are based only on the percent of students who graduate in four years, and data is adjusted for students who drop out or do not earn a regular diploma.
- Previously, states or outside agencies often included all students that graduated in any given year in calculating graduation rates, regardless of how long it had taken a student to finish.
The new data shows that even states with high graduation rates overall aren't doing as well at graduating some student groups.
- Connecticut has an 83 percent graduation rate, one of the highest in the northeast. But when it comes to low-income students, only 62 percent graduate. (Connecticut also has one of the widest test score gaps in the nation between low-income students and their more affluent peers.)
- Minnesota has one of the largest gaps in achievement between black and white students, with a graduation rate for white students 15 percentage points higher than black.
- And in South Dakota, where 83 percent of all students graduate, less than half of Asian, Pacific Islanders, and American Indians earn their diplomas.
"By using this new measure, states will be more honest in holding schools accountable and ensuring that students succeed," said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. "These data will help states target support to ensure more students graduate on time."
The lowest graduation rate was in Washington, D.C., where 59 percent of all students, and only 39 percent of students with disabilities, graduate high school on time. But D.C. does a better job of graduating black students than Minnesota and Oregon, and graduates a larger percentage of low-income students than Nevada and Alaska, all states with higher overall graduation rates.
Several states have relatively stable numbers across racial and income lines. Iowa, which claimed the highest graduation rate of 88 percent, had little variation in rates for different student groups, as did Texas and Arkansas.
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Washington DC/ Elementary Pupils Nationwide Immersed in Foreign Language
By Jamaal Abdul-alim [Freelance writer living in the District of Columbia]
Education Week, Vol. 32, Issue 13 [Edweek.org]
November 30, 2012 [posted online 12/3/12]
When it comes to lessons in other tongues, Kevin Fitzgerald, the superintendent of the Caesar Rodney school district in northeastern Delaware, is never at a loss for words.
He speaks with pride about the fact that his district's high school, Caesar Rodney High School, offers six foreign languages: French, Spanish, German, Latin, and, more recently, Arabic and Mandarin.
This school year, the district introduced a more novel and potentially more effective foreign-language initiative to talk up: a new Chinese-immersion program for 101 kindergartners, which the district plans to offer those children and successive kindergartners through 8th grade.
The immersion program, which provides instruction in math, science, and literacy in Chinese for half a day and in English for the remainder, is one of three such programs funded though Gov. Jack Markell's recently created World Language Expansion Initiative. The initiative operates with $1.9 million annually from Delaware's state budget.
At a time when school districts face constant budgetary constraints while also being charged with preparing students for jobs in a more global economy, proponents of foreign-language instruction say Delaware's new immersion program represents an uncommon but welcome step toward introducing foreign language at an age that researchers say is optimal for students to become multilingual.
- "We'd like to think it will become more common," said William P. Rivers, the executive director of the Joint National Committee for Languages-National Council for Language and International Studies, a Washington-based nonprofit that advocates for languages and international education.
Foreign-language instruction at the elementary level has been around for decades. Funding from the U.S. Department of State, whose goal was to bolster national security and the economy, served as a catalyst for some of that instruction. Delaware, in fact, is one of the states that has received the federal funding. But Mr. Rivers and others hail Delaware's initiative and a similar one in Utah as being at the cutting edge of states trying to bring more in-depth instruction.
Lynn Fulton-Archer, the education specialist for the immersion program at the Delaware education department, said the initiatives in her state and Utah differ from previous ones at the elementary level in part because the earlier programs were "isolated" and "low intensity."
- In those programs, students spend between 30 and 150 minutes a week learning another language, she said, while students in Delaware and Utah get at least 150 minutes of language learning a day.
- What's more, Ms. Fulton-Archer said, the teacher is not an add-on, but, instead, a regular grade-level teacher who teaches both the language and core content.
- Utah's program involves immersion in Chinese, French, Spanish, and Portuguese beginning mostly in 1st grade and university-level coursework in high school. The state plans to establish 100 dual-language programs reaching 30,000 students by 2014.
Since its formal launch this fall at the Caesar Rodney district's J. Ralph McIlvaine Early Childhood Center in Magnolia, Del., which serves families from nearby Dover Air Force Base, the foreign language program has become the talk of the town, Mr. Fitzgerald said.
