PSFA Daily News Digest

8-10 December 2012

www.nmpsfa.org 

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

Santa Fe/ NM Near Bottom in NAEP Vocabulary Scores

By Hailey Heinz

ABQ Journal Staff Writer

December 8, 2012  

New Mexico's fourth-graders scored dead last among the 50 states in vocabulary skills, according to a report released this week from the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Only the District of Columbia scored lower.

Eighth-graders fared slightly better, outscoring students in California, Mississippi, Hawaii, Louisiana and the District of Columbia.

• This is the first-ever vocabulary report from NAEP, which is the only standardized test taken by a sample of students in every state.
• That makes the results more comparable than other state achievement tests, which vary significantly in difficulty.

NAEP has released reports on reading achievement for years, but a specific vocabulary section has now been added to the test. The latest report, which includes results from 2011, is the first public look at how well students understand the meanings of words.

The top state for both fourth- and eighth-graders was Massachusetts.

The test did not simply ask students for word definitions, but asked for meaning in the context of a written passage.

The report highlights some words that were difficult for students nationwide and others that most seemed to know. For example, 75 percent or more of fourth-graders could identify the meanings of "created" and "underestimate," while less than half knew the words "flourish" and "prestigious."

Eighth-graders nationwide mostly knew the meanings of "anecdotes" and "enticing," but struggled with "urbane."

The report also highlighted stark national achievement gaps between Anglo students and their black and Hispanic peers.

• There were also large gaps between students from low-income families and their higher-income peers. These achievement gap data were not available at the state level.

Of fourth-graders whose scores were in the top 75 percent of the nation, 72 percent were Anglo, 10 percent were Hispanic, and 7 percent were black. In addition, 24 percent were eligible for lunch subsidies, and 2 percent were learning English. Similar patterns held for eighth-graders.

For fourth-graders scoring in the bottom 25 percent of the nation, 33 percent were Anglo, 35 percent were Hispanic, and 25 percent were black.

Also, 73 percent were eligible for lunch subsidies, and 24 percent were learning English.

About two-thirds of New Mexico public school students qualify for lunch subsidies, and more than half are Hispanic.

New Mexico's reading scores on NAEP have been flat for years, although the state has made progress in math. In fact, the last release of NAEP scores showed New Mexico was one of only four jurisdictions to make significant progress in math. However, the state's math scores are still near the bottom of national rankings.

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Santa Fe/ SFPS Analysis of Absent Teacher Statistics: 'Big Gap' Among Schools

By Anne Constable

The New Mexican

December 7, 2012

About one-third of teachers in the Santa Fe Public Schools were absent more than 10 days during the 2011-12 school year due to illness, bereavement or other personal reasons, according to a new analysis released Friday.

The report by Richard Bowman, chief accountability and strategy officer for the district, also showed that 33 percent of teachers were absent more than five days in the year for professional development, coaching or other school business.

The data show major differences among the schools.

• The percentage of teachers with more than 10 absences in the personal/sick category ranged from 12 percent at Salazar Elementary School to 53 percent at Atalaya Elementary School, for example.
• In the professional development/district business category, 58 percent of teachers at Salazar and Wood Gormley Elementary School had more than five absences, compared to 3 percent at Piñon Elementary School.

"The next step is to figure out the 'why' behind these numbers, why some schools are really high and others are really low," Bowman said. "We're not sure how concerned we should be. There is a pretty big gap."

He cautioned that the effect of any one teacher is magnified at a small school, such as Acequia Madre.

Bowman also noted that two of the three schools in the district's "innovation zone" - Piñon and Wood Gormley elementary schools - had relatively low absence rates for teachers. Wood Gormley, for example, had a personal/sick absence rate of 25 percent.

These schools are allowed the most freedom to innovate.

"Maybe it's just coincidence," Bowman said. "But it's the sort of thing we'll be looking at."

As for the professional development absences, Bowman said, "We hope teachers are gaining more from it" than students are losing from the absences.

• "What we're concerned about is the disruption to the instructional environment," he stressed. That occurs when the teacher is sick, as well as when he or she is away for professional development. "Every absence is a disruption."

Bowman's study is a response to demand for more information about data presented this fall, following questions from the superintendent's transition advisory team about staff absences. Disclosure that staff members were absent an average of 17 days a year suggested to some that teachers were slacking off and prompted a demand for a more detailed breakdown of the data.

The report also showed that 34 percent of educational paraprofessionals in the district had more than 10 absences because of illness or other personal reasons.

It is difficult to compare New Mexico's teacher absence rate to the rest of the country's. But the state ranked fifth in a report issued last month by the Center for American Progress Report, a research and educational institute. Only Rhode Island, Hawaii, Arizona and Oregon had higher rates of teacher absences in its study, "Teacher Absence as a Leading Indicator of Student Achievement."

• The Center for American Progress calculates the percentage of teachers absent for than 10 days using the most recent information from the federal Civil Rights Data Collection released in early 2012.
• On average, the report found that 36 percent of teachers nationally were absent more than 10 days during the 2009-10 school year. State averages ranged from a low of 20.9 percent in Utah to a high of 50.2 percent in Rhode Island.
• In this study, the absence rate for New Mexico was 47.5 percent.

Bowman's study largely relied on data from the system the district uses to track and assign substitutes. According to a spreadsheet pulled from that system, 918 staff members, mostly teachers, had a total of 12,773 absences. He also included another 2,914 days of leave taken by an additional 25 staff members as leaves of absence and long-term leaves.

The main spreadsheet showed that most of the absences - 5,743 , or 37 percent - were due to sickness. Another 2,465, or 16 percent, were described as personal and 3,427, or 22 percent, were for professional reasons. Absences due to bereavement (2 percent), coaching (1 percent), jury service or court obligations (1 percent) and other things, such as workers' compensation, were minor.

Superintendent Joel Boyd said Friday that the district is in the process of analyzing the data. "Some of the numbers raise more questions," he noted. "We are not ready to draw any conclusions."

On the other hand, he added, "We don't want to be in the inquiry process forever."

Historically, he said, staff attendance has been a concern in the district's human resources office, but it is a concern that "has not been investigated."

The district will be looking closely at the number of days teachers are absent for professional development and the disparities between schools, Boyd said.

"What [national] research tells us is that a teacher's absence from the classroom for more than 10 days in a year has a significant impact on student achievement," he explained. "There's real value in our teachers and our students being in attendance. We can't lose any one of those pieces."

NEA-Santa Fe President Bernice Garcia-Baca, a counselor at Aspen Community Magnet School, said in some cases, the high absence rate for professional development can be explained. At Aspen, for example, 56 percent of teachers had more than five days of absence related to professional development because the school has a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) curriculum.

• "The one thing that could help," she said, "would be if the district could be more responsive to what staff believes they need professional development for. This is an ongoing issue for us. We're told what our development is going to be."

School board member Frank Montaño had not read the report as of Friday afternoon, but he said, "Generally, it seems to me that our district is above the national norm when it comes to absences from the classroom. It needs to be addressed. We need to look at the situation and do whatever we possibly can to make sure our teachers are spending as much time in the classroom as possible."

