Socorro/ County Looks at Acquiring Old San Antonio School Building
By Laura London
El Defensor Chieftain
December 5, 2012
The Socorro County Commission directed county staff to work out a deal with the school district so the county can take over the San Antonio School building.
County manager Delilah Walsh said during the county's regular meeting Nov. 27 Socorro Consolidated School District has been considering its five-year plan for infrastructure, and one major project in the plan is to either remodel or replace the San Antonio Elementary School building.
Walsh said last year, the previous superintendent of the school district asked if the county would take over the building so the district could build a new school for San Antonio, but then administration changed and the county didn't hear back from them again.
Vice chair and District 1 Commissioner Pauline Jaramillo, who also serves on the Socorro Consolidated Schools Board of Education, said the board passed its five-year plan Nov. 26.
John Dennis, head teacher at San Antonio Elementary School, said the plan is to construct a new building rather than remodel the old one.
He said the existing school building is 88 years old, and although structurally sound, a lot of the infrastructure is out of compliance with modern regulations. He said they would rather buy a piece of land from the Bureau of Land Management and build a new school.
Dennis said the county might be interested in the school's gymnasium and cafeteria, which is actually only 12 years old and is commercial grade. Also, he said the school's computer lab is also only 12 years old and is wired for 20 computer terminals.
"I would hate to see the building go to waste," Dennis said. "It's been around 88 years; it's a landmark. So if the county could take it on, that would be great."
Dennis said if the county doesn't take the old building, the school district would have to demolish it. He explained the school district has to get rid of the old building; by law, the district can't own the old building and build a new one at the same time. Walsh added the school district cannot hold empty assets.
One commissioner asked if the old building would be ideal for a senior center. Dennis said he wouldn't say it was ideal, but with some improvements to the building and some landscaping, it could be brought into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act fairly easily.
Dennis estimated it would be two years before the school can move into its new building. Walsh said that would give county staff time to look for planning grants.
Dennis said although the school district can't own empty assets, the school can stay in the old building until the new one is ready to move into. He explained the school district can't plan to keep both buildings.
Board chairman and District 4 Commissioner Daniel Monette said he wants an asbestos test performed on the old building first before any agreement is made because the county could not afford to have that removed. He said all the WPA buildings - of which the San Antonio School is one - had asbestos, and that is his only concern.
Jaramillo asked Fred Hollis, emergency services administrator for the county, to share his thoughts on the issue. Hollis is a resident of San Antonio and chief of the San Antonio Volunteer Fire Department.
Hollis said he understands the county needs to make sure the building has no asbestos, but he is fairly certain there is none or it wouldn't have been allowed to be used as a school.
Hollis thought the old school building would make a great community center for San Antonio.
- He said the new school is to have an activities room, not a complete gym like the old school has, and it would be nice to keep the old gym open for use by the school's basketball players.
- He added the old gym has many other uses - the community Halloween carnival, Festival of the Cranes events and more. He said there are a number of other things they can do with the old gym.
Hollis said San Antonio residents were discussing forming a committee to clean and care for the building so the county would not have to worry about any extra expense if it takes the building over. He added if there were to be a fire in the area, the gym would be the shelter location.
- "If they happen to tear it down, we won't have any place down there," Hollis said. "It has the kitchen, it has the gym to open up the shelter."
Hollis said the old school would be a great asset to the emergency management department, as well as to the county as a whole.
Richard Tafoya, volunteer firefighter, San Antonio resident and 4-H volunteer, said if they can save the building and have it for a community center, that would help 4-H. He said right now 4-H meets at the senior center, which is very small. He said the fire department will let them use the fire station on special occasions, but it's hard to have a dance there because it is not large enough.
District 5 Commissioner Juan Gutierrez said the old building has a lot of potential, plus it is an 88-year-old landmark. He motioned to direct county staff to work out a deal with the school district for the county to take over the building.
Commissioners unanimously passed the motion. Monette added many families in Lemitar bus their children to San Antonio Elementary due to the school's accreditation.
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Santa Fe/ Superintendent Joel Boyd Unveils 4 Options for High School Reform
By Robert Nott
The New Mexican
December 4, 2012
Santa Fe Public Schools Superintendent Joel Boyd on Tuesday night unveiled four potential plans for what he calls "expanding options" at the high school level.
Proposals range from simply strengthening existing facilities and programming to a more ambitious plan to offer four career academies in one high school, create an International Baccalaureate program for grades seven to 12 and a magnet school at one high school, plus start a ninth-grade academy on or close to an existing high school.
Boyd's chief academic officer, Almudena Abeyta, presented the report, titled "Expanding Options for Families at Secondary Level: Creating Rigor, Relevance and Relationships For Every Student," to the school board and about 50 attendees.
Abeyta provided historical context to the report, noting that a 13-member team of district administrators and principals, as well as one member of Santa Fe Community College's administrative team, convened in early autumn to consider and study various options, which tie in with the strategic plan the district adopted last spring.
All of the possible plans require community input, the need to plan financing and staffing after a decision is made, and a clearer definition on what the magnet schools, ninth-grade academy and International Baccalaureate program would look like.
Regardless of which path the district takes, it also will find a way to offer alternative pathway programs - such as evening school, virtual schooling and credit recovery programs - as part of its proposed redesign, Abeyta said.