- "In our community, I run into parents all the time, and there's a great likelihood that the conversation is going to turn to our immersion program," he said.
Sherry Kijowski, the principal at McIlvaine, says student excitement over learning Mandarin is evident from the way immersion students interact with one another.
"When they ask each other to pass crayons, they (use) Chinese words for colors," she said.
A primary benefit of the Delaware initiative is that unlike most foreign-language programs in U.S. schools, it introduces students to a foreign language at an age when researchers say their brains are most receptive to picking it up and enabling them to speak the language fluently with little or no hint of a foreign accent.
- "Early age is the best time to be introduced to a foreign language because the mind/brain is most plastic at that age in terms of its ability to learn a language," Hendrik J. Haarmann, the area director of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Maryland Center for Advanced Study of Language, said in an email.
The cognitive benefits of doing so, Mr. Haarmann says, are multifaceted and long term. For instance, he said, children who have "grown up bilingual" tend to have better memories and stronger protection against certain natural declines in cognitive functions later in life.
Ms. Fulton-Archer, the education specialist for the World Language Immersion program at the Delaware education department, said more than four decades of research has shown the power of immersion education to help students attain high levels of world-language proficiency.
"No other type of instruction, short of living in a non-English-speaking environment, is as successful," she said.
On the Decline
Despite the benefits associated with introducing a foreign language to young children, teaching it at the elementary level remains relatively uncommon in the United States.
- While 91 percent of high schools offer a foreign language, the proportion of elementary schools that do decreased from 31 percent in 1997 to 25 percent in 2008, according to the most recent national survey by the Center for Applied Linguistics, and from 75 percent to 58 percent at the middle school level. The center conducts the survey once every decade.
The 2008 survey says there "continues to be reason for serious concern about the limited number of long-sequence K-12 language programs designed to provide students with the linguistic and cultural skills needed to communicate effectively in the United States and abroad." It also says that a large number of elementary and middle school students, especially in rural or low-socioeconomic-status schools, do not have the opportunity to study foreign language at all.
- "We've just fallen so far behind other countries in terms of preparing our students for the world in which they're going to have to live and work," said Martha G. Abbott, the executive director of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, or ACTFL, based in Alexandria, Va.
Nationally, immersion programs-not to be confused with individual foreign-language classes-have grown from only a handful in the 1970s to nearly 450 in 2011, according to the Center for Applied Linguistics.
As of August, there were 415 two-way bilingual-immersion programs in 31 states, plus the District of Columbia, according to an online directory created by the center, which says the directory is not necessarily exhaustive.
The vast majority, 391, of those programs involve Spanish. Nearly half were in California and Texas.
Resource Challenges
Superintendent Fitzgerald says it wasn't because of lack of awareness about the benefits of studying foreign language early that his Delaware district didn't introduce it until now.
"Plain and simple, either we didn't have the resources or we couldn't find the teachers," he said.
Lack of resources for foreign-language instruction is also a challenge at the national level, even as government leaders trumpet the need for American students to gain foreign-language skills so they can fill crucial voids in realms that range from national security to international trade.
Mr. Rivers of the Joint National Committee laments the recent decision at the federal level not to fund the State Department's Foreign Language Assistance Program, known as FLAP, in fiscal 2012. Until then, FLAP was the only federally financed program that exclusively targeted foreign-language instruction in K-12.
- The previous fiscal year it had been funded at $26.9 million. The Obama administration has repeatedly, as part of the budget request, proposed the creation of a competitive program, Effective Teaching and Learning for a Well-Rounded Education, that would finance education in a variety of areas, including foreign languages and other subjects.
Before he moved on this year to a university presidency in California, Eduardo Ochoa, then-assistant secretary for postsecondary education at the U.S. Department of Education, testified before a Senate panel that foreign-language instruction should not be seen as an "add on" in K-12 or higher education and should take place early in a child's experience. Such programs, he said, help develop skills that will prepare students, and the nation itself, for "economic competitiveness and jobs, collaboration to address global challenges, national security and diplomacy, and effective engagement in a diverse U.S. society."
Gov. Markell had similar things in mind when he launched the World Language Expansion Initiative in Delaware.
Advanced by High School
The initiative, which involves two Spanish programs in addition to Chinese, seeks to reach nearly 8,000 Delaware students at the K-8 level by 2020.