Teacher absences:

65% of teachers in Santa Fe Public Schools had more than 10 absences in 2011-12

31% of teachers had more than 10 personal/sick absences

33% of teachers had more than 5 professional development/district business absences

Schools with highest percentage of personal/sick absences:

Atalaya Elementary School - 53%

Acequia Madre Elementary School - 50%

Academy at Larragoite - 45%

Schools with lowest percentage of personal/sick absences:

Salazar Elementary School - 12%

Piñon Elementary School - 13%

Ramirez Thomas Elementary School - 14%

Schools with highest percentage of professional development absences:

Wood Gormley Elementary School - 58%

Salazar Elementary School - 58%

Aspen Community Magnet School - 56%

Schools with lowest percentage of professional development absences:

Piñon Elementary School - 3%

Amy Biehl Community School at Rancho Viejo - 11%

Kearny Elementary School - 12%

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Santa Fe/ Teachers Out 12 Days Per Year

By T. S. Last

ABQ Journal Staff Writer

December 8, 2012  

The average Santa Fe Public School teacher missed 12 days of school for sickness, personal leave, professional development or district business last year, according to a new analysis by the school district.

That's considerably lower than the 17 days initially reported by the new superintendent's transition advisory team in October.

• "That sounds a lot more realistic," said Bernice García Baca, president of the National Education Association in Santa Fe, the local teacher's union.

Superintendent Joel Boyd's transition advisory team released a report disclosing its findings on a number of issues in October. Among them were that "teachers and other staff" missed an average of 17 days during the 180-day school year, or 9.4 percent of work days, nearly double the national average of nine days per year (5 percent).

Teachers disputed that data and claimed the numbers weren't thoroughly vetted before they were released.

At that time, García Baca said the numbers made SFPS teachers look as if they were lazy and educating students wasn't a priority for them.

"Nothing could be more incorrect!" García Baca wrote in an email to the Journal at the time.

She said then that a number of factors contribute to teacher absenteeism, including days spent on professional development, long-term sick leave and other legitimate reasons, such as jury duty and military duty.

In response, Boyd directed his staff to crunch the numbers more thoroughly and provide a breakdown of the reasons school employees were missing work.

Richard Bowman, the district's chief accountability and strategy officer, did so and released the report Friday.

• "We're drawing no conclusions from this," he said. "I was just asked to break down the data by location, type of absence, and job class. The next step is to answer the question, why? I think what we need to look at is the impact on the instructional environment."

To answer that question, Bowman said principals and other school personnel would be interviewed.

• "The numbers are just the numbers. Now we have to figure out the story behind the numbers," he said.
• "That's the part we want to be a part of," García Baca said. "We're hoping they include us when making those plans."

Bowman explained that the data gathered by the advisory team was pulled from the district's system used to assign substitutes.

• In his analysis, he supplemented that data with information about staff members on long-term leave and converted those absences to "vacancies."
• They were measured in three different job classes: "Teachers," or anyone with "teacher" as part of their job title; "Education Paraprofessionals," including special education and library services; and "Other," which includes everyone else, such as nurses, counselors, therapists and secretaries.
• Reasons for vacancies were grouped into two categories: "Personal/Sick" leave and "Professional Development/District Business."

Bowman said median averages, instead of mean averages, were used to get a more accurate representation.

• "When you use the mean, people on long-term absences really skew the number, often very dramatically," he said.

According to the report, the average teacher within the district missed a total of 12 days of school during the 2011-12 school year, seven of them for personal or sick leave and three days for professional development or district business. The other two unaccounted for days are a function of using averages, he said.

Nonetheless, 31 percent of teachers missed over 10 days due to personal or sick leave. That's actually less than the state average, as reported by the Center for American Progress, which indicated 50 percent of New Mexico teachers miss more than 10 days of school.

But Bowman warned that comparison could be apples to oranges.

• "Other folks don't break out data like this. I think we're one of the first in the state to break it out this way."

Bowman's analysis shows that the average education paraprofessional in Santa Fe missed eight days and employees in other job classifications miss an average of seven days.

Those groups rarely miss work for professional development or district business.

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ABQ/ EDITORIAL: Keep Teacher Evaluation Reform on Smart Track

ABQ Journal

December 10, 2012  

News last week that New Mexico has one of the worst four-year high school graduation rates in the nation likely bolstered the argument for many - including state education chief Hanna Skandera - that education reform measures need to get out of the station faster.

But last week also brought the announcement by the Legislative Finance Committee that New Mexico's colleges of education are not doing enough to prepare future teachers for the classroom.

So fast-tracking a new system of teacher evaluations might only serve the purpose of fast-tracking a new system of teacher evaluations - not improving student proficiency or graduation rates, which is what education reform is geared toward.

There's no question Skandera is correct when she says "our kids are in high stakes every day." But imprudent speed on installing major changes in how teachers are evaluated could stall the overall education reform movement, even set it back immeasurably, by killing any buy-in it has garnered.

Aztec Municipal Schools Superintendent Kirk Carpenter, whose district joined the handful of New Mexico schools in the pilot observation portion of the new teacher evaluations this year, warns "if we don't get that face-to-face training in every single school district prior to this going into place, I think we're in for a train wreck, I really do."

And New Mexico's public schools have enough wreckage as it is.

New numbers from the U.S. Department of Education show that only Nevada, the District of Columbia and the Bureau of Indian Education rank below New Mexico for the percentage of all high school students who graduate in four years. New Mexico's rate for 2011 was 63 percent; so was Albuquerque Public Schools'.

And the new report from the LFC says that admission standards at New Mexico's colleges of education are too low for teaching programs, testing requirements are too low for licensing, and teachers do not get adequate training to handle student behavior, use student data to make decisions, or teach special needs or non-English-speaking students.

Skandera would be wise to take the lessons learned from this school year's pilot teacher observation program, add the test score and other components, and use the next school year to expand the pilot across the entire state.

She should also work with Higher Education officials on mining that LFC report to replicate the programs from those New Mexico teaching colleges and universities that do have a record for graduating teachers who graduate proficient students.

The latest graduation numbers and LFC report show without question that education reform is badly needed, and there is no time to waste.

And it is important to acknowledge Skandera is having to engineer this piece on her own - the New Mexico Legislature refused to pass teacher evaluation reforms last session.

But it is just as important that she take the time needed to ensure this aspect of education reform is done well and done once.

Because it's unlikely there will be a lot of support for this reform leaving the station a second time.

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Santa Fe/ EDITORIAL: Literature Deserves Its Place in Classroom

The New Mexican

December 9, 2012

As we have remarked before, few good ideas in education aren't somehow spoiled while being implemented. When the nation became focused on standardized testing, such essential classes as social studies and science were pushed out in some districts. The notion being, students would spend more time on English, reading and math and score better on the tests. That didn't happen, of course, but a whole generation of children in some schools lost out on enriching and important knowledge.

Now come the Common Core Standards, the admirable attempt to give students across the country a common curriculum. The goal: to ensure that we truly are one nation, where children are held to the same standards and expectations. The notion, in itself, is not a bad one. But never underestimate the ability of some to take a good idea and turn it sour somewhere between concept and classroom. Already, in Common Core implementation, some schools are throwing out the teaching of literature in favor of nonfiction. Adding nonfiction is part of the reform, a belief by its supporters that children were not reading enough rigorous texts, especially in elementary school. With Common Core Standards, some 50 percent of elementary reading is supposed to be nonfiction, climbing to 70 percent by 12th grade. What that has meant in practice, say English teachers, is that poetry could be out the window, or essential novels discarded.

