Santa Fe/ NM Receives $25 Million in "Race to the Top" for Early Learning
By Hailey Heinz
ABQ Journal Staff Writer
December 7, 2012
New Mexico has received $25 million in federal "Race to the Top" money for early childhood learning, according to an announcement Thursday from the U.S. Department of Education.
- The funds are the latest from Race to the Top, a competitive grant program that has been used by the federal government to encourage states to improve their education systems.
- This is the second round of funding aimed specifically at improving education for children in pre-school through third-grade. In New Mexico, the money will be used to make pre-school quality more consistent across the state and to keep better data on pre-school skills. The idea is that pre-school data would be connected to students' K-12 data, to help give educators a more complete picture.
- The grant is a partnership between the Public Education Department, the Children, Youth and Families Department and the Department of Health.
The money will also be spent on additional kindergarten assessments to determine what students know when they enter kindergarten so teachers can target their lessons. The state has already moved toward a kindergarten reading assessment, but the grant may help pay for math and social skills assessments.
Gov. Susana Martinez lauded the award in a news release.
- "The commitment to reform for our students has again made New Mexico a national education leader," Martinez said. "This is just another example of the great things that happen when we put our students first and choose to invest in ensuring that our kids are prepared to read and succeed."
The money will begin to reach New Mexico in February and will be distributed over four years.
Other second-round winners are Colorado, Illinois, Oregon and Wisconsin, bringing the total number of states that have been awarded early-learning funding to 14.
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Farmington/ NM Awarded $25 Million in Education Grant
The Daily Times staff and The Associated Press
December 6, 2012
New Mexico will receive $25 million through a federal education grant aimed at helping small children become good students.
The money will be awarded across four years in the Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge.
Overall, $133 million in Race to the Top grants were awarded to five states.
Gov. Susana Martinez's administration said New Mexico will use its share of federal money to make sure that children are ready to learn when they start kindergarten.
The money will also be used to help improve reading skills of students from pre-kindergarten through third grade.
- "The commitment to reform for our students has again made New Mexico a national education leader," Martinez said in a statement.
- Hanna Skandera, secretary-designate of public education, said the grant for New Mexico was a "huge victory for our students and schools."
The state could start to receive the money in February.
Last year, New Mexico missed the grant when it received the 10th-highest score in a round where nine states received funding, said Larry Behrens, a spokesman for the state Public Education Department.
In addition to New Mexico, Colorado, Illinois, Oregon and Wisconsin will share in the grants announced Thursday.
Race to the Top began in 2011 when the federal government awarded $500 million to nine states to improve early childhood education programs.
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ABQ/ New Tests to Cost APS $39 Million
By Hailey Heinz
ABQ Journal Staff Writer
December 7, 2012
Albuquerque Public Schools is preparing to spend millions of dollars to replace about 17,000 computers as New Mexico moves to Common Core academic standards and new computer-based tests.
APS administrators predict it will cost the district an initial $39 million to upgrade computers, bandwidth, routers and switches, and another $15 million per year to maintain the system and bandwidth.
The costs are needed so APS can comply with the requirements of PARCC-the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers.
- The partnership is a consortium of 23 states working to create a test of the Common Core standards, which are being adopted by nearly every state.
- The test, which students will take on computers, will replace New Mexico's current Standards-Based Assessment in the 2014-15 school year.
School board members expressed concern about the cost this week and suggested phasing in the changes.
- "I'm just sitting here blown away by the cost," said board member Kathy Korte after hearing a presentation Tuesday on the district's technology needs. "I'm a huge proponent of common core standards and what they mean in the future for our kids, but wow. When we institute these kinds of reforms, again and again and again you see that they're not going to be funded fully."
- APS chief information officer Lynn Harris estimates that about one-third of the district's computers in schools-all those purchased before 2010-don't meet requirements.
- APS Chief Financial Officer Don Moya said the district will pay for the upgrades through capital money, not the operational budget, which, for example, pays for teacher salaries.
"It will come from capital dollars," Moya said. "I'm not looking at throwing precious operational dollars at this. We don't have them to throw."
He said he is finding ways to tighten the capital budget.
The Public Education Department is also looking to help.
- It will ask the Legislature for an $8 million statewide appropriation to help districts purchase new equipment, agency spokesman Larry Behrens said.
- He also said the state has been working with districts over the past two years to assess their needs.
The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers is one of two national groups developing tests of Common Core standards. Harris said of the two, the partnership has higher technology standards with greater costs to districts.
Behrens said in an email that New Mexico opted into the partnership for several reasons:
- It is being developed so it can link teacher evaluations to student test score progress, and
- it will give teachers student data regularly throughout the year so they can use the information to best help students.
Partnership spokesman Chad Colby said online testing will save most districts money in the long run, because they will need to update their computers anyway to improve instruction, and they will no longer have to pay for traditional paper tests each year. He also said online tests will assess students in new ways. Sample questions on the partnership website, for example, allow students to move coordinate points on a graph.
APS board member David Peercy urged the board-and the public-not to worry unnecessarily.
"Rather than panic about all this, having a phase-in kind of plan where you don't necessarily have everything all at once, that's what you have to do. And you have to use whatever resources you have to do that," Peercy said. "If you can't get it all by 2014, you can't get it all by 2014. You keep phasing it in."
Harris agreed, saying the district is taking a gradual approach and is initially focusing on high schools and middle schools, where the online tests are likely to be used first. She said the district may also be able to schedule testing so it won't need a computer for every student.
"We are beginning to believe that we won't need one computer per student for each test," Harris said. "It might be one-to-four or one-to-three, and they might stagger testing throughout the day, and that would minimize our financial impact."
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Carlsbad/ State Audit of Pate Elementary School Focuses on Improvement
By Natalie Gross
Carlsbad Current-Argus
December 6. 2012
Pate Elementary School received a grade of D for 2012 by the New Mexico A-F School Grading Accountability System, but Principal Therese Rodriguez said she is in the midst of making changes to make sure that doesn't happen again.
On Thursday, the school received a visit from a local education agency team that will be interviewing teachers, observing classrooms and evaluating curriculums until the end of the school day on Friday.