- "We developed the initiative because we recognize that as global employers choose where to locate jobs, they are better served hiring where their employees have the skills to communicate across markets. That means fluency in two or three languages, not one," the governor, a Democrat, said during a visit to the McIlvaine Early Childhood Center.
In addition to those benefits, he said, "language study improves academic performance, builds sociocultural awareness, and enhances cognitive abilities."
By the 9th grade, Mr. Markell said he expected every student in the program to be able to pass Advanced Placement Chinese or Spanish.
For now, the program is reaching some 340 pupils, including the 101 at McIlvaine.
Superintendent Fitzgerald said one measure of the program will be the extent to which parents keep their children in it. Another, he said, will be how well immersion students perform on standardized tests.
Mr. Fitzgerald would like to see foreign language become an even more prominent part of K-12 education and says he believes it will if his district demonstrates success.
"I can foresee in the future where all of our kindergartners are involved in some sort of immersion program," Mr. Fitzgerald said. "It would be wonderful if we had the funds and the ability to provide each student with another language and help guide them through their education career."
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Washington DC/ Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium Scales Back Test Performance Items
By Catherine Gewertz
Education Week [Edweek.org]
November 29, 2012 [posted online 12/3/12]
A group that is developing tests for half the states in the nation has dramatically reduced the length of its assessment in a bid to balance the desire for a more meaningful and useful exam with concerns about the amount of time spent on testing.
- The decision by the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium reflects months of conversation among its 25 state members and technical experts and carries heavy freight for millions of students, who will be taking it in two years.
- The group is one of two state consortia crafting tests for the Common Core State Standards with $360 million in federal Race to the Top money.
- From an original design that included multiple, lengthy performance tasks, the test has been revised to include only one performance task in each subject-mathematics and English/language arts-and has been tightened in other ways, reducing its length by several hours.
- The final blueprint of the assessment, approved by the consortium last week now estimates it will take 7 hours in grades 3-5, 7½ hours in grades 6-8, and 8½ hours in grade 11.
Earlier this fall, states' worries about too much testing time had prompted the group to offer a choice: a "standard" version of the assessment-6½ to 8 hours-or an "extended" one, which would run 10½ to 13 hours, with more items to facilitate more-detailed feedback on student performance.
Persistent doubts about that plan, however, led to further discussions and a decision to expand the shorter version by about 30 minutes and make it the only one offered, consortium officials said.
While many states saw value in having more performance tasks on the test, the amount of information they could yield didn't justify the additional testing hours, said Carissa Miller, the deputy superintendent for assessment, content, and school choice in Idaho, and the co-chairwoman of the SBAC executive committee. Including even one such task-which requires students to tackle longer, more complex math problems and write essays based on reading multiple texts-represents a major improvement in most states' assessment systems, she said.
"It's a precarious balance between having a test that we get all the measurement pieces we need, and having it be so long that it becomes impractical," she said. "Having even one very authentic performance task, [with] how much that will change instruction in states that have not had those kinds of things in the past. I think we really came to a sweet spot."
Drilling Down
A key push in the latest redesign was to ensure that the test yields enough detailed information to enable reports on student performance in specific areas of math and English/language arts, Smarter Balanced officials said.
The U.S. Department of Education, in particular, pressed for that, said Joe Willhoft, SBAC's executive director. And the consortium's technical-advisory committee had persistent concerns about a pared-down test's ability to report meaningfully on student, as opposed to classroom- or district-level, performance, SBAC leaders said.
The final version will yield overall student scores in math and in English/language arts, by four levels of performance and on a yet-to-be-designed scale, Mr. Willhoft said. It will also produce student-level scores in three areas of math-concepts and procedures, communicating reasoning, and problem-solving/modeling/data analysis-and in four areas of literacy-reading, writing, listening, and research, he said.
In the earlier, "standard" version of the test, some of those areas were combined, making it hard to judge those aspects of students' performance. Adding more items and shifting their distribution allows the test to gauge students' skills in each area, Mr. Willhoft said, while time was managed by scaling back performance tasks and reducing the length of some reading passages.
Still, some experts see the resulting reports as being of disappointingly little instructional value.
W. James Popham, an assessment expert who serves on the Smarter Balanced technical-advisory committee, said tests can provide meaningful information only if teachers and students get more fine-grained feedback than an overall score in writing or in math "concepts and procedures."