Boyd said the district has some flexibility in working within the suggested parameters of these four plans, but he noted that the options were put together superficially to prepare for designed ripple effects when it comes to lining up facilities, staff and financing.
The district plans a finance committee meeting Dec. 10 to estimate preliminary costs for these options, Boyd said. He said he wants to hear from community stakeholders regarding their views on these options, and he plans to schedule somewhere between five and 10 forums - many of which will be moderated by student leaders - on the topic in early 2013.
He said student need will dictate the choice of magnet schools and career pathway programs and help the district decide where and how to house these various components. Though the district has three potential properties to use -
- its administrative B.F. Young Building on Camino Sierra Vista,
- the vacant Kaune Elementary School and
- the soon-to-be-vacant Agua Fría Elementary School
- none of those would work as a high school. Each could house a small magnet school of some kind, however.
A deadline looms on the deal, since Boyd said before Tuesday's meeting that he'd like to get a plan in place before Feb. 5 - the date of both the next school board election for two of five seats (Districts 3 and 5) and a property-tax bond vote. The district is asking county voters to approve $130 million for capital improvements to existing schools and funding for secondary-level reform. Ideally, he said, the school board would vote on a preferred option before that date.
He acknowledged that it's something of a balancing act to move so quickly on the project while keeping the welfare of students and those invested in the public schools in mind. His goal is to use school year 2013 as a planning stage before implementing whatever policy the board chooses for the 2014-15 school year.
Before Tuesday's meeting, Boyd said the district must act to address its dismal graduation rate - about 56.6 percent - and to reverse the exodus of the 30 percent of elementary school kids who choose to not remain in the public-school system by the eighth or ninth grade. Board member Steven Carrillo acknowledged during Tuesday's meeting that his seventh-grade son is one of those children, now attending the private Desert Academy.
"That's a battle his mom won," Carrillo told the crowd.
All five board members seemed impressed with the report, but several raised questions.
- Frank Montaño, for one, said it is vital for the board and the community to know the cost of each choice before it votes for any of them.
- Barbara Gudwin asked how the ninth-grade academies would impact those students' need to take required courses that are currently part of some of the successful career-pathway programs that run from grades nine to 12.
- Both Gudwin and Linda Trujillo said some of the plans will involve professional development and staff training to prepare in advance.
One woman in the audience, Diane Pacheco Gonzales, asked the board what the redesign plans mean for a high school senior who may have to transition to a new setup in the student's final year of school in 2014-15. Boyd and Abeyta said that is one of many questions that needs to be addressed.
The report also notes that there is considerable inequality in current high school options for students, with the district dealing with 378 current interzone transfer requests for Santa Fe high and only 33 such requests for Capital High. Likewise, about 105 students are on a waiting list for Santa Fe High, whereas only two are on the waiting list for Capital.
"Each option requires an investment in research ... and planning dollars," Boyd said. "If we choose to do nothing, there is a different cost."
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Las Cruces/ LCPS Plans Health-Focused Early College High School
By Lindsey Anderson
Las Cruces Sun-News
December 4, 2012
Las Cruces Public Schools is planning to open an early college high school focusing on health and veterinary sciences in July 2014.
The school, nicknamed Early College Two, will allow students to earn college credit while in high school, and will be the district's second such school.
Arrowhead Park Early College High School opened in fall 2010 and focuses on science, technology, engineering, physical education and mathematics.
The new project will cost about $12 million, LCPS Superintendent Stan Rounds told school board members during Tuesday's work session.
- "If a kid wanted to be a doctor, had been in a family that never went to school," Rounds said after the meeting, "my dream is that they'll enter Early College Two and hit medical school two years earlier than they might and come back into the community because they'll have done their internships, their job shadowing and everything here, and maybe, just maybe, they'll come back to the community to provide us the health care we need."
Conversations on the school began about three years ago when Rounds spoke with health care leaders about meeting increasing demand for workers.
The health care and social assistance sector is expected to add 5.6 million workers from 2010 to 2020, with registered nurses alone adding 711,900 jobs, the most of any profession, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
- The new school will enroll about 250 students, around 60 per grade. It may also offer dentistry courses.
- LCPS is still deciding whether to grow the school from ninth grade up or open with all four grades.
- The three-building campus will be located next to Arrowhead Park on Arrowhead Drive.
The district aims to complete final drawings and renderings by March and begin construction that month. Construction would end May 2014, and the school would open July 5.
Rounds said he has talked with representatives from the University of Texas at El Paso, Texas Tech University, Doña Ana Community College and New Mexico State University to help guide the creation of the new school and curriculum.
The two early college high schools will likely share a principal and busing and may share teachers, but the students will not move from one campus to another for classes. They will complete their classes with their cohort at their respective schools, though students at Arrowhead Park could likely try classes at the new school.
Admission will likely be based on a lottery system so the school would not solely be for already college-bound students, Rounds said.
About 63 percent of Arrowhead Park Early College High School students are first-generation college go-ers, Rounds said.
The Early College Two campus will include a medical classroom area with possible cadaver, observation and simulation rooms. It may also be a beta test site for medical equipment and furniture.
Rounds said he is talking with representatives from furniture company Steelcase this week about possibly using the school to try out academic and medical furniture at no or little cost to the district.
The school could also be a site for current health professionals to meet their continuing education requirements, providing a possible source of income for the school.