- "The purpose of the audit is to improve instruction at the classroom level through examining systems that both support and monitor teachers and other instructional personnel," said Rodriguez.
- "By law, we're required to examine our struggling schools," said Larry Behrens, the public information officer for the New Mexico Public Education Department.
And though Behrens said Pate Elementary School is not in danger of being shut down for its bad grade, the results of this audit will impact the institution's future
- "This is pretty important," said Rodriguez, who said she knows it's her job to show the auditors that she has plans for significant improvement in the coming year.
- The auditors expect that all instructional staff must first ensure that teaching and learning meet student academic needs.
- The school must also maintain a positive, respectful and trustworthy environment and employ effective research and teaching strategies.
- "We've already put this in place," Rodriguez said, and mentioned the Renaissance School Excellence Program as a comprehensive professional services program she has already implemented.
The RSEP empowers educators by using technology to make curriculum more effective and increase time for practice of core skills, Rodriguez said.
The audit is supposed to generate data to inform the school about its performance, said Rodriguez, and it helps the school to develop an education plan for student success-a school improvement plan required by every educational institution in the state.
Rodriguez said that at the end of the audit on Friday, she will sit down with the team to discuss the findings and her solutions.
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Taos/ School Board Boundaries Shift Prior to Candidate Filing
By Matthew van Buren
Taos News
December 6, 2012
Just two weeks before candidate filing day, the Taos Municipal School Board unanimously approved new boundaries for board members' districts. State statute calls for redistricting in school districts to follow every decennial Census.
The board was presented with the boundary changes Tuesday evening (Dec. 4). Superintendent Rod Weston said the changes were driven by population shifts and a desire for compact, contiguous districts. He said he and consultant Jennifer Smith, who analyzed the population data and compiled the revised maps, tried to avoid dividing precincts or creating "spokes" that stick out from members' districts.
- "It really was driven by numbers," Weston said.
According to information Smith derived from the Census Bureau, the school district's total population is 25,068. She and Weston aimed to place 20 percent of the total, or just over 5,000 people, in each of the board members' five districts.
Weston said the process involved finding the largest voting precincts and tacking smaller, contiguous precincts onto them to get close to the 5,000-person mark.
- "It's actually shifted a lot of things," Smith said.
She said areas to the Northwest, such as Blueberry Hill and Tune Drive, saw their populations grow between the 2000 and 2010 Census, accounting for some of the boundary changes.
Regarding the late timing of the action, Weston said redistricting had taken a back seat to "other crises of the moment." He said he initially thought the undertaking could be completed rather quickly.
- "It got put off some," he said. "It was a far more complicated process than I thought it would be."
Districts 3 and 5 are at issue in the Feb. 5 election.
- Under the newly drawn boundaries, board members Thomas "Chuby" Tafoya and Stella Gallegos both reside in District 5, population 4,987, which includes areas to the North such as Arroyo Seco, Tune Drive and San Cristóbal.
- Gallegos has said she will not seek another term, and
- Tafoya said he is moving into District 2, now represented by Zach Córdova.
District 3, population 4,940, is open under the new boundaries. It includes areas in the western portion of the school district, such as Los Córdovas, and extends south to County Road 110.
To view a map of the new districts, visit www.taosnews.com.
Board members were largely pleased with the new boundaries.
"It makes more sense geographically," Tafoya said.
Tafoya's former District 3 used to extend North to the D.H. Lawrence Ranch and South to the Pilar area.
Weston said one "downside" to the new boundaries is that District 1, which now includes Taos Pueblo, will not be up for election for another two years. Jason Silva represents District 1. Pueblo leaders have been arguing in favor of representation on the board for some time; Gallegos' District 5 used to include Taos Pueblo.
- "That was unintended," Weston said, but he said the population calculations made the shift necessary.
Board members and district leaders, as well as representatives of the local Yes! for Kids education group, have said they haven't heard much from people interested in running for the Taos school board in February, though they are hoping for candidates to come forward now that the new district boundaries are set. Yes! for Kids representative Roger Lerman said the group has been "beating the bushes" in search of interested parties.
"We're eager to meet people who are stepping forward," he said.
Lerman can be reached at (575) 758-5525.
State law calls for those interested in running for seats on local school boards to file Dec. 18. Candidate filing will be held at the Taos County Clerk's office, 105 Albright Street, between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.
Three seats on the Peñasco school board and four on the Questa school board will also be up for election Feb. 5, according to information from the county Bureau of Elections. However, those members are elected at-large from their school districts. State law calls for districts with populations of more than 16,000 to elect board members from individual districts.
For information, call the Taos County Bureau of Elections at (575) 737-6400.
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Washington DC/ Federal Commitment to Tribal Collaboration on Education
By Cameron Brenchley [Director of Digital Strategy at the U.S. Department of Education]
US Department of Education [ED.gov]
December 6, 2012
"In America, education must be the great equalizer," Secretary Arne Duncan said during a speech at the fourth White House Tribal Nations Conference this week. "[It is] the one force that enables people to overcome differences of birth and bank accounts and of power and privilege."
Each of the nation's 566 federally recognized tribes were invited to send a representative to the conference, which provided leaders the opportunity to interact directly with senior officials in the administration.
Duncan noted that the Administration is committed to tribes, citing such examples as President Obama's Executive Order establishing the White House Initiative on American Indian and Alaska Native Education, the launch of the State-Tribal Education Partnership, and help from ED's School Improvement Grants. However, he said there is still a "distance we have yet to travel," and that the conference is "an opportunity to take stock of our progress together, and to plan how we will address serious challenges that lie ahead."
Secretary Duncan explained that visiting reservations has been among the "most rewarding, uplifting-and sometimes heart-wrenching-opportunities I have had since taking office." He spoke of the real challenges that Indian Country faces, but that
Together, we must do more to nurture the next generation. Native youth need, and absolutely deserve, safe homes, safe communities, and an education system that prepares them for success in college and careers. They need and deserve an education system that prepares them for leadership and service to their communities, tribes, and country.
Education, Duncan said, "is the surest, most powerful path for breaking the cycle of poverty on tribal lands."