That can't be allowed to happen. Fiction - complicated, lavish, multilayered fiction - teaches about the human psyche and condition. Children need the connection they feel with the great characters of literature, whether identifying themselves with Huckleberry Finn or Ultima or even Harry Potter. In a world where the art of reading is being neglected, literature must remain in our classrooms - our English classrooms, that is.

Because the Common Core Standards are not calling for literature to be tossed. It's more that developers of the curriculum wanted other kinds of writing to be included - and we think that's a good idea.

American high school students, for example, should read Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, or Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from the Birmingham Jail." That reading, though, could take place in social studies, not in English class.

Science and math, too, could leave some room for reading - not to replace the important work of learning scientific principles or theorems, but to supplement knowledge by referring to the original great thinkers. (Doesn't that work well at St. John's College, for example?)

The burden for reading nonfiction does not have to fall only to English. That's a mistake of implementation, not necessarily a fault in the standards themselves - although the 70 percent nonfiction requirement in high school seems high. In fact, if further evidence rolls in that the standards are out of whack, educators should press to make sure literature requirements are strengthened. Children deserve better than another educational flavor of the month, and common standards must not replace common sense.

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Santa Fe/ COLUMN: Brooklyn Castle - Chess and Success in the Inner City

By Robert Nott

The New Mexican

December 9, 2012

I can't remember the first name of my middle school math teacher. In those days, students didn't get to know the first names of their instructors. But he was known to me as Mr. Hull, and he did two things for me: He convinced me I could grasp mathematics when I wanted to give up on the topic, and he taught me chess.

I was a competent, if sometimes clumsy, basketball player during that time period, but when it came to after-school activities, it was chess club, and not the gymnasium, that attracted me. I took part in regional tournaments and played chess during study hall, recreation hall and before class in the morning. I attended a really tough inner-city school populated by people from a lot of different backgrounds, but the chessboard didn't recognize race, creed or color. The game was a beautiful equalizer on so many levels. I think it helped me to not get beat up, in fact.

So Karen Dellamaggiore's new documentary, Brooklyn Castle, resonated with me. The film, which opens at the Center for Contemporary Arts' Cinematheque on Old Pecos Trail in Santa Fe this coming weekend, looks at the financial challenges facing I.S. 318, a public junior high school in Brooklyn, N.Y., and how district budget cuts threaten the school's chess club. Although about 65 percent of the kids who go to school there are considered impoverished (under federal guidelines), the school's student chess players have managed to win 26 national chess competitions over the last 15 to 20 years.

"In [I.S.] 318, the geeks ... are the athletes," the school's principal, Fred Rubino, notes in the film, which focuses on five of the school's chess-playing students and their hopes for winning the big matches at various regional and national chess competitions in 2009-10. These students are all aware that a draw can deny their team a win. (Draws are rarely considered a sign of success in a chess match, though I've breathed a sigh of relief when I've pulled off a stalemate after thinking I was going to lose a match.)

One of the kids in Brooklyn Castle, Justus Williams, is now considered a teen chess champ. Chess, for these kids, is a potential springboard for success in terms of choosing their high school and college down the line.

The movie contains a great scene in which school leaders urge parents and kids to lobby their political leaders to lessen the budget cuts and save the chess team (among other programs) - and their efforts work! Given the push from Santa Fe Public Schools Superintendent Joel Boyd and board member Steven Carrillo to get the community lobbying for our public schools come January (when the next, 60-day legislative session starts), I wonder if they can rally parents and students behind them the way these I.S. 318 leaders do in Brooklyn Castle.

The documentary's website, www.brooklyncastle.com, includes an updated blog about the picture's upcoming release and the lives of some of its subjects. Sad to say, it looks like Principal Rubino recently passed on, according to that blog.

Thinking of Mr. Hull got me to recalling the other teachers in my life who impacted me in a positive way. I don't know their first names - we're talking 35 to 45 years ago now. So, in no particular order, a belated thanks to Mr. Lee (sixth grade), Mrs. Bartel (fourth grade, and really tough, but she nurtured my love of reading), Mr. Scalpi (English teacher in high school), Mr. Cushman (history teacher in high school) and Mrs. Smith, another high school history teacher. And I recall Mrs. Parker (second grade) who was really playful with vocabulary, and Mr. Pritchard, who was a film and literature teacher in high school.

But the only middle school teacher I can remember is Mr. Hull. Who taught me chess. And math.

I still play chess. My checkbook is a mess.

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Santa Fe/ OPINION: Big Returns on Early Education Investments

By Michael Padilla [Democratic State Senator-elect, South Valley]

ABQ Journal

December 8, 2012  

New Mexico has a real opportunity to get our children excited about learning at a very young age by properly funding early childhood programs across New Mexico.

Simply by investing a very small portion of the state's permanent land grant fund, this can become a reality. In this year's legislative session there were two bills making their way through the legislature (HJR 15 and SJR 9) that could have positively altered the face of New Mexico for decades.

These bills would not only have had the impact of getting our children off on the right foot for the rest of their lives, but would have also had a lasting effect on our economy.

This legislation would have pumped hundreds of millions of desperately needed new dollars into the struggling New Mexico economy over the next decade.

In addition, the return on investment for high quality early childhood programs has conservatively been estimated by the Nobel Prize winning economist from the University of Chicago, James Heckman, to be 10 percent per year, per child for the rest of that child's life.

The key objective of this legislation is to take a portion of New Mexico's permanent land grant fund and commit it solely to high quality early childhood programs across the state.

The fund itself will not shrink, only grow at a less rapid rate. The return on investment, however, will be enormous and have multiple positive benefits.

In addition, this legislation has a sunset clause after 10 years as well as multiple safeguards and mechanisms to stop this initiative if it is not achieving its objectives. This is good government and something that all business people should fully embrace.

As a business owner, I've supported numerous economic development initiatives funded by the state. Some have proven successful and others have been failures. Many of these programs have focused on tax breaks for large out-of-state corporations that promise new jobs.

Unfortunately, the jobs never seem to materialize in the numbers promised and often don't last more than a few years.

This legislation will create jobs for decades because we begin to truly develop a quality workforce from the earliest opportunity, which will ultimately help New Mexico become significantly more competitive when it comes to recruitment of new business to New Mexico. Companies are looking for the best and the brightest workforce, and this legislation will develop such a workforce across New Mexico, not for the short run, but for generations.

Other positive residual effects of this legislation will be reduced dropout rates, increased earning potential, reduced crime and many others community benefits.

Gov. Susana Martinez and the Democratic Legislature should work together in a bipartisan fashion to make this a reality as soon as possible.

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Santa Fe/ OPINION: Logical Ways to Improve Funding for SFPS

By Joel D. Boyd [Superintendent of Santa Fe School]

ABQ Journal

December 9, 2012 

With approximately 70 percent of students receiving free and reduced priced meals, Santa Fe Public Schools has one of the highest poverty rates in the state. However, despite the obvious needs of our students, SFPS continues to be funded at lower levels than other comparable districts.