Early college high schools are cost-effective, Rounds said, because students don't remediate and earn free college credit. So far, no students have dropped out of Arrowhead Park, he said.
"I can do it (educate students) more cheaply, have higher yield, have sooner completion, less remediation, zero drop outs," Rounds said.
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Taos/ 2 Taos Elementary Schools Initiate Recycling Projects
Taos News
December 3, 2012
Groups of students at two Taos elementary schools are working to bring awareness to new recycling projects.
- According to information provided by Kristen Rivera, a fifth-grade teacher at Ranchos Elementary School, her class was inspired to start a new recycling and awareness program after watching a documentary called "Tapped." The movie focuses on environmental problems associated with bottled water.
According to a letter from the class, the production of plastic bottles also leads to air pollution, and the bottles themselves often end up in rivers, landfills and oceans.
- "Our class has decided to start a school-wide recycling program and a community-wide awareness campaign," the letter states. "We want our community to be aware of these problems that come from purchasing bottled water."
Students suggest buying bottled water only in emergencies and recycling any plastic consumers. "If we work together, we will have a cleaner and healthier community and world," the letter states.
- At Arroyos del Norte, Gess Healey's second-grade class is working with the "FundingFactory," a group that collaborates with schools, community groups and others on a free fundraising-through-recycling program.
According to a release from Healey, her students are collecting unwanted items including empty ink cartridges, cell phones, small electronics (such as MP3 players and digital cameras) and laptops to send to the FundingFactory.
In return, they can receive cash or other rewards based on the estimated value of the items. Rewards include electronics, sports balls, gift cards and interactive whiteboards.
People can drop off cartridges, small electronics and laptops for recycling at the Arroyos del Norte office or Healey's second-grade classroom.
For more about the FundingFactory, which also offers a "Business Support Program" that provides free, prepaid shipping labels for items to be recycled, visit www.fundingfactory.com or call (888) 883-8237.
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Washington DC/ Training Programs Connect Principals to District Realities
Practical readiness, local needs stressed
By Jaclyn Zubrzycki
Education Week, Vol. 32, Issue 13 [Edweek.org.]
December 5, 2012
A growing number of principal-preparation initiatives are forsaking university classrooms in favor of much more familiar training grounds: the schools and districts where those aspiring leaders will end up working.
Through coaching and mentorship initiatives, residencies and internships, and other new programs, both districts and university education schools are turning their focus to building practical readiness, in context, and offering continued learning and support for principals already on the job.
- Traditional principal-training programs "haven't been as connected to the realities of the profession as they need to be," said Dick Flanary, the deputy executive director of programs and services for the National Association of Secondary School Principals, based in Alexandria, Va. "Universities talk about preparation, and school districts talk about readiness."
Leadership-training programs in Philadelphia; Chicago; Prince George's County, Md.; Gwinnett County, Ga.; Denver; New York City; and elsewhere all aim to give aspiring principals-and in some cases, even struggling midcareer principals-context-specific advice and support from experienced educators.
And, in a similar vein, districts in Sarasota County, Fla., in New York state's middle Hudson Valley region, and elsewhere have created homegrown leadership academies and career tracks to supplement university-based principal-certification programs with hands-on experience, mentoring programs, and training in district-specific information and initiatives.
Filling the Gap
- "Homegrown programs often set out to fill a gap" in the training provided by traditional principal-certification programs, said Cheryl L. King, the director of leadership for learning innovation at the Education Development Center, a Waltham, Mass.-based nonprofit organization that evaluates and designs education programs and provides self-assessments for university and district leadership programs.
In the 41,000-student Sarasota County district, educators created a leadership academy and mentorship program for leaders.
- "In our experience, developing our own leaders has helped our district maintain its focus on long-term goals," said Lori White, the
superintendent of schools. "[Academy graduates] are familiar with our culture and have an understanding of our vision."
- Since 2006, 15 of the 25 new principals in the district and 31 of 43 assistant principals have graduated from the leadership academy.
- The school's leaders credit that leadership flow with the district's top-level A ranking from the state.
- That kind of support also appeals to aspiring leaders. David Jones, the principal at the district's North Port High School, said he chose to move to Sarasota County after seeing a presentation on the school system's leadership program.
But such programs are often dependent on a district's budget situation, said the NASSP's Mr. Flanary.
- "In today's economic times, with budget cuts and scarce and diminishing resources, it's a commitment on the part of a district to create an academy," he said.
- In some districts, he said, those commitments are not possible.
- Even Sarasota County has had to put its principal academy on hiatus for a year because of budget pressures.
And Mr. Jones said he's seen how the lack of the program has had an impact. One of his assistant principals, he said, "who has phenomenal talent and ability, needs the opportunity to participate in something like that so he can move his career forward."
The district agrees: It is planning to bring the leadership academy back in the coming spring.
Sustaining the Effort
In New York's Hudson Valley, the Ulster Board of Cooperative Educational Services, based in New Paltz, managed to continue a principal-training initiative that focused on district-specific content and initiatives even after initial grant funding dropped off.
- "The overall value of the program is significant enough that it's no longer in question," said Jane Bullowa, the assistant superintendent for instructional services at the Ulster BOCES.
- But the program's been unable to build a network with neighboring leadership programs or forge a partnership with the State University of New York at New Paltz, as the creators of the initiative had intended, Ms. Bullowa said.