We must prepare our students to preserve the proud heritage and vibrant cultures that have shaped America's history for centuries. Your children are ready-they want to be challenged, they want to be successful. They just need a light to show them the way. And that is why we must be their champions now, so they can lead in the future. Children only get one shot at an education. They can't wait for reform to materialize a decade from now.
Read the entire speech here, and read about his recent commencement speech at Navajo Technical College. You can also read more about the conference on the White House Blog.
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Washington DC/ 7 Districts Split $25 Million from Gates Foundation for Charter Schools
By Kathy Matheson
Huffington Post
December 5, 2012
Seven school districts committed to working with charter schools to improve student achievement will split about $25 million in grants from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, officials announced Wednesday.
The funding is designed to deepen the collaborations among educators in Philadelphia; Boston; Denver; New Orleans; New York; Hartford, Conn.; and Spring Branch, Texas.
- "These cities are particularly committed to advancing college-ready strategies in both district and charter schools," said Vicki Phillips, education director for the foundation's College Ready program in the U.S. "What we're most excited about is the common ground that's getting established."
Charter schools, which are publicly funded but operate independently of school districts, have been a lightning rod in the debate over education reform.
- Supporters say they provide innovative and sometimes safer alternatives to traditional neighborhood schools.
- Opponents contend they drain resources from school districts without providing a better education.
The seven grant recipients are among 16 communities that entered into compacts designed to reduce tension between districts and charters. By signing the agreements, which entail sharing resources and best practices, districts received $100,000 and qualified for further funding.
Over the next few years, Hartford will get nearly $5 million and Denver about $4 million. The other districts will receive between $2.2 million and $3.7 million each.
Funds will go toward projects including universal enrollment systems, leadership training for aspiring principals and joint professional development for charter and district teachers.
- Chris Gibbons, the CEO of Strive Prep Charter Network in Denver, said the compacts are formal recognitions "that resources of the public sector are available to all students ... (and that) the responsibility to educate all students well is the shared responsibility of an entire city."
- In Philadelphia, the compact includes collaboration with private and Catholic schools. Lori Shorr, the city's chief education officer, said Philadelphia needs all types of high-achieving schools to reduce poverty, enhance public safety and attract economic development.
She also acknowledged that managing charter growth has been a contentious issue in the financially struggling district, where about 30 percent of the 207,000 students attend charters.
Shorr said some tension stems from "early animosities" about charters that have hardened and led to misunderstandings and misperceptions. The important thing, she said, is to "put adult foolishness aside" and focus on what's best for students.
- Spring Branch, a district that includes part of Houston and its suburbs, is slated to receive nearly $2.2 million. Superintendent Duncan Klussmann said a new partnership with two charter school operators is designed to spur innovation and a cultural change in the district, which is striving to double the number of students who obtain a degree or certificate in higher education.
"To do that, we have to have strong partnerships and collaboration," Klussmann said.
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Washington DC/ Vocabulary 'Report Card': 'Urbane' Stumps 8th-Graders, 'Grimace' Doesn't
A first deep look at vocabulary skills among America's students shows their vocabulary proficiency tracks closely with their reading ability overall. Racial gaps exist, but boys and girls performed about the same.
By Stacy Teicher Khadaroo, Staff writer
CSMonitor.com
December 6, 2012
For the first time, the Nation's Report Card is zeroing in on a key component of students' reading skills: vocabulary.
- A useful understanding of vocabulary goes beyond simply recalling a dictionary definition, education experts say.
- What's most important is for students to pull the appropriate meaning from a word in the context of what they're reading.
Thursday's new report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) shows results from a bolstered focus on vocabulary within the reading assessments given to national samples of students in 2009 and 2011.
- The results show that students' vocabulary knowledge tracks closely with their overall reading ability.
- "About half of the variation in reading comprehension [on the main test] can be associated with variation in vocabulary," said Jack Buckley, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, in a conference call with reporters Wednesday.
The report also hints that schools and parents have a long way to go to ensure that their children can precisely understand the kinds of texts they will encounter in an academic context.
- "There's quite a bit written about vocabulary and the best ways to teach it; unfortunately we're not seeing that go into the classrooms as much as we'd like," said Margaret McKeown, a senior scientist and clinical professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Education.
- "Typically for the younger kids, teachers often use words that the kids already know ..., conversational words,... but they're not attending to the meanings of words kids are meeting in texts," said Professor McKeown, who helped develop the reading and vocabulary framework for NAEP.
Students in fourth, eighth, and 12th grades answered multiple-choice vocabulary questions based on passages of text they had read.
- At least 75 percent of fourth-graders understood the meaning of words such as "created" and "underestimate."
- Eighth-graders knew "grimace" and "enticing." And 12th-graders grasped "capitalize" and "prospective."
- Some words that stumped the majority of students: "barren" and "prestigious" for fourth-graders; "urbane" for eighth-graders; and "delusion" for 12th-graders.
All items on the test are based on what a student performing at grade level should be able to understand. But, as in the overall reading assessment, there are some large gaps in vocabulary knowledge between various groups of students.
Among eighth-graders, for instance, the overall average score was 265 on a 500-point scale in both 2009 and 2011.
- But Asian and white, non-Hispanic students on average scored more than 20 points higher than black and Hispanic students.
- The gap between whites and Hispanics did narrow somewhat, however, from 30 points in 2009 to 28 points in 2011.
Racial gaps of a similar size exist at the fourth- and 12th-grade levels, as well.
- And for fourth- and eighth-graders, nearly 30 points divide students who are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch from their better-off peers (that measurement is not available for 12th grade).
"Among my students who are economically disadvantaged, I see some common barriers: not having reading materials at home, not having a support group to encourage visits to the library or reading newspapers and magazines, or simply not being read to,... [and that] makes a difference," said Brent Houston, principal of Shawnee (Okla.) Middle School, in a statement prepared for the NAEP vocabulary release event Thursday morning.
To address this, Shawnee teachers "routinely stop when reading passages aloud to ask questions and hold conversations," helping students understand specific words, says Mr. Houston, a member of the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), which oversees NAEP.