"It's still too broad," he said. "No one can ferret out what students need help with. For Smarter Balanced to make a real contribution, it has to make certain that its other two pieces, the interim and formative assessments, are instructionally focused, so educators can do something with the results."
The evolution of the Smarter Balanced assessment showcases a persistent tension at the heart of the purpose of student testing, some experts say.
"Is it about getting data for instruction? Or is it about measuring the results of instruction? In a nutshell, that's what this is all about," said Douglas J.
McRae, a retired test designer who helped shape California's assessment system. "You cannot adequately serve both purposes with one test."
That's because the more-complex, nuanced items and tasks that make assessment a more valuable educational experience for students, and yield information detailed and meaningful enough to help educators adjust instruction to students' needs, also make tests longer and more expensive, Mr. McRae and other experts said.
The Right Balance
What Smarter Balanced did, he said, was to compromise on obtaining data to guide instruction in order to produce a test that measures the results of instruction. As a strong supporter of accountability, that's an approach Mr. McRae supports. It's also crucial to have data that guide day-to-day instruction, he said, but that should come from separate formative and interim tests.
That's what SBAC has in mind, said Mr. Willhoft. Its end-of-year, summative tests will measure results for accountability, and those can shape what schools and districts do long term, he said.
"I'm not convinced that the end-of-year summative assessment used for accountability could be imagined to be extremely instructionally useful," Mr. Willhoft said. It's the interim and formative pieces of its system, he said, that have the potential to affect day-to-day instruction in profound ways.
The plan is to have thousands of test items and tasks in an online "bank" teachers can draw from to custom-design interim tests on specific standards. Also available will be a bank of "formative" tools and strategies to help them judge and monitor students' learning as they go along, Mr. Willhoft said. That three-pronged approach-summative, interim, formative-makes up the "balanced" suite of tests many have sought, he said.
The final test design, with a mix of multiple-choice, constructed-response, technology-enhanced, and performance items, is a big improvement over the exams most states have now, said Deborah V.H. Sigman, California's deputy superintendent of public instruction and a member of SBAC's executive committee.
"We have a summative assessment that signals to the world that there are different ways to measure what students are learning and can do," she said. "That's a huge benefit."
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Longmont CO/ St. Vrain School Students Benefit from All-Day Preschool, Kindergarten
By Karen Augé
The Denver Post
December 2, 2012
One might be table-washer, another may be assigned to handle toy-bucket duties and another to be line leader, but every day, every toddler in Sara Hinklin's preschool class has a job.
It's not that Blue Mountain Elementary in Longmont is running some sort of labor camp for 3- and 4-year-olds. This is all part of St. Vrain Valley School District's plan to get kids used to school and used to learning years before they walk into a first-grade classroom. That's why in Hinklin's class, every activity, every conversation has a purpose. And that purpose is learning, and getting kids ready mentally and socially to start their formal education.
Six years ago, the St. Vrain board decided to make early-childhood education a priority.
- The district got a $5 million grant, sold the idea to voters who approved a mill-levy override and got to work.
- Now, all 26 of St. Vrain's elementary schools offer preschool and full-day kindergarten, making it one of just a handful of districts in the state that can say that.
Last spring, as the first group of kids enrolled in those preschools started taking the state's all-important standardized tests, St. Vrain began to see the payoff.
- "It does take a commitment, but now we are starting to see the benefit, and it's huge. We see it not just in test scores but in motor skills, in social skills. And the parents engage at a much earlier age and become much more invested," said Superintendent Don Haddad.
St. Vrain is experiencing something education experts and researchers have been preaching for decades: The earlier kids get into a learning environment, the better. St. Vrain leaders got the message years ago. And those early-childhood-education efforts came despite a multimillion-dollar budget crisis in 2002 caused by financial mismanagement that forced the state to step in and bail out the district.
Denver voters, who approved a tax hike for preschool in 2006, did too, even as Colorado lagged behind other states in funding preschool and full-day kindergarten. Now, signs that momentum is growing to give more Colorado kids access to kindergarten and preschool reach all the way to the governor's office.
And the first thing Denver Public Schools has announced it will do with proceeds from the bond issue that passed last month is build a new preschool center for 200 to 250 mostly low-income kids on the Kepner Middle School campus in southwest Denver.