Elsewhere, districts are increasingly collaborating with universities to provide more coaching and longer-term internships and residencies for aspiring principals.
- A 2010 paper from the New York City-based Wallace Foundation found that districts could improve the quality of principals by acting as "consumers," encouraging local universities to craft programs that met their needs. (The Wallace Foundation also supports coverage of educational leadership in Education Week.)
- The Education Development Center's Ms. King said such training is helpful "particularly in chronically low-performing schools, where context matters so much. Leaders are given an induction into what the experience is like, and how it differs from different contexts."
The University of Illinois at Chicago's program, for instance, which is focused on preparing principals to improve low-performing urban schools, puts students in full-time residencies in schools similar to those where they are likely to end up working.
- "We didn't believe the best place to train future leaders of Chicago schools was in high-income suburban schools or selective-enrollment schools," said Steven Tozer, a professor of education policy studies at the university and the coordinator of its urban education leadership program.
- "The right place to develop capacity was in the most-challenging schools."
Working 'Hand in Hand'
Rituparna "Rita" Raichoudhuri, a resident principal at Wells High School in Chicago and a member of the program's first cohort, said her residency had been helpful.
- "The biggest learning here has been really learning the day-to-day operations of the school, different things that happen in a day with students and parents," she said. "I work hand in hand with the principal. I'm doing everything he's doing; I'm in every meeting he's in."
Her mentor principal had been in an earlier cohort in the same program.
The University of Illinois at Chicago's program is one of four programs that are part of the Chicago public schools' Chicago Leadership Collaborative, through which the district is trying to bring in more principals with internship or residency experiences and whose education has been tied to a set of "principal competencies" outlined by the district.
At Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C., the college of education began focusing on coordinating its program with the nearby Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C., school system, and now does the same for a number of smaller districts in South Carolina, said Mark W. Mitchell, the program director for education leadership at the university.
- "The things you teach are more relevant when you can sit down and talk with your students about what's actually happening in their district," said Mr. Mitchell, who was a principal before he came to Winthrop. "We have to become much more cognizant of how important it is for us to stay current with what's happening in the public schools."
The collaboration with the 141,000-student Charlotte-Mecklenburg system, which now receives funding from the Wallace Foundation, was begun in 2004, when Mr. Mitchell and another former school administrator arrived at the university and set a goal of building a relationship between the district and the university.
Tying universities' programs more tightly to districts also has the benefit of allowing districts and programs to track their effectiveness, said Ms. King of the Education Development Center.
The Chicago program has produced 83 principals in the city's public schools so far. Mr. Tozer said that schools headed by graduates of the program are more than twice as likely to close achievement gaps between students of different racial and ethnic backgrounds.
"We've known for 35 years that a really good principal could transform student learning outcomes in a very bad school-but we have acted as if such principals were born and not made," said Paul Zavitkovsky, a former principal who now coaches aspiring leaders through the Chicago program.
"We have to create the organizational structures," he said, "to take advantage of principals who have succeeded to help pass on to the next generation what they've learned."
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Philadelphia PA/ For Young Latino Readers, an Image is Missing
By Motoko Rich
New York Times
December 4, 2012
Like many of his third-grade classmates, Mario Cortez-Pacheco likes reading the "Magic Tree House" series, about a brother and a sister who take adventurous trips back in time. He also loves the popular "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" graphic novels.
But Mario, 8, has noticed something about these and many of the other books he encounters in his classroom at Bayard Taylor Elementary here: most of the main characters are white. "I see a lot of people that don't have a lot of color," he said.
Hispanic students now make up nearly a quarter of the nation's public school enrollment, according to an analysis of census data by the Pew Hispanic Center, and are the fastest-growing segment of the school population. Yet nonwhite Latino children seldom see themselves in books written for young readers. (Dora the Explorer, who began as a cartoon character, is an outlier.)
Education experts and teachers who work with large Latino populations say that the lack of familiar images could be an obstacle as young readers work to build stamina and deepen their understanding of story elements like character motivation.
While there are exceptions, including books by Julia Alvarez, Pam Muñoz Ryan, Alma Flor Ada and Gary Soto, what is available is "not finding its way into classrooms," said Patricia Enciso, an associate professor at Ohio State University.
- Books commonly read by elementary school children - those with human characters rather than talking animals or wizards - include the Junie B. Jones, Cam Jansen, Judy Moody, Stink and Big Nate series, all of which feature a white protagonist.
- An occasional African-American, Asian or Hispanic character may pop up in a supporting role, but these books depict a predominantly white, suburban milieu.
"Kids do have a different kind of connection when they see a character that looks like them or they experience a plot or a theme that relates to something they've experienced in their lives," said Jane Fleming, an assistant professor at the Erikson Institute, a graduate school in early childhood development in Chicago.
She and Sandy Ruvalcaba Carrillo, an elementary school teacher in Chicago who works with students who speak languages other than English at home, reviewed 250 book series aimed at second to fourth graders and found just two that featured a Latino main character.
The Cooperative Children's Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education, which compiles statistics about the race of authors and characters in children's books published each year, found that in 2011, just over 3 percent of the 3,400 books reviewed were written by or about Latinos, a proportion that has not changed much in a decade.