- Children need to learn a rich vocabulary in a variety of contexts at a young age-in preschool or before, says Judy Schickedanz, a retired education professor at Boston University who specialized in early-childhood reading. "If we don't attend to vocabulary and content knowledge in these early years, they can't ever catch up," and gaps in reading scores solidify, she says.
"By NAEP tracking vocabulary, it gets it on the front burner for people in the earlier years to look at, and I think that can only help," Ms. Schickedanz adds.
While girls' overall reading scores are higher than boys', in vocabulary the gap is minuscule in the fourth and eighth grades and doesn't show up at all in 12th grade, the new report finds. That may be because the vocabulary questions are multiple choice, while the overall assessment includes items in which students must write their answers, and writing is something girls tend to score better on, Mr. Buckley says.
The report also offers some state-level data on students' vocabulary knowledge. In 18 states, both fourth-graders and eighth-graders scored higher than the national average.
The focus on vocabulary is still too new to talk about long-term trends, but education experts hope that over time, NAEP will be able to track progress, especially because vocabulary is part of the emphasis in the new Common Core State Standards, with which most states are aligning their curriculum and testing systems.
"The Common Core pays considerable attention not just to learning individual words but also to their different meanings in different contexts and to the nuances in families of words. Like NAEP, it also stresses vocabulary that is characteristic of written language and academic texts rather than everyday speech," said Francie Alexander, senior vice president of Scholastic Inc., and a former member of NAGB, in a statement prepared for Thursday.
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Washington DC/ NAEP Data on Vocabulary Achievement Show Same Gaps
By Erik W. Robelen
Education Week, Vol. 32, Issue 14 [Edweek.org]
December 6, 2012
A new analysis of federal data that provide a deeper and more systematic look into students' ability to understand the meaning of words in context than was previously available from "the nation's report card" finds stark achievement gaps in vocabulary across racial and ethnic groups, as well as income levels.
The analysis aims to offer greater insights into reading comprehension.
- The first-of-its-kind National Assessment of Educational Progress report suggests a consistent relationship between performance on vocabulary questions and the ability of students to comprehend a text, which experts say is consistent with prior research on the subject.
- In 2011, 4th and 8th graders performing above the 75th percentile in reading comprehension on NAEP had the highest average vocabulary scores, the report says. Likewise, those 4th and 8th graders scoring at or below the 25th percentile had the lowest average vocabulary scores.
"Today's special report puts an important spotlight on something that's not discussed nearly enough on its own: vocabulary," Brent Houston, the principal of Shawnee Middle School in Shawnee, Okla., and a member of the NAEP governing board, said in prepared remarks.
- "We discuss concepts such as reading comprehension and reading on grade level, but we can't have success in those areas if our students also do not learn to understand the meaning of words in a variety of contexts.
What was especially troubling, Mr. Houston said, were the achievement gaps identified in the report.
- "Perhaps what struck me most-and what hits closest to home-is observing the performance trends by family income," he said.
As Mr. Houston pointed out, the data reveal large gaps in achievement on the vocabulary assessment between students who are eligible for a free or reduced-price lunch and those who are not.
- In 4th grade, the gap was 31 points on a 0-500 scale.
- In 8th grade, the gap was 28 points.
The report does not provide achievement levels for students, such as "proficient" or "basic," as is typical for NAEP reports. Data from the broader NAEP reading report for 2011 found just 34 percent of both 4th and 8th graders scoring at or above the proficient level.
"Schools nationwide really need to go beyond teaching word definitions" to improve reading performance, Mr. Houston said.
The new report offers a sampling of vocabulary words that tripped up many students. The word "permeated" was a trouble spot for a lot of 8th graders, with nearly half failing to correctly identify its meaning in a nostalgic passage about eating a "mint snowball" at a small-town drugstore. And "puzzled" was apparently puzzling for 49 percent of 4th graders, who misidentified its meaning in a passage from the story "Ducklings Come Home to Boston."
'The Early Stages'
A revised NAEP framework for reading, instituted in 2009, seeks to provide a more detailed and "systematic" measure of vocabulary.
- While previous reading assessments had included some vocabulary questions, the revised framework set new criteria for developing vocabulary questions and increased their number.
- The changes, a NAEP fact sheet says, allow the test to "reliably measure students' vocabulary performance and report it separately."
- All vocabulary questions were multiple-choice and appeared in two different sections of the reading exam: comprehension and vocabulary.
Margaret McKeown, a senior scientist for learning research and development at the University of Pittsburgh, said in a statement that the new assessment is distinct from traditional vocabulary exams in three ways.
- First, it's not based on a list of specific words.
- Second, the "target words" appear within the context of a passage, "rather than in isolation."
- And third, the NAEP items emphasize an understanding of a word's use within a given context, rather than the definition of the word on its own.
"This decision represents the major rationale for the assessment," Ms. McKeown said, to measure "the kind of knowledge that students need to have about words in order to use the words to understand what they read."
She added: "Although we are in the early stages of assessing vocabulary in NAEP, these initial results may give us some clues on patterns and how vocabulary fits into reading comprehension. ... Future NAEP reports in this area will provide invaluable data and trends on vocabulary in text that provide a better grasp of the nature of comprehending text and the role vocabulary knowledge plays in the quality of comprehension."
Ms. McKeown served on a NAEP planning committee charged with developing recommendations for the current reading-assessment framework.
The report includes achievement data for 2009 and 2011 at grades 4 and 8.
- The average overall score did not shift by a statistically significant margin at either grade level. But there were changes in certain categories. For example, the lowest-achieving 8th graders, those at the 10th percentile, saw a gain of 2 points on the NAEP scale, which was statistically significant.
- On the issue of achievement gaps by race and ethnicity, the analysis found that in 2011, black students trailed white students, on average, by 29 points in both the 4th and 8th grades. Changes from 2009 to 2011 were not deemed statistically significant.
- Meanwhile, Hispanic 4th and 8th graders also trailed their white peers, by 28 points in 8th grade and 29 in 4th grade.
- Girls outperformed boys by slight margins in grades 4 and 8 (2 points and 3 points, respectively) in 2011. The 1-point difference in 12th grade, from the 2009 assessment, was not statistically significant. In 2011, 12th graders were not tested.