"I think what we've experienced over time is more public understanding of the benefits of early-childhood education, and as research has gotten more sophisticated, I think public will is building toward accepting that early-childhood education is important," said Jennifer Landrum, vice president for early-childhood initiatives at the Colorado Children's Campaign.
- Colorado Classroom covers local and state education issues affecting K-12 and higher education students in the state of Colorado.
- The Denver Preschool Program just added some research of its own to the pile of literature extolling the benefits of early-childhood education.
Since the city's voters approved spending an additional 12 cents in sales tax for every $100 spent, the program has served 25,000 students, boosting preschool enrollment from 7 percent of Denver 4-year-olds to nearly 70 percent, thanks in part to more than $40 million in help with tuition payments.
About three-quarters of those kids scored average or above in literacy and math assessments, 50 percent better than would be expected in the general population, according to an evaluation of the program by a study by Mary McGuire Klute of the University of Colorado at Denver's school of public affairs.
Klute, whose research was done in collaboration with the Clayton Early Learning Institute, found that "English-language learners and other children at risk of falling behind in school due to poverty are showing evidence of making progress toward closing the achievement gap by the end of preschool."
It's the same in St. Vrain, Haddad said.
"At the elementary level, what we've seen with at-risk kids is they've gone from 18 percent proficient to 88 percent proficient in third-grade reading," he said.
Haddad said the district is especially encouraged by the results of tracking individual at-risk children as they move from preschool to third grade. Overall, the district's third-grade reading scores have improved by 4 percentage points, from 77 percent reading at or above grade level in 2007 to 81 percent achieving that in 2011.
At-risk kids include those from low-income families, who typically have more difficulty in school, as well as those who come from homes where English isn't the first language, and those with special-education needs.
But advocates insist test scores shouldn't be the only measure of success.
"Doing better doesn't necessarily mean better test scores," said Lynn Karoly, an economist who studies early-childhood education at the Rand Corp. "It means reduced rates of grade repetition, higher rates of high school graduation and other life-course benefits, like less crime, less delinquency, better life outcomes as adults."
If all that's true, why does Colorado trail many states - it is 36th in funding preschool and not among the 10 states that fund full-day kindergarten - in giving kids a shot at early learning?
"It takes real resources, and in many cases the cost per child is higher," Karoly said.
Haddad said he couldn't estimate the total amount St. Vrain has spent on early-childhood education in the past six years - there have been contributions from bond issues; there was a $5 million federal grant - but he does call the investment "considerable."
"In the end, you save money because it's much less expensive to fund students at the beginning of K-12 than to remediate them through the system as they fall behind. That cost is huge," he said.
That's especially true for special-education kids - students with learning or other disabilities that mean they need additional help.
Which is one reason that while all St. Vrain preschool teachers are licensed, several, including Hinklin, are certified for teaching special education as well.
In fact, in Hinklin's Thursday-morning class, nearly half the toddlers have been identified as having learning disabilities or other special-education needs.
One reason early-childhood education costs more is that classes have to be smaller. It may work to have 20 kids in a first-grade class, but that many 4-year-olds in a single classroom with a single teacher is a recipe for chaos.
"The economy and the recession has made us take some steps back, but for the most part the trajectory has been one where states are putting more resources into this area as they are able," Karoly said.
Since 1988, the Colorado Preschool Program has tried to help low-income families afford preschool.
- But like everything else, the program suffered during the recent recession. Currently, 20,150 children are enrolled in the program in 170 of the state's 178 school districts, according to Gov. John Hickenlooper's TBD initiative.
- But there are between 7,000 and 14,000 more who qualify but can't get into the program.
The program, like all education in Colorado, lost money during the recession.
But this year, as the economy recovers and the state has more money coming in, much of the money stripped from education may be put back. In addition, Hickenlooper, in his budget proposal, has recommended that $23.9 million of the $201 million he hopes to put back into K-12 education will be directed toward expanding full-day kindergarten and preschool around the state.
But advocates caution that it's not enough to pour money into any old preschool program.
"It's important to say not all early- learning programs are going to be successful," Karoly said.
St. Vrain has adopted a districtwide curriculum, but just taking a quick glance into Hinklin's class, you'd never know it. Kids seem to be playing - and they are. That, experts say, is how 3- and 4-year-olds learn.