As schools across the country implement the Common Core - national standards for what students should learn in English and math - many teachers are questioning whether nonwhite students are seeing themselves reflected in their reading.
For the early elementary grades, lists of suggested books contain some written by African-American authors about black characters, but few by Latino writers or featuring Hispanic characters. Now, in response to concerns registered by the Southern Poverty Law Center and others, the architects of the Common Core are developing a more diverse supplemental list.
- "We have really taken a careful look, and really think there is a problem," said Susan Pimentel, one of the lead writers of the standards for English language and literacy. "We are determined to make this right."
Black, Asian and American Indian children similarly must dig deep into bookshelves to find characters who look like them. Latino children who speak Spanish at home and arrive at school with little exposure to books in English face particular challenges.
- A new study being released next week by pediatricians and sociologists at the University of California shows that Latino children start school seven months behind their white peers, on average, in oral language and preliteracy skills.
- "Their oral language use is going to be quite different from what they encounter in their books," said Catherine E. Snow, a professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. "So what might seem like simple and accessible text for a standard English speaker might be puzzling for such kids."
Hispanic children have historically underperformed non-Hispanic whites in American schools.
- According to 2011 data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a set of exams administered by the Department of Education, 18 percent of Hispanic fourth graders were proficient in reading, compared with 44 percent of white fourth graders.
Research on a direct link between cultural relevance in books and reading achievement at young ages is so far scant.
- And few academics or classroom teachers would argue that Latino children should read books only about Hispanic characters or families. But their relative absence troubles some education advocates.
- "If all they read is Judy Blume or characters in the "Magic Treehouse" series who are white and go on adventures," said Mariana Souto-Manning, an associate professor at Columbia University's Teachers College, "they start thinking of their language or practices or familiar places and values as not belonging in school."
At Bayard Taylor Elementary in Philadelphia, a school where three-quarters of the students are Latino, Kimberly Blake, a third-grade bilingual teacher, said she struggles to find books about Latino children that are "about normal, everyday people." The few that are available tend to focus on stereotypes of migrant workers or on special holidays. "Our students look the way they look every single day of the year," Ms. Blake said, "not just on Cinco de Mayo or Puerto Rican Day."
On a recent morning, Ms. Blake read from "Amelia's Road" by Linda Jacobs Altman, about a daughter of migrant workers. Of all the children sitting cross-legged on the rug, only Mario said that his mother had worked on farms.
Publishers say they want to find more works by Hispanic authors, and in some cases they insert Latino characters in new titles.
- When Simon & Schuster commissioned writers to develop a new series, "The Cupcake Diaries," it cast one character, Mia, as a Latino girl. "We were conscious of making one of the characters Hispanic," said Valerie Garfield, a vice president in the children's division, "and doing it in a way that girls could identify with, but not in a way that calls it out."
- In some respects, textbook publishers like Pearson and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are ahead of trade publishers. Houghton Mifflin, which publishes reading textbooks, allocates exactly 18.6 percent of its content to works featuring Latino characters. The company says that percentage reflects student demographics.
Students should be able "to see themselves in a high-quality text," said Jeff Byrd, senior product manager for reading at Houghton Mifflin.
But Latino education advocates and authors say they do not want schools to resort to tokenism. "My skin crawls a little when this literature is introduced because people are being righteous," said Ms. Alvarez, the author of the "Tia Lola" series, as well as "Return to Sender." "It should be as natural reading about these characters as white characters," she said.
At Bayard Taylor, another third-grade teacher, Kate Cornell, said that she would love to explore more options featuring Hispanic characters. "It would be more helpful as a teacher," she said, "to have these go-to books where I can say 'I think you are going to like this book. This book reminds me of you.' "
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New York NY/ Gates Foundation Awards $25 Million in Grants to Back Public-Charter Cooperation
By Motoko Rich
New York Times
December 5, 2012
In an effort to encourage collaboration between charter schools and traditional neighborhood schools, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded $25 million in grants to seven cities.
The Gates Foundation, which is one of the largest philanthropic players in public education, was scheduled to announce the grants on Wednesday to Boston, Denver, Hartford, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia and Spring Branch, Tex.
- Relationships between traditional public schools and charters, which are publicly financed but privately operated, are often fraught, with neighborhood schools seeing charters as rivals for money and the most motivated students.
- Charter schools, which have been operating in the United States for two decades and now educate about two million children across the country, were originally conceived as places to experiment with new ideas in education that could be transferred to their traditional counterparts. But that transfer has not often taken place smoothly.
"It took Microsoft and Apple 10 years to learn to talk," said Don Shalvey, a deputy director at the Gates Foundation who focuses on college readiness. "So it's not surprising that it took a little bit longer for charters and other public schools. It's pretty clear there is more common ground than battleground."
The grants will support a variety of projects in the seven cities, which are among 16 that have signed district-charter collaboration compacts with the Gates Foundation over the last two years.
- In New York, for example, four district schools and four charter schools will work to develop a literacy program that helps students meet the Common Core standards that have been adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia.
- In Denver, high-performing schools - whether charter or district schools - can apply for grants to serve as demonstration sites where teachers and administrators from struggling schools can visit and be paired with mentors.
"'Best practice' has become this very common phrase in education," said Chris Gibbons, the chief executive of the Strive Preparatory School network of seven charter schools in Denver. "But so often the best-practice sharing that happens is at such a surface level."