'Barren' and 'Eerie'
A chart featured in the report highlights some of the vocabulary words tested and how students fared in recognizing their meaning in context.
In grade 4, words like "barren," "detected," and "eerie" posed problems, with fewer than half of students correctly identifying their meaning. But "created," "spread," and "underestimate" were correctly understood by 75 percent or more.
The word "urbane" was difficult for both 8th and 12th graders, with fewer than half getting the correct answer. But "anecdotes" was correctly understood by three-quarters of 8th and 12th graders.
Several criteria were used to select words for inclusion in the vocabulary questions, according to the report. Those words were to be: characteristic of written language, as opposed to everyday speech; used across a variety of content areas, rather than being technical or specialized language; generally familiar concepts, feelings, or actions; and necessary for understanding part or all of a passage.
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Denver CO/ New NAEP Results Explore Link between Vocabulary, Reading Skill
By Kevin Simpson
The Denver Post [Colorado Classroom]
December 6, 2012
A new test has confirmed the link between vocabulary and reading comprehension and created a systematic way to assess students' grasp of word meaning, according to new data released Thursday by the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Representative samples of fourth-, eighth- and 12th-graders from across the country answered questions that measured not only how well students understood reading passages but also how they arrived at the meaning of specific key words.
- Colorado's fourth- and eighth-graders scored higher than the national average on both vocabulary and reading comprehension in 2011 results.
- Only 11 states tested 12th-graders in a pilot program, and Colorado wasn't among them.
- The state's girls scored higher than boys in fourth grade, but there was no significant gender gap in eighth grade.
- Nationally, students who scored higher on the vocabulary questions also scored higher in reading comprehension. Compared with results from 2009, there was no statistically significant change.
The vocabulary questions didn't ask students to define words but offered multiple-choice answers for what a given word meant in the context of the reading passage. It's the "intersection of word knowledge and passage comprehension" that offers insight, according to NAEP.
- "The format of the test gave us the opportunity to peer into what students are doing with the words as they're going through the text and trying to understand it," said University of Pittsburgh researcher Margaret McKeown. "It gives us insight into what happens in comprehension and reminds us that a good score overall on comprehension doesn't mean that a student understood everything in a passage. It gives us a snapshot of what's missing and whether it could be due to vocabulary."
McKeown added that teachers could find the test's examples helpful in revealing how students figure out a word's meaning from context.
- "That's never been put into assessments before," she said. "Other tests ask for a word in isolation, or a definition. So this is embedding what we know about vocabulary into assessment."
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New York NY/ Students Fall Flat in Vocabulary Test
By Stephanie Banchero
Wall Street Journal
December 7, 2012
Read the 'Vocabulary Results from the 2009 and 2011 NAEP Reading Assessments' Report: http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/vocabreport1206.pdf
U.S. students knew only about half of what they were expected to on a new vocabulary section of a national exam, in the latest evidence of severe shortcomings in the nation's reading education.
Eighth-graders scored an average of 265 out of 500 in vocabulary on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress, the results of which were made public Thursday. Fourth-graders averaged a score of 218 out of 500.
The results showed that nearly half of eighth-graders didn't know that "permeates" means to "spread all the way through," and about the same proportion of fourth-graders didn't know that "puzzled" means confused-words that educators think students in those grades should recognize.
Most fourth-graders did know the meaning of "created," "spread" and "underestimate." At eighth grade, most students knew "grimace," "icons" and "edible."
The new vocabulary test was embedded in the biennial national reading exam, known as the NAEP. Last year's scores were in line with those posted in 2009, the first time vocabulary scores were broken out, but the latest results are the first to be made public. Experts noted that the results mirror the performance on the national reading test, which has yielded fairly static scores for a decade.
- Margaret McKeown, a senior scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh, said she wasn't surprised by the results but that they are cause for concern.
"There is very little vocabulary done in any classroom at any age," said Ms. McKeown, whose research focuses on reading and vocabulary. "There is quite a bit of research about vocabulary and the best ways to teach it. Unfortunately we are not seeing that go into the classrooms as much as we would like."
- Leslie Russell, a reading specialist at Butts Road Intermediate School in Chesapeake, Va., said the vocabulary scores could be improved if students were more immersed in literacy at school and at home. "We need to make more of an effort to get parents involved in teaching reading and teaching them how to help children make sense of words they do not know," she said.
The U.S. Department of Education administered the 2011 exam to a representative sample of 213,100 fourth-graders in public and private schools in all states. About 168,000 eighth-graders were tested.
In 2009, 12th-graders also took the exam. Their average score was 296 out of 500 on the vocabulary portion. The high school exam is administered every four years.
The department has given the reading exam for decades but decided to add new questions in 2009 to more fully test students' knowledge of grade-level vocabulary. The words were embedded in reading passages and students were asked their definition in a multiple-choice format based on the context of those passages. The selected words are familiar concepts, feelings or actions.
African-American and Latino students posted scores lower than white and Asian students at every grade level. Low-income students scored far below their wealthier counterparts. The gaps between the groups ranged from 28 to 31 points.
Girls scored a few points higher than boys in fourth and eighth grade, but the results of girls and boys were nearly identical in 12th grade.
Data showed scores for the highest-performing students dipped slightly from 2009, while scores for the lowest-scoring students remained unchanged in fourth grade and increased slightly in eighth grade.
"Without a strong vocabulary, any child's ability to read and to learn suffers dramatically," David Driscoll, chairman of the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policy for NAEP, said in a statement. "Helping students improve their vocabulary and use words in the proper context is essential to improving overall reading ability."
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Tacoma WA/ Economic Reality Marries Age-Old idea - Apprenticeships - with College
By Christopher Connell
Hechinger Report [Hechingerreport.org]
This story also appeared on NBCNews.com on December 6, 2012
December 6, 2012
Five-foot-two Jesica Bush exudes confidence, whether she's scribbling notes in a 6:30 a.m. class at Bates Technical College here or wrestling 900-pound girders atop a mock two-story building.
With her blond ponytail tucked inside a brown hardhat, the 30-year-old is an apprentice with the ironworkers' union, a job that starts at nearly $25 an hour and will lead her in three years to both a journeyman's card and an associate degree.