But a closer look reveals that "everything she does has a purpose," said Blue Mountain principal Kristie Venrick.
All the chairs have numbers on them. Each child's photo is on the wall, attached to a colored piece of construction paper cut into a different shape. And by mid-November, all 14 of Hinklin's kids know that when they sit on the rug for stories, they sit on the shape that corresponds to the shape on their photo.
And when Hinklin asks what they had for breakfast, she's not just compiling culinary data, she's helping them with speech and vocabulary.
Sometimes, they help her too. When Hinklin tells the kids they have two minutes until "play" time is over, she holds up two fingers and waves her arm around the room so every child can see them. One extremely helpful child, Tobin Atherton-Wood, also holds up two fingers and waves them in the faces of several children, in case they might have missed Hinklin's message.
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Washington DC/ Schools Ring Closing Bell
More shut as student-age population declines, charters add competition
By Stephanie Banchero
The Wall Street Journal
December 2, 2012
At Davis Elementary in this city's mostly poor southeast section, 178 students are spread out in a 69-year-old building meant to hold 450.
Three miles away, the new, $30 million KIPP charter school teems with 1,050 children. Toddlers crawl over a state-of-the-art jungle gym and older students fill brightly decorated classrooms. A waiting list holds 2,000 names.
Many students who live within the Davis boundaries instead attend the charter school, one of 125 nationwide run by KIPP, a nonprofit. The exodus helped land Davis on a list of 20 schools targeted for closure next school year.
Closing underused schools, however painful, will let the district shift resources to "improve the quality of education we provide to our students," Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson said at a recent city council hearing packed with parents, teachers and students pleading for schools to be kept open.
Similar scenes are playing out in places such as Tucson, Ariz., Chicago and Philadelphia, where school systems are rolling out plans to close underenrolled and underperforming facilities.
- The efforts are driven by a drop in the school-age population, the Obama administration's push to shut poor-performing schools and competition from charters, the publicly funded schools run by independent groups.
- During the 2010-11 school year, school districts nationwide closed 1,069 traditional public schools, uprooting nearly 280,000 students, according to data compiled for The Wall Street Journal by the National Center for Education Statistics, the primary federal entity for national school data.
- That was up from 717 closings affecting 193,000 students in 2000-01, according to the data, which don't include specialized schools, such as those for special-education students.
Even charters aren't immune.
- In 2010-11, 128 charter schools were closed, compared with 44 in 2000-01, the data show.
- This past week, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, a nonprofit group that represents government and other entities that approve charter-school applications, called on its members to close hundreds of poor-performing charters and urged new state laws to improve accountability.
- The group said at least 900 of the nation's 6,000 charters, which also receive private donations, post test scores that land them in the bottom 15% of all schools in their states.
"We did not start this movement to create more bad schools," said Greg Richmond, president of the group. "We want smarter charter-school growth and stronger accountability."
Proponents of school choice say closing low-performing and under-enrolled campuses is a natural outgrowth of healthy competition, while many teacher unions argue that struggling schools often need more resources to fairly compete. Meanwhile, many parents fear that closures will mean students end up in schools that are farther away or worse academically.
Tubrook Livingston, who has a child at Davis Elementary and heads its Parent Teacher Association, said he recognizes the school is under-enrolled and low-performing, but he wants it kept open. "Unless they have a better place for our kids...I don't see any reason to close it," he said.
- In Chicago, rumors that the city intended to close as many as 100 schools laid the foundation for the two-week teachers strike in September and sparked rallies protesting the closings and prompted protests citywide. Facing a Saturday deadline, city officials lobbied state legislators last week to allow a delay in identifying schools targeted for closure. State lawmakers granted the extension and the governor signed the bill Friday. Chicago schools officials have said they will implement a five-year moratorium on closings after next year's schools closings.
- In Washington D.C., enrollment in district-run schools has dropped to about 42,000 this year from about 61,000 in 2002, due partly to the city's dwindling school-age population and the growing popularity of charter schools. About 40% of D.C. public-school students now attend charters.
Research is scant on the academic impact of school closings. But two studies-one in Chicago and one in an unnamed district in the Northeast-found that, in general, students displaced by closures do no better, and sometimes worse, in other traditional schools, in large part because they transfer to similarly low-performing campuses nearby.