Nina Rees, the president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said the grants would give school districts more incentive to work with charter schools. "If you're running a school district and looking at your bottom line, the notion of an entity that's sitting outside of your system serving your students with more autonomy is not necessarily something you will openly embrace," Ms. Rees said. "Which is why having mediators or foundations who can take a step back and bring the two sectors together is definitely welcomed."
The Gates Foundation, as well as Bill and Melindae Gates personally, have strongly supported charter schools. Most recently, Mr. Gates donated more than $3 million in support of a ballot initiative to permit charter schools in Washington State for the first time. That measure passed by a slim margin.
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Washington DC/ Access to AP Courses in STEM to Grow With $5 Million Google Gift
By Erik Robelen
Education Week [Edweek.org.]
December 4, 2012
Fueled by a $5 million grant from the technology company Google, more than 800 public high schools will be invited to start up Advanced Placement STEM courses with a focus on attracting more female and minority students who show strong potential to succeed.
The new program-to be developed by the College Board in collaboration with the nonprofit DonorsChoose.org, the grant recipient-will work directly with teachers in qualifying schools to help them obtain the training and classroom resources they need to launch AP courses.
- "There are hundreds of thousands of talented students in this country who are being left out of the STEM equation," said Jacquelline Fuller, the director of giving at Google, in a press release.
- "We're focused on creating equal access to advanced math and science courses, and ensuring that advanced classrooms become as diverse as the schools themselves."
Google's gift was part of a larger set of seven grants announced today under what it's calling Global Impact Awards.
- One other grant is focused on education. It will provide $1.8 million to the nonprofit Equal Opportunity Schools to identify 6,000 students who are deemed ready for more advanced coursework but not enrolled in such classes, and help move them into those classes.
- Under the AP-focused grant, schools will be eligible to receive funding to start one or more AP courses in STEM subjects. They will receive awards ranging from $1,200 to $9,000, depending on the subject, for each new course. The money will be used for professional development to prepare teachers, as well as to acquire classroom materials, lab and technology equipment, and other resources to support the new STEM courses.
The new program will target a set of more than 800 high schools, identified through several criteria, that are deemed to have a population of students traditionally underrepresented in the STEM fields but who are ready for advanced coursework in those disciplines.
- One criteria was that each school during the 2010-11 academic year had 10 or more African American, Hispanic, American Indian, or Alaskan Native students, and/or 25 or more female students, with "high potential to be successful in one or more AP STEM courses that were not offered in their school," the press release said.
- These figures are pegged to their performance on specific sections of the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test.
"The data exists to identify students who have the ability to achieve but otherwise aren't getting [access]," Chris Busselle, a program manager at Google, told me. "We're excited about taking a data-driven approach to decreasing those gaps and increasing access for girls and underrepresented minorities."
The College Board press release cites data showing wide variation in AP course taking among students with the same high academic potential to succeed in STEM subjects.
- It notes, for instance, that in 2011, only three in 10 black and Hispanic students participated in AP math courses.
- It also points to disproportionately low rates of females taking some STEM courses.
In many cases, the College Board says, students did not take AP math and science courses because they were not available. In some instances, however, minority and female students simply did not participate and "the diversity of those classrooms frequently did not reflect the diversity of the school overall."
In addition to the grants to help teachers start AP courses, they will get another incentive.
- All AP teachers who increase the diversity of the student body in their classrooms will receive a $100 DonorsChoose.org gift card for each student who scores a 3 or higher on an AP STEM exam.
- Teachers can use the gift cards to pay for additional classroom resources.
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Washington DC/ Google Gives $23 Million To Charities To Spur Innovation, Help Girls And Minority Students
By Brett Zongker
Huffington Post
December 4, 2012
Google is announcing $23 million in grants to spur innovation among charities and increase education for girls and minority students in science and technology.
Seven nonprofits will win the first Google Global Impact Awards on Tuesday.
Charity: Water receives $5 million to use water-monitoring technology at 4,000 wells across Africa.
Donorschoose.org receives $5 million to create 500 new Advanced Placement science and math classes with the College Board for underrepresented students.
The World Wildlife Fund receives $5 million to adapt sensors and animal tagging technology to detect and deter poaching.
The Smithsonian's Barcode of Life project gets $3 million to use DNA barcoding to protect endangered species.
Additional grantees include GiveDirectly, Equal Opportunity Schools and the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. Google says innovation is underfunded among nonprofits.
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Washington DC/ COLUMN: List of What Common Core Authors Suggest High School Students Should Read
By Valerie Strauss [The Answer Sheet column]
Washington Post
December 5, 2012
A Post story by my colleague Lyndsey Layton about controversy surrounding the Common Core English Language Arts standards - or, more specifically, the call for reading by high school seniors to be 70 percent non-fiction - has generated a lot of online interest.
A number of the hundreds of comments on the story mention some of the reading recommendations from the Common Core authors that Layton mentioned in the story, including "the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (2009) and "Executive Order 13423: Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation Management," published by the General Services Administration."
Here is the full list of reading "exemplars" for high school. The fiction category is divided into stories, poetry and drama, and the nonfiction category, or "informational texts" offers suggested reading in English, History/Social Studies, and Science/ Mathematics/Technical Subjects. (The K-11 exemplars are contained in Appendix B to the standards; there are none listed for 12th grade.)You can find the actual Common Core standards here: http://www.corestandards.org/the-standards.
