Rio Rancho/ Common Core Money Top Wish
By Elaine D. Briseño
ABQ Journal Staff Writer
December 13, 2012
The Rio Rancho school district has outlined its goals for the upcoming legislative session, and its top priority is lobbying lawmakers for enough financial support to roll out the Common Core standards.
- "We believe Common Core funding should, without a doubt, be the number one priority of our legislators," said district contract lobbyist Theresa Saiz. "We think it's the most important thing for the upcoming session."
Saiz was at the Rio Rancho Public Schools Board meeting Monday to discuss the administration's legislative plan. She said all districts, including RRPS, need proper support and funding to develop the curriculum, train teachers, purchase instructional materials and provide sufficient technology to administer the Common Core assessments to students. She did not name a specific amount.
The state has mandated that all districts adopt the core standards, which will be used nationally, for all grades in the subjects of math and English by the 2013-14 school year. The standards ensure students are taught the same topics and subjects in the same time frame. They also allow teachers to go into greater depth because fewer topics are covered.
Don Schlichte, president of the school board, said he was skeptical the state would provide enough money so districts can properly transition to Common Core.
- "Does PED (New Mexico Public Education Department) and the Legislature understand the cost to implement Common Core or do they just not care?" he said. "It's like speaking to deaf ears, but I know we have to say it."
Rio Rancho Superintendent Sue Cleveland said she believes many legislators and people at the state level are not aware of how many resources it will actually take.
- "When we have observed what other states are doing to help school districts make this transition, we are amazed," Cleveland said. "In other states, the state is taking the lead to make sure they get it right. In New Mexico, they are leaving it up to the school districts."
Other priorities include providing enough money so the district can replace aging school buses, which it is required to do when the buses become 12 years old. Maurice Ross, the district's executive director of transportation, said next year he will have 23 buses that must be replaced, costing about $2 million.
Cleveland said the district also would like to encourage the state to adopt a teacher-evaluation system that has already shown to be effective in other states instead of coming up with its own system.
Saiz said the district has learned there may be some capital outlay money available this year.
- The district will ask for $100,000 in matching funds to add more student parking spaces at Cleveland, which has only 605 compared to Rio Rancho High's 1,100.
- The district also wants $75,000 in matching funds for more parking at the school's concert hall lot and
- $150,000 for technology upgrades to support Common Core. Technology upgrades would include adding bandwidth, switches, cables, servers and some computers.
The 60-day session opens Jan. 15.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Clovis/ School Board Approves Sale of $5 Million 2010 Bonds
Clovis News Journal Staff Report
December 12, 2012
In what Superintendent Terry Myers called a good day for the schools, the Clovis Municipal Schools Board of Education sold the final $5 million in bonds approved in a 2010 election.
The board agreed to sell the bonds in a brief special meeting Wednesday, Myers said, with a rate of 1.9 percent.
Previous bonds, Myers said, have normally been sold between 2 percent and 3 percent.
"We met or exceeded the Triple A bond rating in New Mexico in several of the issued in the bond sale," said Myers, who also noted a buyer premium of $113,000 will come back to the district.
The bonds, to be paid over 15 years, will pay for final work at Lockwood Elementary and W.D. Gattis Middle School and beginning work on James Bickley Elementary.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Santa Fe/ State High School Test Scores Improve
By Robert Nott
The New Mexican
December 12, 2012
The New Mexico Public Education Department sent results of state high school graduation exams to school districts on Wednesday.
- Statewide, about 70 percent - 16,252 students - of the class of 2013 passed the test, either when they first took it last spring, as juniors, or when they retook it this fall.
- According to Larry Behrens, spokesman for the department, the passing rate is higher than both the 63 percent graduation rate and the 57 percent pass rate after the test's first round earlier this year.
- The 6,947 students who didn't pass might still graduate if they fulfill requirements for an alternate diploma.
"It's obvious students and educators have responded to high expectations," Behrens said. "It's also clear we have a lot of work to do so every student is able to meet the challenge."
In Santa Fe, Richard Bowman, chief accountability and strategy officer for Santa Fe Public Schools, said he had put in a request for clarification of data.
Some 10,000 New Mexico students in the class of 2013 failed the 11th-grade Standards Based Assessment last spring, including 361 in Santa Fe. That included:
- 84 percent of juniors at the Academy at Larragoite (32),
- 63 percent at Capital High School (162) and
- 50 percent at Santa Fe High (167).
They were allowed to retake the test this fall.
The law requiring the test was passed in 2008. The 11th-grade Standards Based Assessment replaced the High School Competency Exam, which measured student competence at an eighth-grade level.
- In math and reading, the class of 2013 must achieve a composite score of 2,273 on the Standards Based Assessment, with neither individual score below the designation "nearing proficient."
- Students must score at least 38 on the science Standards Based Assessment.
- For social studies and writing, students must demonstrate competency by passing the appropriate English and U.S. history course.
Seniors who did not pass the Standards Based Assessment can still graduate by completing the ADC, or Alternative Demonstration of Competency diploma.
The requirements for the ADC were developed with help from 17 education leaders statewide. For the class of 2013, they include competency on post-secondary readiness assessments such as the SAT and ACT or end-of-course examinations.
Information on the ADC is online at www.ped.state.nm.us/ped/adc/ADC2012.pdf.
The Standards Based Assessment is also administered to students in grades 3 through 8 each spring.