Three years back, Bush sat in the state women's prison in Purdy, finishing seven and a half years for an armed-robbery conviction. The former addict dropped out of school in seventh grade-"Me and school, we never saw eye to eye," she says-was convicted of her first felony at 13, had a child at 15, and was sent to prison at 19.
But when it took her just six months to complete her GED in Purdy, the instructors asked her to be valedictorian at the graduation ceremony and to start thinking about college. When she got a chance to fight fires with a prison brigade instead of cleaning toilets, she jumped on it and made the discovery that "I loved hard work. I'd never worked a day in my life. You hike up the forest, you chain-saw trees all day. It's hard-really hard-just like being an ironworker. But I loved coming back and being tired."
Now Bush is one of 209 people learning the ironworking trade through apprenticeships like this one and others run by the Aerospace Joint Apprenticeship Committee, a state-funded partnership among community colleges, industry and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, at a time when skilled workers are needed by Boeing and the rest of the aerospace industry in Seattle and to help build a $4 billion replacement for the floating 520 Bridge over Lake Washington.
An age-old doorway into skilled trades and a middle-class life, the apprenticeship is making a comeback, rebounding after all but disappearing in recent decades in the face of a decline in union membership and dwindling demand for skilled labor. And as the economy changes, today's apprenticeships combine the chance for workers not only to master skills while earning a paycheck but to get a college degree at the same time.
From the White House to executive suites, and from think tanks to such industry groups as the National Association of Manufacturers, there's a push to link apprenticeships with conventional education, mostly at community colleges, and produce a better-educated workforce capable of filling the more than 3.6 million skilled jobs the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates remain vacant in industries such as manufacturing-even at a time when more than triple that number of Americans are looking for work.
Higher education, advocates say, can not only provide these newly minted workers with the critical-thinking skills they need for today's jobs, but also leave them better prepared and more appealing to employers the next time things get tough.
- "What works so well about apprenticeships is that workers can gain tailored skills for the workplace along with critical academic learning, all while they earn a paycheck," says Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington), a champion of federal support for apprenticeship programs.
What makes them a model, Murray said at a U.S. Department of Labor ceremony marking this year's 75th anniversary of the National Apprenticeship Act, are those paychecks, plus the programs' reliance on strong public and private partnerships and the combination of academic and on-the-job learning.
- Machinists these days have to operate sophisticated, computer-numerical-controlled equipment like the $3 million Makino vertical machining center that Seattle apprentice Irwin Downes has learned to run at JWD Machine in Fife, Wash. The company sent Downes and two other apprentices to Ohio to learn how to run the super lathe, which can cut titanium parts on several axes at once under high heat and jet sprays. Now the three are teaching the factory's other 42 machinists how to use the time-saving machine to make critical parts for the aerospace industry.
Downes, who is 24, also spends four hours in class one night a week at Bates Technical College. "I knew my feeds and speeds for cutting aluminum, but why is it that way?" says Downes, who previously worked in a Chinese fast-food restaurant for a year after high school. "At Bates, they break it down into a math formula and show us where the numbers come from."
- Across the country in Virginia, at the sprawling Newport News Shipyard on the waterfront near where the James River spills into Chesapeake Bay, applications to the apprenticeship program have skyrocketed from barely 540 a dozen years ago to a record 6,300 this year. New apprentices spend two full days each week in college classes, while earning more than $30,000 to start and upwards of $50,000 by their fourth year. They spend the rest of the week on the waterfront learning one of 17 trades and helping build and repair the nation's aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines.
The best move on to advanced classes from which almost half will graduate with an associate degree from nearby Thomas Nelson Community College or Tidewater Community College, which teach some courses inside the shipyard gates and others back on their own campuses. The shipyard's Apprentice School has its own 17-member faculty as well as nearly 70 craft instructors. Of those 6,300 applicants, it takes 260 new apprentices each year-making it more selective than Harvard, Yale and Princeton.
The shipyard, owned by Huntington Ingalls Industries, also looks to the Apprentice School for future supervisors, managers and executives. Danny Hunley, who enrolled as an apprentice welder at age 19 in 1974 and is now vice president of operations, says that "human supply chain" is particularly reliant on the community colleges.
"We invest heavily in community colleges, not just for workforce development but for education of our employees," says Hunley. "We rely on a lifetime of learning to prepare our people to create the product that we sell that no one else can."
Hunley says he hopes that when the Apprentice School moves from its World War II-era brick building into a planned glass-and-steel showcase in downtown Newport News, it will even begin to offer bachelor's degrees.
Malachi Underwood, 27, an apprentice in the foundry shop, came to the shipyard in 2010 after being laid off from a job making wheels for railroad freight cars. "The things you do in the classroom here relate to what you do every day on the job. They make them real life," says Underwood, who was recently tapped to leave the foundry and become a nuclear test technician.
Everett Jordan, director of the Apprentice School and, like Hunley, an alumnus (he was a shipfitter), says the complex theory classes that apprentices take bring "a critical dimension to our education here." Adds training manager David Tilman: "If you're taking AC/DC theory as a freshman in college [elsewhere], you're putting together little boards. When you're doing it here, you're putting together nuclear submarines."
Conversely, employers say the instruction their apprentices get in college classes is broader than what new workers can learn on the job alone. The colleges typically work with local industry to design their classroom programs.
"Not only is the curriculum structured, but it helps the company build that apprentice's skill in all facets," says Jason Mohon, manufacturing director for JWD Machine. "Historically, if you were just an operator or a machinist out on the floor, you might find yourself spending years focusing on one task. This helps the company open their eyes and cross-train them."
The same is true of the 6:30 a.m.-to-3:30 p.m. classes that the ironworker apprentices take in Tacoma, which occupy one month each year during their four-year apprenticeships. At the job sites where they spend the other 11 months, much of the trainees' time may be spent carrying or tying rebar, or doing other hard, physical labor, rather than the more complicated work of following codes and blueprints.
Some foremen and journeymen "have no problem explaining things so the apprentices build up knowledge as they go, but some do not," says instructor Kelly Graves. He tells the apprentices that if they want to be superintendents, they'll need college degrees. "The more education you have, the better off you are," he says.
- Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire and the state legislature came up with $3 million to create the aerospace apprenticeship program in 2008, at a time of near-panic among employers about the aging of their skilled workers. Half of Boeing engineers are eligible to retire by 2015, and two-thirds of the company's entire workforce is within a decade of retirement age.
Yet employers have their work cut out to convince a new generation to enter these trades, says Laura Hopkins, the program's executive director. For them, the promise of a college degree can be an inducement.
"In this day and age, if I'm trying to recruit young people, we have to have a college degree attached," Hopkins says. "We have to convince their counselors and teachers and parents as well that this is a good career opportunity for them and that if the economy shifts and their industry goes down, they can move on to something else with that college degree."
If apprentices have a college degree and work as machinists for a while but then decide they want to go into engineering, "they now have the opportunity to do that without starting from square zero," says Hopkins, herself a former Boeing aircraft mechanic and dean at South Seattle Community College. "The more pathways we create for folks to go into these different careers, the better it is for everybody."
Back at Bates, Jesica Bush is convinced she's found the right calling. She wants to become a construction supervisor eventually and instruct apprentices herself.
"I'm a bossy person. I envision me running something sooner or later," Bates says. "I grew up in prison. That's where I got educated. I had to learn, and I'm still learning. I am driven-and I refuse to lose again."
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Washington DC/ Startups Target Teachers as 'Consumerization' of Education Emerges
By Jason Tomassini [Editorial Interns Mike Bock and Nikhita Venugopal and Research and Development Associate Amy Wickner contributed to this article]
Education Week, Vol. 32, Issue 13 [Edweek.org]
December 5, 2012
Before the 2011-12 school year, a high school journalism student interviewed Keith Pomeroy about the technology tools used in the Olentangy school district, the Ohio system where Mr. Pomeroy is director of technology.
When the student asked about Schoology, the online course-management system many teachers in the district were using, Mr. Pomeroy found himself at a loss for an answer.
"I looked around my office and asked, 'Does anyone know what Schoology is?'" Mr. Pomeroy recalled.
Without his knowledge, 500 students and their teachers within one Olentangy high school were using Schoology, which is available online for free.
- The district was reviewing learning-management systems at the time, and after three weeks of researching the products and talking to teachers, Mr. Pomeroy reached out to the New York City-based company.
- By then, he said, 1,500 students across the district were using the product in their classrooms. After evaluating some demos, the district bought an annual subscription.
- "I've never seen this trajectory on any other tool," said Mr. Pomeroy, who has held his position at the 17,500-student Olentangy district for 12 years.
Schools throughout the country are experiencing the same teacher-driven adoption of technology tools. Internet-savvy teachers are increasingly finding tools to use in the classroom on their own, and lower business-startup costs mean the tools are more readily available.
In response, many education companies are changing how they market and sell their products.
- Nationwide sales teams and central-office visits are giving way to word-of-mouth and sophisticated business-intelligence software as preferred methods for pushing adoption.
- Companies offer free products to teachers with the goal of influencing districtwide purchases of more-robust versions-known as the "freemium" pricing model.
But in most sectors of the existing K-12 system-with its various stakeholders, budgetary restrictions, and procurement regulations- the so-called "consumerization" of education faces many barriers, experts say, making it difficult to find the right balance between selling directly to teachers and addressing the needs of central-office administrators.
"Investors get excited," said Adam J. Newman, a founding and managing partner of Education Growth Advisors, an education business-advisory firm in Stamford, Conn. "But I think anyone is lying to themselves if they say they know which consumer models will become successful."
'What's Radically Changed'
Schoology's Manhattan offices are what most people would expect for a startup company. On one afternoon before the start of the school year, young adults in jeans and T-shirts sat in front of their computers in ergonomic chairs and sported headphones, or they gathered around one another's desks talking shop. There is a pool table, a Ms. Pacman machine, and a flat-screen TV with a real-time map of the product's usership across the country.
The Schoology website itself is familiarly modern. The home page for users looks similar to that of Facebook, with a left navigation bar and a center column of notifications. In its early days, the company interviewed hundreds of teachers, who said they wanted a learning-management system that felt like something they actually use in their everyday lives.
"Typically, students have had to find things; with social networks, it comes to you," said Jeremy Friedman, the 25-year-old co-founder and chief executive officer of Schoology, which began in 2009 as a class project at Washington University in St. Louis.
For free, teachers can sign up and use Schoology to upload class rosters, manage attendance, keep grades, create calendars, chat with students, and deliver assessments. Schoology can offer those features for free because hosting and developing a website is cheap, and the company believes teachers shouldn't have to pay for classroom tools, Mr. Friedman said.
Schoology also offers an enterprise product for schools and districts, with a per-student fee that varies depending on the customer. That version allows for greater central-management ability, advanced student-data analytics, and professional-development resources.
That's what makes Schoology a "freemium" model, and Mr. Friedman acknowledges it's the latter part of its business that allows it to succeed and grow.
"We're an enterprise company that has consumer functionality," he said.
That approach is beginning to take off in education, but it's more common in other sectors. For instance, Apple's iPhone overtook Research in Motion's BlackBerry as the corporate phone of choice because the former gained so much traction in personal use.
- "What's radically changed is the amazing, incredible realization that people who work in enterprise-or schools-are people, consumers," said Geoff Ralston, a former executive at Yahoo and a partner at Imagine K-12, a Palo Alto, Calif., startup accelerator that invests in and advises education technology companies. "If you get consumers, you have pull," he said.
Newer companies, such as Edmodo-a San Mateo, Calif.-based competitor to Schoology that doesn't charge its users-have embraced that concept. Recently, Edmodo launched an app store, similar to the iTunes store, and it is rolling out a feature that allows districts to funnel dollars into teachers' accounts so they can buy software applications independently.
Kickboard, a data-analytics and gradebook startup based in New Orleans, is working backward through this trend. It began only as a paid product for district or school adoption, but last week launched "starter accounts" that teachers can use for free.
The most prominent example of the consumer-focused model in education is Blackboard, the learning-management-system giant. The company began in 1997 as a way for teachers to set up class websites for free, and now it is a billion-dollar corporation used in thousands of schools and universities.