Grades 9-10 Text Exemplars:
Stories
Homer. The Odyssey
Ovid. Metamorphoses
Gogol, Nikolai. "The Nose."
De Voltaire, F. A. M. Candide, Or The Optimist
Turgenev, Ivan. Fathers and Sons
Henry, O. "The Gift of the Magi."
Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath
Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451
Olsen, Tillie. "I Stand Here Ironing."
Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart
Lee, Harper. To Kill A Mockingbird
Shaara, Michael. The Killer Angels
Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club
Álvarez, Julia. In the Time of the Butterflies
Zusak, Marcus. The Book Thief
Drama
Sophocles. Oedipus Rex.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Macbeth.
Ibsen, Henrik. A Doll's House
Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie
Ionesco, Eugene. Rhinoceros
Fugard, Athol. "Master Harold"...and the boys.
Poetry
Shakespeare, William. "Sonnet 73."
Donne, John. "Song."
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "Ozymandias."
Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Raven."
Dickinson, Emily. "We Grow Accustomed to the Dark."
Houseman, A. E. "Loveliest of Trees."
Johnson, James Weldon. "Lift Every Voice and Sing."
Cullen, Countee. "Yet Do I Marvel."
Auden, Wystan Hugh. "Musée des Beaux Arts."
Walker, Alice. "Women."
Baca, Jimmy Santiago. "I Am Offering This Poem to You."
Informational Texts: English Language Arts
Henry, Patrick. "Speech to the Second Virginia Convention."
Washington, George. "Farewell Address."
Lincoln, Abraham. "Gettysburg Address."
Lincoln, Abraham. "Second Inaugural Address."
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano. "State of the Union Address."
Hand, Learned. "I Am an American Day Address."
Smith, Margaret Chase. "Remarks to the Senate in Support
of a Declaration of Conscience."
King, Jr., Martin Luther. "Letter from Birmingham Jail."
King, Jr., Martin Luther. "I Have a Dream: Address Delivered at the March on Washington, D.C., for Civil Rights on August 28, 1963."
Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Wiesel, Elie. "Hope, Despair and Memory."
Reagan, Ronald. "Address to Students at Moscow State University."
Quindlen, Anna. "A Quilt of a Country."
Informational Texts: History/Social Studies
Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee:
An Indian History of the American West
Connell, Evan S. Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn
Gombrich, E. H. The Story of Art, 16th Edition
Kurlansky, Mark. Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World
Haskins, Jim. Black, Blue and Gray: African Americans in the Civil War
Dash, Joan. The Longitude Prize
Thompson, Wendy. The Illustrated Book of Great Composers
Mann, Charles C. Before Columbus: The Americas of 1491
Informational Texts: Science, Mathematics, and Technical Subjects
Euclid. Elements
Cannon, Annie J. "Classifying the Stars."
Walker, Jearl. "Amusement Park Physics.".
Preston, Richard. The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story
Devlin, Keith. Life by the Numbers
Hoose, Phillip. The Race to Save Lord God Bird
Hakim, Joy. The Story of Science: Newton at the Center
Nicastro, Nicholas. Circumference: Eratosthenes and the Ancient Quest to Measure the Globe
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency/U.S. Department of Energy. Recommended Levels of Insulation
Grades 11-CCR Text Exemplars:
Stories
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales
de Cervantes, Miguel. Don Quixote
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice
Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Cask of Amontillado."
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment
Jewett, Sarah Orne. "A White Heron."
Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor
Chekhov, Anton. "Home."
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby
Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying
Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God
Borges, Jorge Luis. "The Garden of Forking Paths."
Bellow, Saul. The Adventures of Augie March
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye
Garcia, Cristina. Dreaming in Cuban
Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Namesake
Drama
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet
Molière, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin. Tartuffe
Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest
Wilder, Thornton. Our Town: A Play in Three Acts
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman
Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun
Soyinka, Wole. Death and the King's Horseman: A Play
Poetry
Li Po. "A Poem of Changgan."
Donne, John. "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning."
Wheatley, Phyllis. "On Being Brought From Africa to America."
Keats, John. "Ode on a Grecian Urn."
Whitman, Walt. "Song of Myself."
Dickinson, Emily. "Because I Could Not Stop for Death."
Tagore, Rabindranath. "Song VII."
Eliot, T. S. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
Pound, Ezra. "The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter."
Frost, Robert. "Mending Wall."
Neruda, Pablo. "Ode to My Suit."
Bishop, Elizabeth. "Sestina."
Ortiz Cofer, Judith. "The Latin Deli: An Ars Poetica."
Dove, Rita. "Demeter's Prayer to Hades."
Collins, Billy. "Man Listening to Disc."
Informational Texts: English Language Arts
Paine, Thomas. Common Sense
Jefferson, Thomas. The Declaration of Independence
United States. The Bill of Rights (Amendments One through Ten
of the United States Constitution)
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Society and Solitude."
Porter, Horace. "Lee Surrenders to Grant, April 9th, 1865."
Chesterton, G. K. "The Fallacy of Success."
Mencken, H. L. The American Language, 4th Edition
Wright, Richard. Black Boy
Orwell, George. "Politics and the English Language."