Currently, our schools rank third from the bottom of the seven largest school districts in New Mexico in terms of per-student revenue. Las Cruces, the top-funded "large" district, receives almost $500 more per student from the state than does Santa Fe. If our capital city were funded at the same level per student, SFPS would have more than $5 million dollars extra to support its schools - enough money to provide strategic interventions for students, increase professional development for teachers and offer every staff member a more competitive salary.

Although the state has attempted to overcome inequities in finances across its various locales through a statewide funding formula, over the years, the system has become just as unequal as those in other states, which are based on local property taxes.

People who follow New Mexico's political landscape have suggested that anyone who is interested in New Mexican politics can follow the changes of the statewide agenda by studying the ebbs and flows of the school funding formula. Over time, that formula, which is referred to as the State Equalization Guarantee, has become anything but equal.

As New Mexico's Legislature convenes next month, we are asking our state's elected officials to consider revising the current approach to school funding in two ways:

Modify the funding formula to place greater emphasis on the needs of students.

• Specifically, we are asking the Legislature to support an increase to the "risk factor" - a proposal to increase funding for students who come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and those who come from second language homes.
• We know that it costs more to support students who come to school with additional needs regardless of where they happen to live.
• By increasing the risk factor in the current formula, students throughout New Mexico can be provided with more equitable educational opportunities.

Despite the logic of this proposal, we recognize that there may be opposition to a formula change. There may be districts that incur an incremental loss in revenue. However, any loss in revenue in coming years is bound to be outweighed by gains in revenue in past years due to the faulty formula.

Amend the Public School Capital Improvement Act (commonly referred to as SB-9) and the Public School Buildings Act (commonly referred to as HB-33).

• SB-9 primarily provides funds for technology upgrades and school furnishings while
• HB-33 primarily provides funds for facility improvements.

It seems to make sense that if we purchase new technology for our students and build new facilities, we will need people to maintain their quality.

Although HB-33 allows school districts to pay salaries for certain workers, the language is restrictive. Thus, we advocate for more flexibility within these funding sources to cover the cost of employees who oversee and maintain these capital improvements. This flexibility would free up funds within the district's operational budget to support teaching and learning.

Some may contend that this budget source should not be used to cover ongoing salary costs since SB-9 and HB-33 funds are dependent on voter support during each six-year election cycle.

What people must realize is that school districts are always asked to make long-term decisions with short-term budget projections. In New Mexico and across this country, districts make budget adjustments from year to year due to revenue changes. Allowing flexibility in the use of SB-9 and HB-33 won't significantly alter this reality.

This is just a snapshot of a complex problem in district funding, which, in order to change, will require the support of parents, legislators and the broader community.

Santa Fe's local delegation has demonstrated considerable support for our schools, but it will take more than a few votes on the floor of the legislature to change the prevailing school funding structure. I am hopeful that the rest of our elected officials state-wide will see the flaws in the current system and have the courage to support all of New Mexico's students.

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Manchester NH/ Strapped District Plans to Add Online Classes

By Jess Bidgood

New York Times

December 7, 2012

Budget cuts have eliminated about 95 full-time teachers from the school district here over the past year, swelling class sizes and prompting parents to cry foul.

• "We had students sitting on the floor with a clipboard," said Jim O'Connell, the president of the Parent-Teacher Organization at Hillside Middle School. "It's one degree separated from a 1700s classroom with chalk and a slate."

Officials, seeking an overhaul, began to wonder if a 21st-century technology might help allay their struggles: having some students take courses online during the school day, without a teacher physically present.

But a plan to institute "blended learning labs," which allow students to do just that, is stoking concern among parents and teachers. Some doubt the efficacy of online learning. Others say the proposed solution barely scratches the surface of systemic problems here.

• "It's smoke and mirrors; it's a high-tech baby sitter," said David Fischer, a community college instructor who has two children set to attend Central High School next year.
• The plan, which Superintendent Thomas J. Brennan Jr. presented to the district's school board last month, would expand the district's current use of New Hampshire's online charter school, the Virtual Learning Academy, by putting a virtual learning lab in each of the district's three high schools, allowing students to take courses there during the school day under the supervision of a "facilitator" who would be present in the lab.
• It would also add a remote classroom to each high school, where students in undersubscribed courses could participate in classes taught at one of the other schools via an interactive monitor, and expand the school's collaboration with the University of New Hampshire at Manchester.

In an interview, Dr. Brennan said class-size issues were not the main motivation for the project, which he hopes will expand student opportunity and increase technology literacy among pupils and staff alike. But it could, he said, provide a new alternative for students in oversubscribed classes without the schools' having to hire part-time teachers to pick up extra course sections.

• "It deals with the reality of budgets and the limited resources we have, and the need for students and school districts to catch up with technology," Dr. Brennan said of the plan. "I believe the class sizes will diminish, and it will allow more opportunities for teachers to work with students that are struggling."

With more than 15,000 students, Manchester is the largest school district in the state, serving about 1 in 12 of its public school students, district officials say. Once, the city drew money from the large business tax base of its mill economy, now defunct. Since then, the district's growth has not kept up with its tax revenues, and Manchester now has some of the state's lowest per-pupil spending, at $10,283.77 per student (the state average is $13,159.15). Some frustrated school officials and parents also blame under-financing on a tax cap, finalized last year, that limits what the city can spend.

The question of under-financing and overcrowding drove the school board in tiny Candia, N.H., to request a face-to-face meeting with Manchester's school board late last month. Candia has its own public schools through eighth grade, but it contracts with Manchester to send its students to their Central High School.

Assistant Superintendent Michael Tursi presented the new plan, including the learning labs, to Candia's board, but it was unimpressed. "This is not a solution," said Candia's superintendent, Charles P. Littlefield, to applause. Later, he added, "I'd like to think I'm a 21st-century superintendent, but I'm not sure anything substitutes for high-quality interaction between teachers and students."

Parents bristled at the idea that online learning could begin to close the gap they see in the schools. "What you're seeing in Manchester is a postage stamp, a fig leaf, to cover the fact that politicians in our city will not increase taxes to fund our schools," said Mr. O'Connell, who is president of an advocacy group called Citizens for Manchester Schools.

Yet the use of online learning in high schools is growing nationwide; a 2008 survey by the Sloan Consortium, an organization that advocates for online learning, estimated that 1.3 million high school students took an online course during that academic year, and the number is likely to have grown since. Some states, like Florida, require students to take an online course to graduate.

Steve Kossakoski, the chief executive of the Virtual Learning Academy, New Hampshire's online charter school, said that the program was often used for accelerated or remedial courses or increased flexibility, but that he did not know of schools using his program to ease overcrowding.

But Crystal Howard, of Florida Virtual School, said school districts like Miami-Dade, one of the nation's biggest, did look to online learning when a 2002 voter referendum that went fully into effect in 2010 limited class sizes statewide. "When they said that there would be a mandatory class size and they could only have a certain number of students in the classroom, we did become a solution," Ms. Howard said.

Officials in Manchester expect to spend about $80,000 on the blended and remote classrooms, which they aim to begin putting in place next semester.

"I don't want people to think we're trying to divert resources so that we don't have to hire teachers," Dr. Brennan said. "The intent is to maximize the learning and to minimize the financial impact on Manchester School District."