Closing schools doesn't necessarily yield a financial windfall, because teachers often are shuffled to other schools and vacant school buildings are tough to unload, according to a 2011 study by Pew Charitable Trusts' Philadelphia Research Initiative.
- "There is nothing easy about closing schools and it is extremely difficult to find productive uses for the buildings," said Emily Dowdall, a senior researcher at Pew.
Still, underused schools like Davis, which has students from preschool through fifth grade, can be expensive to operate. Davis Elementary spends about $13,225 a pupil, with about 32% going toward classroom teachers, and the rest funding such things as instructional aides, office staff and custodians. Nearby Langdon Elementary, with more than twice as many students, spends $9,900 a pupil, with 55% going to classroom teachers.
"We get that we are small and it's not cost effective to run a small school, but we have a good thing going here and our students are making great progress," said Davis's principal, Maisha Riddlesprigger.
Since 2009, the portion of Davis students who tested proficient in reading doubled to 34%, while math proficiency jumped to 35% from 22%. At the nearby KIPP school, 59% are proficient in reading and 75% in math.
Nichole Young lives a few blocks from Davis but sends her 4-year-old son to KIPP. "I don't have anything against Davis," said Ms. Young, who teaches 12th grade English in a Maryland public school. "But we visited KIPP and observed the children in classes and they seemed so happy to be learning and that won me over."
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Baton Rouge LA/ State Judge Blocks Gov. Bobby Jindal's Signature School Voucher Program
By Patrik Jonsson
CSMonitor.com, Staff writer
December 1, 2012
In a major blow to Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's school reform efforts, a state judge on Friday found that Gov. Jindal's signature state school voucher program, which makes nearly half the state's students eligible to attend private schools, is unconstitutional.
Louisiana's program, pushed through in April by Jindal, allows families of four making no more than $57,000 a year to receive vouchers for private schools. Its goal is to impose competition on public schools while allowing poorer parents to move their children out of failing schools. About 450,000 Louisiana pupils are eligible.
- Teachers unions have blasted the program, complaining that some of the private schools receiving the money focus on so-called Young Earth Creationism over evolution.
- A judge hearing a separate voucher lawsuit in New Orleans last week agreed with another complaint: That the voucher program threatens to undermine federal desegregation orders that are in effect in 30 school districts around the Pelican State.
While Jindal will appeal Judge Tim Kelley's ruling to the Louisiana Supreme Court, the ruling's main importance is how it's likely to create more debate about how to fund state voucher plans, which currently are in place in 12 states, about half designed for children with certain disabilities.
Teachers unions brought the lawsuit in Louisiana, while 12 families have brought a lawsuit currently being mulled by the Indiana Supreme Court over similar issues: whether state law mandates that taxpayer money go exclusively to public, or common, schools.
Friday's ruling is a big disappointment for Jindal, who's widely seen as a rising star in the Republican Party's stable of nationally competitive candidates, potentially for president. The voucher plan embodies several tenets of national educational philosophy being touted by Republicans, particularly the goal, as with charter schools, of breaking teacher unions' hold on failing schools by empowering parents.
The "ruling is wrong-headed and a travesty for parents across Louisiana who want nothing more than for their children to have an equal opportunity at receiving a great education," Jindal said.
But the gambit has also been ensnared by criticisms over the curriculum of parochial private schools. In some of those schools, instruction is focused on creationism over evolution. At the same time, the US Supreme Court has affirmed the right of religious institutions to receive taxpayer funds through vouchers, as long as the state itself isn't advocating a particular faith.
In an at-times emotional trial, state lawyers argued that as long as Louisiana funded public schools at adequate and equitable levels the state could divert some education funds to parochial and other private schools to boost parental school choice.
While he didn't strike down that philosophy more broadly, Judge Kelley took issue with how the program dovetailed into the state's complex school funding formula, called the Minimum Foundation Program, which Kelley ultimately interpreted as being intended solely for public schools.
The approximately 5,000 students already enrolled in the program will be able to continue for the time being, even as the state education officials scramble to find alternative funding sources. One option is for the state to use its general fund to pay for the program, as it already has, most notably, to fund a city voucher program in New Orleans.