Hofstadter, Richard. "Abraham Lincoln and the Self-Made Myth."
Tan, Amy. "Mother Tongue."
Anaya, Rudolfo. "Take the Tortillas Out of Your Poetry."
Informational Texts: History/Social Studies
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America
Declaration of Sentiments by the Seneca Falls Conference
Douglass, Frederick. "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?: An Address Delivered in Rochester, New York, on 5 July 1852."
An American Primer. Edited by Daniel J. Boorstin
Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe. "Education."
McPherson, James M. What They Fought For 1861-1865
The American Reader: Words that Moved a Nation, 2nd Edition
Amar, Akhil Reed. America's Constitution: A Biography
McCullough, David. 1776
Bell, Julian. Mirror of the World: A New History of Art
FedViews by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco
Informational Texts: Science, Mathematics, and Technical Subjects
Paulos, John Allen. Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences
Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
Tyson, Neil deGrasse. "Gravity in Reverse: The Tale of Albert Einstein's 'Greatest Blunder.'"
Calishain, Tara, and Rael Dornfest. Google Hacks: Tips & Tools for Smarter Searching, 2nd Edition
Kane, Gordon. "The Mysteries of Mass."
Fischetti, Mark. "Working Knowledge: Electronic Stability Control."
U.S. General Services Administration. Executive Order 13423: Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation Management
Kurzweil, Ray. "The Coming Merger of Mind and Machine."
Gibbs, W. Wayt. "Untangling the Roots of Cancer."
Gawande, Atul. "The Cost Conundrum: Health Care Costs in McAllen, Texas."
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Wellesley MA/ OPINION: WellesleyX, a Grand Experiment in Online Education
By H. Kim Bottomly [President, Wellesley College]
Huffington Post
December 5, 2012
Online education has been hailed by some as the potential savior of higher education. It is expected that online education will enable more students to be educated, more cheaply, with more thorough assessment, and more focus on usable job skills. It is thought to be the greatly needed disruptive innovation that could serve students better than standard classrooms.
Those of us who have been forerunners in the innovative teaching of undergraduates have been cautious about seizing this "opportunity." The reason is simple: We see online education as better suited to training than to educating.
Ultimately, our mission is not merely to train students in the skills necessary for entry-level jobs, but rather to educate students to become lifelong learners and to have the skills for a lifetime of jobs.
We believe that face-to-face interaction in the classroom and on campus is an essential part of the educational experience. Each class is an intellectual and interactive experience in which the teacher is responding continually to the students' ability to understand and be excited about the topic, and the student is learning how to learn. Because of this, we have been skeptical about the current hype surrounding online education.
All that being said, Wellesley College has just become the first liberal arts college to join edX, the online learning initiative recently founded by Harvard and MIT.
Why then, given the skepticism I noted, is there now a WellesleyX?
We have joined edX because we believe that colleges with a strong emphasis on teaching excellence have an imperative to use all means available to improve undergraduate education. We have joined to explore the possibility of creating better undergraduate experiences for our students.
I view this as an opportunity for a faculty known for innovation in the classroom to continue to experiment with the use of new technologies that have the potential to bring even more excitement to learning, and to enhance and enliven the classroom experience. Using a powerful platform such as edX, Wellesley faculty can fully explore the concept of blended learning - a process that combines the best of classroom and non-classroom experience.
We have also joined edX because we believe that the transformative experience of a liberal arts education, which has been so successful at Wellesley for generations, can contribute important value to the online learning space. Through edX and its partners, we will strive to develop the highest quality online education possible.
But edX offers us something more, another way to bring about an even better educational experience.
- Students online will be tracked, and their progress studied, allowing us to learn which pedagogical approaches are most effective, and which don't work.
- Through data collection, we will be able to link individual learning to our syllabi, content delivery, and interactive tools, and clearly assess the effectiveness of each.
In addition, edX provides other exciting opportunities. For Wellesley College, the opportunity to provide access to Wellesley professors for many around the world - especially women - who would not otherwise have that opportunity, is consistent with our values.
We imagine women in Saudi Arabia taking WellesleyX courses without having to leave their homes, or women in our own country taking a Wellesley course while juggling jobs and raising children, or young people from all areas of the country - rural and urban - trying their hand at an interesting course, expanding their knowledge of history, their appreciation of art and science, and their insight into our society.
Yet another benefit is the potential for WellesleyX to become the means by which we provide lifelong learning for our alumnae - something they want and something we want to do. We hope to extend their four-year educational experience to a lifetime.
WellesleyX is not a replacement for the traditional Wellesley experience, nor is it intended to be. It will necessarily be different from our dynamic, engaged classroom. But it will provide new ideas about engaged undergraduate learning. It will challenge us to think about the ways we will successfully educate students in 2020.
It will provide us with a new way of creating a classroom populated with students from all walks of life, bringing unique perspectives to classroom conversations, improving the learning experience for those participating, and building analytical, creative, and communication skills so highly sought in today's world.
I do believe that online education has the potential to improve the quality of education in this country. Whether we are a university, a liberal arts college, or a community college, our common goal is to enable learning. While we have different challenges, online education offers each of us an opportunity to create a more engaged educational environment. An engaged learning environment leads to more engaged students, a higher graduation rate, which in turn leads to more successful graduates, and a more educated society.
For all of these good reasons, we have begun WellesleyX.
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