"We always very explicitly believed what we were trying to do with teachers is gain mind share," said Matthew Pittinsky, a co-founder of Washington-based Blackboard and now the CEO of Parchment, a transcript-management company based in Scottsdale, Ariz. "The revenue model was always to sell software to schools and universities."
Mr. Pittinsky left Blackboard in 2008 on good terms, but he said his one regret was shifting too much of the company's sales efforts toward institutional customers rather than continuing to focus on teachers.
For much of its existence, Schoology didn't even employ a dedicated sales team. The company interviewed and even hired teachers to develop a product they would like and could spread by word-of-mouth.
As the company grew, it is used by nearly 2 million students, employs 38 people, and has raised $10 million in venture capital funding, Mr. Friedman said-it did hire a sales team of seven people. The company competes with larger, more established businesses by using what is known as intelligence software.
'Gives Them Ownership'
The software presents a map showing which users are teachers, which are administrators, and whether they are using the site for free. Districts with many free users are targeted for sales calls, during which a company representative tells an often-surprised technology director how many teachers are using Schoology and why an enterprise version might help. The information also influences what conferences the company attends and where it should direct its support and marketing resources.
Of course, the emerging sales models used by Schoology and other companies are made possible by educators who actively look for technology.
Little information is available on how teachers spend money on instructional technology, but a recent survey of 1,200 teachers by AdoptAClassroom.org showed that 28 percent of respondents spent their own money on products that include technology.
Biannual surveys from the National School Supplies and Equipment Association showed that while out-of-pocket teacher spending dropped from an average of $552 per teacher in 2006 to $356 in 2010, the percentage of that money spent on instructional materials, including technology, grew from 44 percent to 52 percent.
Myla Lee, a 42-year-old teacher at Deerfield Elementary School in Novi, Mich., follows education technology blogs, attends conferences, and uses online forums like Edutopia to learn about instructional technology. She began using a free tool called PB Works to manage content for her classes, after a teacher friend used it during a workshop presentation.
Ms. Lee recommended the product to other teachers, who approved of its simplicity and wiki-type format, and then persuaded the principal to buy an annual subscription, which the school used for four years.
As a math teacher at Northwest Classen High School in Oklahoma City, Telannia Norfar used student-response clickers on the recommendation of a friend and encouraged the 43,000-student district to put the manufacturer on its preferred-vendor list.
But Ms. Norfar, 36, acknowledged that districts aren't always ready for this kind of bottom-up change. When she pushed her school to buy a new brand of graphing calculator for math teachers, there was enough initial interest to make a purchase. However, the devices ended up gathering dust on the shelves because the teachers not familiar with the technology didn't want to risk incorporating new technology during tests, she said.
For such products to succeed, companies and schools must provide training, said Ms. Norfar, who is now an instructional technology coach for the district. And the training must be practical. To achieve that, teachers must influence decisions on which products are used in the classroom, Ms. Norfar said.
"If we found success by doing this, how can we do it again and purchase it?" she said. "Sometimes it's technology and sometimes it's not, but it came from [teachers] and that gives them ownership. "
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Washington DC/ OPINION: Teach to Each Child's Intelligence
By Thomas Fisher [Professor and Dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota]
Huffington Post
December 6, 2012
Colleges and universities teach to their students' intelligence. Those students who have musical intelligence gravitate to the music school, bodily-kinesthetic intelligence to the dance department or intercollegiate sports, spatial intelligence to the art school or design college, and so on. While these diverse departments in universities convey a lot of specialized knowledge and technical skill, they also do something equally profound: they recognize that people have "multiple intelligences," as educational psychologist Howard Gardner has argued, and that we often learn best when content gets conveyed in ways that match our intellectual strengths.
To understand the difference this makes, talk to almost any college student. Most will tell you how dreary so much of their primary and secondary school education felt to them, with too much rote learning and too few opportunities for creativity, too many academic exercises with too little relevance to the world around them. Higher education has some of the same problems, especially in large lecture classes taken by non-majors to fulfill distribution requirements. But once most college students find the major that suits them, you can see in their faces and hear in their voices the excitement that comes from learning things that interest them and that play to their strengths.
Why do we make so many students wait until the last couple of years of college to finally find pleasure in learning? Why can't primary and secondary schools follow the model of colleges and teach to the intelligence of their students? Charter schools have tried to do this, with curriculums that appeal to one of the eight intelligences that Gardner has identified - language immersion schools for linguistically intelligent students, for example, or outdoor-oriented pedagogies for students with a nature intelligence. Still, these schools remain few in number and reach relatively few students.
Most public and private schools still march students through standard curriculums, sorted by their age group rather than by one of the eight intelligences. While that standardization may make it easier to test and measure, it comes at too high of a price, making too many bright kids feel stupid in the process. As I hear from the talented students in my college, their visual and spatial intelligence and their natural creativity often went unappreciated and sometimes completely stifled in grade school and high school. And they will tell you how hard it was to watch those students with either linguistic or logical-mathematical intelligence - the two forms of intelligence most valued in schools - get held up as the smart ones.
Critics of the theory of multiple intelligences have objected to its apparent lack of objective criteria, empirical evidence, and measurability, but if this has no merit, why do we sort students according to their intelligences in college? At the same time, some supporters of Gardner's ideas want every school to address all eight intelligences, which may seem like an admirable goal, but will almost guarantees that every student feels equally frustrated, since very few are equally intelligent in every way.
Instead, we should consider expanding what works so well in higher education to primary and secondary schools. In my design college, for example, our students learn a wide range of subject matter - science and social science, art and philosophy, math and technology - via their predominantly visual and spatial intelligence, and they apply that knowledge to projects in a hands-on way, making it immediately useful and relevant. Imagine grade schools and high schools doing the same, with students grouped not by grade, but by intellectual strength, learning a diversity of content via a linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal, or naturalist lens.
This would make K-12 teaching as creative and challenging as college teaching, and it would probably better prepare students for continuing their education in college. But, most importantly, it would help students see that they are not dumb, but just intelligent in different ways and that school need not be such a drag, but instead - as college is for most students - a place that makes learning fun. Imagine that!
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