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Waterbury CT/ Cognitive Labs: Test Designers Seek Help of Students, One at a Time

By Catherine Gewertz

Education Week, Vol. 32, Issue 14 [Edweek.org]

December 7, 2012

Pondering a math problem while she swings her sneakered feet from a chair, 12-year-old Andrea Guevara is helping researchers design an assessment that will shape the learning of 19 million students.

The 8th grader, who came to the United States from Ecuador three years ago, is trying out two ways of providing English-language support on a computer-based test. First, she does a few problems that display Spanish translations of the English instructions. Then she tries a few written only in English, but with pop-up windows that open on the screen and show translations of unfamiliar words.

Three researchers watch Andrea closely. They note which words she clicks on to activate the "pop-up glossary." They watch how she responds to the bilingual instructions. Since Andrea has been encouraged to think aloud while she's solving the problems, researchers hear as well as see how the features of the different test items help or hinder her.

Held at a middle school here last week, the session spotlighted an important but little-known piece of the test-making process, known as cognitive labs. With their intimate scale and their dive into a student's experience with the test, cognitive labs allow scientists to get inside students' heads and use what they learn to craft easy-to-use questions and tasks.

Designing for Many

The Waterbury session was a tiny part of a sprawling project to design tests for the Common Core State Standards in mathematics and English/language arts.

• All but four states have adopted the standards.
• Two federally funded groups of states are working on such tests; the cognitive labs are being conducted by one of those groups, the 25-state Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium.
• Students in grades 3-8 and 11 in those states are slated to take the tests in 2015, but since the standards span grades K-12, and assessments have a potent influence on instruction, all 19 million students in SBAC states stand to be affected by the new tests
• That's also true for the 25 million students in the other state consortium designing such tests, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for Colleges and Careers, or PARCC.

Smarter Balanced is working its way through 945 cognitive-lab sessions in about a dozen states nationwide. As part of SBAC's item-development contract with the test-maker CTB/McGraw-Hill, experts from the American Institutes for Research are looking for feedback on 20 questions that will inform the way test items are designed.

• "We want to make significant changes in the way assessment items look, and we don't want to make those changes without actually seeing how items function when they're put in front of kids," said Shelbi Cole, SBAC's director of math. "This helps us know earlier in the process so we don't develop a bunch of items that don't measure the new standards the way we want."

Long a tool of psychological research, cognitive labs found a place in educational assessment design in the 1980s. The qualitative information they yield about subjects' experiences with test items complements the quantitative data produced by larger-scale pilot tests and field tests, which are more geared toward gauging items' reliability and validity. In developing its tests, Smarter Balanced is using the cognitive labs early in the process, to influence the design of items that will be field-tested in 2014.

Many of the questions at the heart of the Smarter Balanced cognitive labs focus on the interaction of students with technology, since the group's tests will be computer-based and computer-adaptive.

• Do students feel as comfortable, for instance, responding to questions on tablets as they do with pencil and paper?
• How do their responses on tablets differ from those on PCs?

Some questions reflect the newer types of items envisioned for the tests.

• How long, for instance, is long enough for a performance task, which requires more-complex, extended research, writing, or problem-solving?
• What kinds of instructions do students need when presented with a multiple-choice item that allows them to choose more than one answer?

Key questions explore ways to provide accommodations for students with disabilities and those learning English. Magda Chia, SBAC's director of support for underrepresented students, said it's crucial that students from all walks of life, at all skill levels, find the test items equally accessible.

So for the cognitive labs, the group reached out through emails to school districts, mailings to churches and YMCAs, and Craigslist advertisements to recruit a broad array of students: those from big cities and small towns, and from all points on the income scale; those who are more and less at ease with technology; students who speak English fluently and those who struggle; children with disabilities and those without. Participating in the 90-minute sessions entitles students to a $50 gift card; their parents get $10 to cover transportation costs.

Zeroing In

On researchers' minds for the Waterbury session were two questions:

• What kinds of translations work best for students still learning English, and
• whether students find a tablet's on-screen keyboard as easy to use as a traditional keyboard.

Andrea was chosen to help them gain insight into the first, since she is still working to master English. Her older sister, Melanny, was on board to help with the second.

Elena Saavedra, trained at the AIR to administer the cognitive lab, began each protocol with a brief orientation, telling the girls that the session wasn't about grading their responses but about designing a test for "students from many districts" with items that work well and make sense. As Ms. Chia and AIR researcher Kristina Swamy watched, Ms. Saavedra asked the girls to think aloud as they worked.

Working on a laptop computer, Andrea tackled three math problems that displayed Spanish translations for each paragraph of English instructions. She read the problem aloud, as it was written in English, and then switched to Spanish as she thought out loud while solving it, using pencil and scratch paper to do the calculations for herself.

Then Andrea moved on to the three problems that used pop-up glossaries to translate words or concepts students might find unfamiliar. One was about a student who had to paint ceramic tiles blue and green in an art class. If Andrea had hovered her cursor over the words "tile" and the phrase "art class," and clicked on them, she would have seen little windows open up with Spanish translations. But she didn't click on them, even though she told Ms. Saavedra in a postlab interview that she didn't understand the word "tiles."

She used the glossaries more as she went along, however. In the third problem, which asked her to calculate the cost of building a sidewalk of specific dimensions, she clicked on "contractor" and saw its translation. But she also clicked on words and phrases for which the item had no pop-up glossary: "fee," "charge," and "Prospect Road," the location of the fictional sidewalk project. She told Ms. Saavedra afterward that she found the item difficult and that the glossaries were "kind of" helpful. When she couldn't understand a word in one of the problems, she said in Spanish, she tried her best to deduce its meaning from context.

Reflecting later, the research team wondered whether additional pop-ups might be needed and whether extraneous details in that item would distract some students unnecessarily.

"We could have said that a woman is building a house, and needs a sidewalk built, and we don't really need the detail that it's on Prospect Road," Ms. Chia said. This same protocol will be tried on several dozen other students, though, before any conclusions are drawn.

Multistep Process

Also, the test items used in the cognitive labs have not gone through "bias and sensitivity" reviews, a standard part of test development in which items are examined for factors that could upset or distract students, or put them at a disadvantage because of cultural, social, or other references. Had the sidewalk item been through such a review, some revisions probably would have been made, said Ms. Chia. But she added that unreviewed items were used deliberately in the cognitive lab to get additional feedback on the kinds of terms or phrases that could trip students up.

Some of what researchers gleaned from Andrea's work with the translations and pop-up glossaries came not just from listening to her, but from observing.

The fact that she clicked on the pop-ups more as she went along, they said later, suggested that it took a little while for her to get comfortable with that option. That got them wondering about the possible need for teachers to introduce the pop-ups to students during the year, so they are familiar with them by the time they take the test. They tucked that thought away for later, once the feedback from all students in the experiment can be compiled and analyzed.

With the translation exercise completed, Ms. Saavedra turned to 15-year-old Melanny, and introduced her to the tablet computer she'd be using for a set of English/language arts questions.

For the first, Melanny would use the tablet to read a short argument about whether students should be permitted to go on the Internet in their classrooms. Then she would use the on-screen keyboard to write a brief counterargument in a rectangle drawn underneath the prompt. When she began to compose her response, the 10th grader laid the tablet on the table and typed with one or two fingers of her right hand, leaving the left in her lap.