That, however, is likely to be a tough sell in a state already facing a $1 billion budget shortfall, and where lawmakers already have had to make steep cuts in its charitable public hospital system that benefits the poor and uninsured.
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Washington DC/ OPINION: Speaking Up for and Demanding Full-Day Kindergarten
By Marian Wright Edelman [President, Children's Defense Fund]
Huffington Post
November 30, 2012
About four million American children celebrated a very big milestone this fall - their first day of kindergarten.
Far too many were already a step or more behind their peers. If we want all of our children to be school-ready so that they can become college, career and workforce-ready, it's long past time to offer universal quality prekindergarten followed by universal full-day kindergarten in the United States.
A while back the bestselling book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten touched a chord with its simple messages: Share everything. Clean up your own mess. Don't take things that aren't yours. Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.
But those kinds of lessons sound very quaint today as forty-five states and the District of Columbia move towards implementing Common Core Standards that shift the focus for kindergarteners to mastering a new list of skills, for example:
- Solve addition and subtraction word problems.
- Describe measurable attributes of objects, such as length or weight.
- Analyze and compare two- and three-dimensional shapes, using informal language to describe their similarities, differences, parts and other attributes.
- Spell simple words phonetically, drawing on knowledge of sound-letter relationships.
- Participate in shared research and writing projects.
For too many kindergarteners, though, one thing is still a throwback to the old days: going to school for only half a day. In order to master the skills covered in the Common Core Standards, the amount of time a kindergartener gets to go to school each day can vary from as little as two and a half hours to a full day of six hours.
As even a five-year-old can see, that's not fair. It's time to stop demanding performance from children we do not give the supports they need to succeed.
Public education in America is built on the foundation of equal opportunity for all children. But while most Americans think of all children as having access to a robust K-12 education system, in many places full-day kindergarten is a huge missing half step in the early learning continuum.
- Research comparing full-day kindergarten ("Full-Day K") and half-day kindergarten suggests that children benefit more from developmentally appropriate Full-Day K. Full-Day K plays a vital role in children's educational development, boosting cognitive learning, creative problem-solving, social competence, promoting positive school outcomes including faster gains on literacy and language measures, better attendance through the primary grades and higher academic achievement in later grades.
- As the expectations for kindergarten in the Common Core Standards show, kindergartners across the country also are being expected to meet more rigorous academic benchmarks than ever before, just like students in every other grade.
The case for making kindergarten equal to every other school day seems obvious. Yet too many children aren't given an opportunity to attend kindergarten for a full school day. Instead, access to Full-Day K is more like playing a game of chance in which the lottery of geography and income determine who wins. Millions of children are the losers.
Consider these facts:
- Only 10 states and the District of Columbia require by statute that school districts provide publicly funded Full-Day K. An additional 34 states require school districts to provide half-day kindergarten, and 6 don't require school districts to provide kindergarten at all.
- Some school districts have voluntarily chosen to provide Full-Day K for all students funded through local taxes.
- Others construct a hodge-podge of funding to provide Full-Day K for some students dependent on factors like whether a family qualifies for tuition assistance based on family income or whether the child is at risk of school failure.
- In 12 states some children can access Full-Day K only if their parents pay tuition for the half of the day not covered by public funds.
- States and school districts across the country have cut or delayed funding for Full-Day K as budgets have tightened because of the recession.
Unequal access to publicly funded full-day and full-week high quality kindergarten programs means too many young children lose a critical opportunity to develop and strengthen foundational skills necessary for success in school and lifelong learning.
Many children who attend full day pre-K programs find themselves cut back to half days in kindergarten, which becomes a huge setback for them and hardship for their working families. And although a year of instructional time for kindergartners varies from 540 to 1,080 hours, the expectation of mastery of the Common Core Standards is the same from state to state and district to district no matter how much class time the children receive.
If implementation of the rigorous Common Core standards is to succeed, Full-Day K can no longer be viewed as an optional add-on, enrichment, or intervention program. It must become a stable part of the pre-K to 3rd grade early learning continuum in every state and school district.
What are children in your state - or your neighborhood - getting? Policymakers at all levels of government can help make Full-Day K a reality for all children in urban, suburban, and rural districts. Join CDF in our campaign to make this happen. Kindergarteners like to try to do lots of things all by themselves, but they need adults to help speak up for Full-Day K.
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