For the second question, Melanny was asked to use a mechanical keyboard connected to the tablet to write her response to another prompt. This time, she typed with both hands. For the third question, Melanny was allowed to choose whether to use the on-screen keyboard or the mechanical one. She chose the mechanical keyboard.

Interviewing her afterward, Ms. Saavedra asked which keyboard she preferred. Melanny demurred, glancing down at the table and saying she had no preference. Researchers said that it's not uncommon to get those kinds of responses, as students try to be accommodating. But the adults know that valuable information lies underneath those answers. So Ms. Saavedra gently pressed Melanny: But if you had to choose, she said, which one would you pick?

"If I had to choose, this one," the teenager said, quickly this time, pointing to the mechanical keyboard.

Asked why, Melanny was quick to offer several reasons. For the on-screen keyboard, "you use only two fingers," she said, while on the mechanical version "you use all of them." In addition, Melanny explained, when the on-screen keyboard displays on the tablet, it crowds the space provided to type the answer, making that process difficult. She also complained that the on-screen keyboard display made it necessary to keep moving the screen back and forth horizontally with her finger so she could read the paragraph-long prompt.

The research team thanked Melanny, handed her a Visa gift card, and reunited her and her sister with their parents, who were waiting in the hallway. In the coming weeks, the notes and audio recordings detailing the two sessions will be combined with the responses of more than 900 other students and analyzed for lessons about test-item design.

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Highlands Ranch CO/ Highlands Ranch High School Alt-Ed Program Named State's Best

The Alternative Cooperative Education program helps at-risk students gain skills needed for college, jobs

By Clayton Woullard

Denver Post

December 5, 2012

Anthony Peterson was ditching often in his sophomore year at Highlands Ranch High School.

He had a lot of social and home issues, but most of all he had a lot of bad habits. He joined the school's Alternative Cooperative Education program and slowly started getting out of his bad habits. In his senior year, he had eight credits to earn in order to graduate.

"Senior year, it really smacked me in the face," Peterson, 18, said.

But he spent every period in the ACE classroom, helped by ACE teacher Joe Chandler, and graduated in May. Now he attends the automotive school at Lincoln College of Technology.

"It got me forward, it got me to graduation, it got me to college, it got me past all the BS," he said.

The school's ACE program was recently recognized as 2012 Colorado ACE Program of the Year by the Colorado Association for Career and Technical Education. The program helps at-risk students struggling to graduate with credit recovery, job skills and skills for college. It has been at Highlands Ranch High School since 2007.

The program recently started construction days, in which students visit construction sites. They take part in the junior achievement stock show challenge and competed last year in the FIRST Tech robotics challenge.

When Pamela Lopez, 17, and a senior at HRHS, joined ACE, she was a year behind in classes because she was ditching and lazy about homework. Now she's caught up and plans to attend the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising when she graduates.

According to the Colorado Department of Education, the school's graduation rate in 2011 was 90 percent and its dropout rate was 0.4 percent.

Chandler said about 100 students are in the program at any one time, and about 96 percent of seniors in the program go on to graduate.

He said while the goal of the program is to decrease the drop-out rate, his goal is to make the learning relevant to students with field trips to workplaces and real-life examples.

"In this class you talk about relevant stuff," Peterson said. "The classes I never showed up to I thought weren't relevant. You know us teenagers - we already know everything."

Chandler tries to instill the teens with skills such as civic responsibility, critical thinking, cultural awareness and work ethic.

"Other people might take these kids as at risk of dropping out, but when they come in here, they're not at risk at all," Chandler said. "They do amazing things."

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New York NY/ Charter Schools Expanding Rapidly in More US Cities

By Sarah Carr

Hechinger Report [Hechingerreport.org]

December 5, 2012 [posted online 12/10/12]

Charter schools now enroll more than 20 percent of public school children in 25 school districts across the country, according to a new report [http://publiccharters.org/data/files/Publication_docs/NAPCS 2012 Market Share Report_20121113T125312.pdf] from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, which tracks charter-school growth annually.

Overall, charters enrolled more than two million students in 41 states and the District of Columbia during the 2011-12 school year; that amounts to about 5 percent of public school enrollment nationally.

• In only one community, New Orleans, did charters serve more than half of the public school children last year.

But the data suggest that within the next few years, charters will likely educate a majority of students in other communities as well.

• For instance, charters enrolled 41 percent of students in both Detroit Public Schools and
• the District of Columbia Public Schools in 2011-12.
• Seven other communities experienced growth greater than 25 percent in charter-school enrollment between 2010 and 2011.

Apart from New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and a few other Southern cities, Midwestern towns dominated the top 10 list.

The report cites parent demand as a major explanation for charters' growth. But President Barack Obama's Race to the Top program also motivated some states to lift or eliminate their caps on the number of charter schools allowable under state law.

For more background on the history and politics of charter schools, please see this Education Writers Association guide: http://www.ewa.org/docs/PrivatizationRept_v06.pdf.

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New York NY/ Poor Schools Struggling to Meet State Standards, Years After Critical Ruling

By Vivian Yee

New York Times

December 10, 2012

Six years after a landmark court ruling required New York State to increase spending on public education, many schools in poor districts lack basic resources, and some do not even meet minimum state standards in certain areas, according to a report to be released on Monday by researchers affiliated with Teachers College at Columbia University.

• The researchers interviewed teachers, administrators and support staff members at 33 schools with high proportions of low-income, struggling or disabled students, including 12 in New York City.
• In many cases, schools could not afford enough staff members to meet standards in core subjects or in services like extra help for struggling students.
• Thirteen were not meeting state minimums for the amount of instructional time devoted to science, including three New York City high schools that were not offering any chemistry or physics classes, according to the report.

The issue, as it has been for years, is money.

• The recession arrived not long after a ruling by the State Court of Appeals in 2006 and an agreement by the Legislature and Gov. Eliot Spitzer in 2007 ended a battle of more than a decade over financing of poor schools, and the state is $5 billion behind what it pledged to spend, according to the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, the group that won the court ruling.
• "These constitutional rights are not conditional, and they cannot be put on hold because there is a recession or a state budget deficit," the report's authors wrote.

The group issuing the report, the Campaign for Educational Equity, is based at Teachers College and led by Michael A. Rebell, a lawyer and education professor who is the former executive director of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity.

The report did not identify which schools researchers visited. It said that 5 of the 33 were not meeting state requirements in social studies, and that 3 fell short of minimum standards in math.

• Schools could not keep up with standards in art, occupational studies, health and physical education.
• None were offering the minimum amount of support services for struggling students, like remedial after-school programs.
• Students with disabilities were not receiving enough extra academic support in six schools, and English-language learners were affected in 13.

Cuts, meanwhile, had slashed so deeply at some schools that principals reported taking on the duties of a secretary, a social worker or a janitor.

Although a major goal of the lawsuit by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity was to limit class sizes, they remain high, the report said. All the New York City middle and high schools in the survey reported classes of 30 or more students.

According to statistics from the city's Education Department, class sizes have been steadily increasing; the average class size in elementary schools rose to 24.4 in 2011-12 from 23.7 in 2010-11, and in middle schools to 27 from 26.8 over the same periods. In high schools, they remained at 26.3.

According to the report, teachers said the minimum standards, hard as they were to follow, were still too low to ensure a meaningful education, which the court defined in its ruling as preparing students to become competitive workers and productive citizens.

Even if the schools had the resources to meet the minimum standards, teachers said, students were unlikely to meet Regents standards or the state's new Common Core learning standards, which are more stringent.

But between the recession and Hurricane Sandy, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo faces a difficult fiscal situation. The governor's office has repeatedly fretted over the fact that New York leads the nation in education spending yet apparently has little to show for it.

• "The facts on the governor's priorities for education are clear," Matt Wing, a spokesman for the governor, said in a statement. "Last year, he invested an additional $800 million in our schools, despite a multibillion deficit, and prioritized low-income districts with a spending formula that gives them a higher percentage of state aid."
• The $800 million restored to school districts last year followed two years of substantial education cuts, which eliminated most of the extra aid the state had given out in the years immediately after the court ruling.

Mr. Rebell said he hoped the reports would prompt Mr. Cuomo and the Legislature to incorporate more education aid into next year's budget. But if not, he said, his group would consider going to court, using the reports as the groundwork for its arguments. The Campaign for Fiscal Equity has also indicated it may sue again.

Mr. Rebell has made one concession: given the condition of New York's finances, he and other advocates have offered to help the state find ways to do more with less.

"The kids have a right to constitutionally mandated services; they don't necessarily have a right to a dollar amount," he said. "I'm aware a lot's changed since 2007."

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Jackson KY/ COLUMN: Profiting From a Child's Illiteracy

By Nicholas D. Kristof

New York Times

December 8, 2012

This is what poverty sometimes looks like in America: parents here in Appalachian hill country pulling their children out of literacy classes. Moms and dads fear that if kids learn to read, they are less likely to qualify for a monthly check for having an intellectual disability.

Many people in hillside mobile homes here are poor and desperate, and a $698 monthly check per child from the Supplemental Security Income program goes a long way - and those checks continue until the child turns 18.

"The kids get taken out of the program because the parents are going to lose the check," said Billie Oaks, who runs a literacy program here in Breathitt County, a poor part of Kentucky. "It's heartbreaking."

This is painful for a liberal to admit, but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America's safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency. Our poverty programs do rescue many people, but other times they backfire.

Some young people here don't join the military (a traditional escape route for poor, rural Americans) because it's easier to rely on food stamps and disability payments.

Antipoverty programs also discourage marriage: In a means-tested program like S.S.I., a woman raising a child may receive a bigger check if she refrains from marrying that hard-working guy she likes. Yet marriage is one of the best forces to blunt poverty. In married couple households only one child in 10 grows up in poverty, while almost half do in single-mother households.

Most wrenching of all are the parents who think it's best if a child stays illiterate, because then the family may be able to claim a disability check each month.

"One of the ways you get on this program is having problems in school," notes Richard V. Burkhauser, a Cornell University economist who co-wrote a book last year about these disability programs. "If you do better in school, you threaten the income of the parents. It's a terrible incentive."

• About four decades ago, most of the children S.S.I. covered had severe physical handicaps or mental retardation that made it difficult for parents to hold jobs - about 1 percent of all poor children.
• But now 55 percent of the disabilities it covers are fuzzier intellectual disabilities short of mental retardation, where the diagnosis is less clear-cut.
• More than 1.2 million children across America - a full 8 percent of all low-income children - are now enrolled in S.S.I. as disabled, at an annual cost of more than $9 billion.

That is a burden on taxpayers, of course, but it can be even worse for children whose families have a huge stake in their failing in school. Those kids may never recover: a 2009 study found that nearly two-thirds of these children make the transition at age 18 into S.S.I. for the adult disabled. They may never hold a job in their entire lives and are condemned to a life of poverty on the dole - and that's the outcome of a program intended to fight poverty.

There's no doubt that some families with seriously disabled children receive a lifeline from S.S.I. But the bottom line is that we shouldn't try to fight poverty with a program that sometimes perpetuates it.

A local school district official, Melanie Stevens, puts it this way: "The greatest challenge we face as educators is how to break that dependency on government. In second grade, they have a dream. In seventh grade, they have a plan."

There's a danger in drawing too firm conclusions about an issue - fighting poverty - that is as complex as human beings themselves. I'm no expert on domestic poverty. But for me, a tentative lesson from the field is that while we need safety nets, the focus should be instead on creating opportunity - and, still more difficult, on creating an environment that leads people to seize opportunities.

To see what that might mean, I tagged along with Save the Children, the aid group we tend to think of as active in Sudan or Somalia. It's also in the opportunity business right here in the United States, in places like the mobile home of Britny Hurley - and it provides a model of what does work.

Ms. Hurley, 19, is amiable and speaks quickly with a strong hill accent, so that at times I had trouble understanding her. Ms. Hurley says that she was raped by a family member when she was 12, and that another family member then introduced her to narcotics. She became an addict, she says, mostly to prescription painkillers that are widely trafficked here.

Equipped with a crackling intelligence, Ms. Hurley once aspired to be a doctor. But her addictions and a rebellious nature got her kicked out of high school, and at 16 she became engaged to a boyfriend and soon had his baby.

Yet there are ways of breaking this cycle. That's what Save the Children is doing here, working with children while they're still malleable, and it's an approach that should be a centerpiece of America's antipoverty program. Almost anytime the question is poverty, the answer is children.

Save the Children trains community members to make home visits to at-risk moms like Ms. Hurley, and help nurture the skills they need in the world's toughest job: parenting. These visits begin in pregnancy and continue until the child is 3 years old.

I followed Courtney Trent, 22, one of these early childhood coordinators, as she visited a series of houses. She encourages the mothers (and the fathers, if they're around) to read to the children, tell stories, talk to them, hug them. If the parents can't read, then Ms. Trent encourages them to flip the pages on picture books and talk about what they see.

Ms. Trent brings a few books on each visit, and takes back the ones she had left the previous time. Many of the homes she visits don't own a single children's book.

She sat on the floor in Ms. Hurley's living room, pulled a book out of her bag, and encouraged her to read to her 20-month-old son, Landon. Ms. Hurley said that she was never read to as a child, but she was determined to change the pattern.

"I just want him to go to school," she said of Landon. "I want him to go to college and get out of this place." Ms. Hurley said she was clean of drugs, working full time at a Wendy's, and hoping to go back to school to become a nurse. I'd bet on her - and on Landon.

"When kids come to us through this program and come here, we can see a big difference," Ron Combs, the principal at Lyndon B. Johnson Elementary School here, told me. "They're really ready to go. Otherwise, we have kids so far behind that they struggle to catch up.

"By second or third grade, you have a pretty good feeling about who's going to drop out," he added.

A group of teachers were in the room, and they all nodded. Wayne Sizemore, director of special education in Breathitt County, puts it this way: "The earlier we can get them, the better. It's like building a foundation for a house."

I don't want to suggest that America's antipoverty programs are a total failure. On the contrary, they are making a significant difference. Nearly all homes here in the Appalachian hill country now have electricity and running water, and people aren't starving.

Our political system has created a particularly robust safety net for the elderly, focused on Social Security and Medicare - because the elderly vote. This safety net has brought down the poverty rate among the elderly from about 35 percent in 1959 to under 9 percent today.

Because kids don't have a political voice, they have been neglected - and have replaced the elderly as the most impoverished age group in our country. Today, 22 percent of children live below the poverty line.

Of American families living in poverty today, 8 out of 10 have air-conditioning, and a majority have a washing machine and dryer. Nearly all have microwave ovens. What they don't have is hope. You see it here in the town of Jackson, in the teenage girls hanging out by the bridge over the north fork of the Kentucky River, seeking to trade their bodies for prescription painkillers or methamphetamines.

A growing body of careful research suggests that the most effective strategy is to work early on children and education, and to try to encourage and sustain marriage.

Bravo to Mayor Julián Castro of San Antonio for backing a landmark initiative to add one-eighth of 1 percent to the local sales tax to finance a prekindergarten program. Early interventions are not a silver bullet, and even programs that succeed as experiments often fall short when scaled up. But we end up paying for poverty one way or another, and early childhood education is far cheaper than adult incarceration. I hope that the budget negotiations in Washington may offer us a chance to take money from S.S.I. and invest in early childhood initiatives instead.

One reason antipoverty initiatives don't get traction in America is that the issue is simply invisible.

"People don't want to talk about poverty in America," Mark Shriver, who runs the domestic programs of Save the Children, noted as we drove through Kentucky. "We talk more about poverty in Africa than we do about poverty in America."

Indeed, in the 2012 election campaign, poverty was barely mentioned. A study by Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, a liberal watchdog organization, found substantive discussion of poverty in just 0.2 percent of campaign news reports.

Look, there are no magic wands, and helping people is hard. One woman I met, Anastasia McCormick, told me that her $500 car had just broken down and she had to walk two miles each way to her job at a pizza restaurant. That's going to get harder because she's pregnant with twins, due in April.

At some point, Ms. McCormick won't be able to hold that job anymore, and then she'll have trouble paying the bills. She has rented a washer and dryer, but she's behind in payments, and they may soon be hauled back. "I got a 'discontinue' notice on the electric," she added, "but you get a month to pay up." Life is like that for her, a roller coaster partly of her own making.

I don't want to write anybody off, but I admit that efforts to help Ms. McCormick may end with a mixed record. But those twin boys she's carrying? There's time to transform their lives, and they - and millions like them - should be a national priority. They're too small to fail.

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Washington DC/ OPINION: The Half-Day Kindergarten/Common-Core Mismatch

By Laura A. Bornfreund [Senior policy analyst for the Early Education Initiative at the New America Foundation, Washington DC]

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

December 5, 2012

This fall, millions of 5-year-olds donned backpacks full of school supplies for the first time as they headed off to kindergarten. Depending on where they live, however, these children are having widely divergent experiences, with some attending full-day kindergarten and others offered only half-day classes. And yet the new national English/language arts and math standards they are expected to meet are exactly the same.

Under the Common Core State Standards, kindergartners will be challenged by new and higher expectations. Forty-six states and the District of Columbia have signed up for the common core (one of those states, Minnesota, adopted only the ELA standards). Will teachers be able to help their kindergarten pupils reach the common goals when those children are only attending for half a school day? Or might the instruction needed to meet the standards be pushed to before- or after-school programs or prekindergarten programs, as a recent report from the National Association for the Education of Young Children cautioned?

Children enrolled in half-day kindergarten receive less instructional time, likely experience a narrowed curriculum, have less time for experimentation and exploration, and enjoy fewer opportunities for play. Many states and school districts already require a 90-minute uninterrupted reading block in elementary schools. It's likely that others may choose to adopt the 90-minute reading policy because of the demands of the common core. Focusing on early reading and language development is important, but in half-day kindergarten-which rarely lasts longer than three hours a day-that reading block would leave only about 90 minutes each day for deep learning in mathematics, science, social studies, and the arts, not to mention time for physical activity and socializing, which are so important to kindergartners' development.

How many American children are in half-day kindergarten? It's nearly impossible to know because states are not required to keep track, and decisions about kindergarten have been left to local districts in most places. When school districts do choose to provide a full day of kindergarten, it is vulnerable to funding cuts because in most states it is not required by law.

• According to an analysis by the Children's Defense Fund, only 10 states and the District of Columbia require that districts provide full-day kindergarten for all children.
• Some states require only a half-day.
• Six states have no kindergarten requirement at all, although most districts still offer at least half-day kindergarten.
• Thirteen states allow districts to charge parents for part of a full day of kindergarten.

Even before the arrival of the common core, many experts have advocated full-day kindergarten, arguing that children who attend it are more prepared for later learning in school, post higher academic achievement in later grades, and display more advanced social, emotional, and behavioral development, which also helps them learn in later grades.

A half-day allows less time for teachers to include inquiry-led instruction, child-centered play, exploration and hands-on activities-all important learning opportunities. Additionally, kindergartners in half-day programs have less time to be with teachers who know how to help them develop and practice social-emotional skills, such as understanding feelings, managing emotions, regulating behavior, and developing empathy. While the common core only directs what should be taught in reading and math and not how it should be taught, teachers in half-day programs may feel the need to resort to more direct instruction rather than employ strategies that match how young children best learn.

• In Pennsylvania, for example, according to the state's science standards, kindergartners are supposed to begin learning about similarities and differences between living things. One example of an activity for this standard is to observe the growth of a living thing-a frog, perhaps-and document it through drawings and writings. In half-day programs, will state standards for other subjects play second fiddle to the common core? Will kids miss out on lessons such as this for additional instruction in reading and math? Teachers can and should select informational texts on science-related topics to use during reading lessons. This is actually a requirement of the common-core reading standards. But reading about a frog's life cycle is very different from actively observing, discussing, and explaining it. Children need both. Teachers may find it challenging to fit both into a three-hour day.
• A teacher from the South Huntington district in New York illustrated the problem in a letter to the school board when it was considering cutting full-day kindergarten despite the common core: "So there will be no time for calendar, morning message (I can't even begin to tell you how many skills are developed through this activity), playing, singing, character education, socializing, fine motor skills, art, painting, cutting, handwriting, learning how to work as a group, telling stories, sharing their favorite things, listening to more than one story a day, technology, fitness breaks, using their imaginations, making new friends at recess, exploring their kindergarten classroom through activities like workstations, etc."
• Some districts are making or discussing making the shift from half-day to full-day kindergarten because of the new standards. School districts across Connecticut provide examples. In an article in the Suffield Patch, an online publication, the Suffield, Conn., superintendent of schools, Karen Baldwin, said there isn't enough time in a half-day to implement the common core. And according to an article in the Hartford Courant, the superintendent of the Wethersfield, Conn., public schools, Thomas Y. McDowell, said of the common core: "The bottom line is we cannot deliver our present-day kindergarten curriculum in a half-day model." In another article from Connecticut, Bethel Associate Superintendent Janice Jordan said a full day of kindergarten allows for the time needed to support the new standards and to have appropriate time for play.

I'm happy to see that change is afoot in some districts. But states must act as well to keep full-day kindergarten off the chopping block in districts when budgets are slim.

The common-core standards provide a clear, consistent, and challenging framework for what children should know and be able to do in math and reading. To help children reach the high expectations and have a well-rounded kindergarten experience, states should fund a full day of kindergarten and require school districts to provide it.