The next round of Standards Based Assessment exams is scheduled for March 2013.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
ABQ/ 2 UNM CEPR Presentations: College Access Inventory and Education in Doña Ana County
UNM Center for Education Policy Research
Dec 12, 2012
NM College Access Network Releases College Access Inventory
December 12, 2012
CEPR also recently presented "Education in Doña Ana County: The Challenges, The Choices, The Future," a collaboration among CEPR, the NMSU Center for Research and Outreach, and NMSU Arrowhead Center.
CEPR Presents to the Bridge of Southern New Mexico
December 12, 2012
~~~~~~~~~~~~
ABQ/ EDITORIAL: Computer Outlays Must Have Students at Core
ABQ Journal
December 13, 2012
Who knew that adopting Common Core academic standards for public schools would, at the core, cost so darn much?
Of course the cost of not adopting the test (and thus its focused approach to curriculum) promises to be much higher in the long run; in just the latest example of our academic ineptitude, this month New Mexicans learned their students are near the bottom nationally when it comes to vocabulary scores.
But $39 million to upgrade just Albuquerque Public Schools' computers, bandwidth, routers and switches, and another $15 million a year to maintain the system and bandwidth? Those are hard numbers to compute in a good economy.
So it is important that APS and New Mexico take a cautious approach when it comes to capital spending on the conversion.
Two national groups are developing the Common Core tests, which will be taken on computers. According to the Public Education Department, New Mexico opted into the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers because it will link teacher evaluations to student test score progress and give teachers student data regularly so they can tailor their lessons.
According to APS, the partnership also has higher technology standards with higher costs.
So while board member David Peercy is rightly recommending phasing-in the technology and thus the costs, and APS chief information officer Lynn Harris is saying care with scheduling could reduce the number of new computers needed, it is also important to ask the big questions.
Such as whether any districts can really afford all of the PARCC technology recommendations, and whether all of the technology recommendations serve students first and foremost, or vendors. Such as whether some of the other 22 states and their districts have found alternative ways to comply?
The district should determine whether all the PARCC recommendations are needed, or if acceptable corners can be cut (such as transmission of test results from City Center rather than via screaming-fast bandwidth from each of 136 campuses)?
Like districts across the country, APS is busy crunching its capital budget to cover some of the costs, while the state's Public Education Department plans to ask the 2013 Legislature for an $8 million statewide appropriation to help districts pay for new equipment. Based on the APS cost estimate, that's less than a drop in the proverbial bucket.
The conversion to Common Core is quite literally an investment in the state's future, but officials need to do their homework to ensure that each accompanying technology expenditure is truly a necessary one.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Washington DC/ In Rural Areas, After-School Efforts Must Stretch to Provide Services
Funding and transportation are common challenges
By Diette Courrégé
Education Week, Vol. 32, Issue 14 [Edweek.org]
December 12, 2012
One of three grants Linda Barton relies on to provide out-of-school programs to her students will run out this month.
With two other grants still in play, Ms. Barton is perhaps in a better situation than most such providers, but she's trying to figure out how to maintain her existing programs in her Lander, Wyo. community until she can get more money.
"The funding is always a challenge," she said.
Ms. Barton is the executive director of a K-12 before- and after-school program, Lights on in Lander, in the central part of the sparsely populated state. The school-based program is financed with public dollars and serves nearly 340 students.
Rural out-of-school programs such as those Ms. Barton runs face a host of challenges because of their isolated locations. Inadequate funding, access, transportation, and staffing are among the biggest obstacles.
Despite increasing national attention to the potential for out-of-school programs to enhance school offerings and provide academic enrichment, leaders in rural areas mostly agree that their troubles, exacerbated by the economic crisis of recent years, aren't getting easier.
- "Most programs that we surveyed are actually worse off than three years ago at the height of the recession," said Jen Rinehart, the vice president of research and policy for the Afterschool Alliance, based in Washington.
Obstacles Identified
For after-school providers in rural communities, much like their urban counterparts, the economy is an ongoing challenge to their ability to provide high-quality programming to enough students, said Ms. Rinehart, citing recent studies.
"The indication is that rural communities seem to be right in line with the overall after-school picture, which is not optimistic," she said.
A 2011 Harvard Family Research Project report found that out-of-school-time programs in rural areas had positive effects on students, but they face problems that urban and suburban programs did not.
The report, "Out-of-School Time Programs in Rural Areas," highlighted high family poverty, low funding, lack of transportation, and a shortage of qualified workers as some of the biggest issues facing rural communities.
- On funding, rural areas generally have smaller populations that limit financial resources. They receive less federal, state, and local money for after-school services compared with urban and suburban areas, according to the study.
Another report, "Uncertain Times 2012," released this year by the Afterschool Alliance, found that nearly four out of 10 programs reported that their budgets were worse today than at the height of the recession in 2008.
That lack of money is huge for Sherry Comer, who has directed an after-school program in Camdenton, Mo., for 14 years. Her program was one of the original recipients of the federal 21st Century Community Learning Center grants, and it's relied on a combination of sources, such as federal Title I and economic-stimulus money, to keep afloat since then.
"It is exhausting, and it takes a lot of my time to keep the balls juggled," said Ms. Comer, who serves on the Missouri AfterSchool Network board. "It's consistently been a challenge since we started. I'm always looking for where we can get funding."
Out-of-School Enrichment
Many rural communities rely on 21st Century Community Learning Center grants to serve their students.
- The program offers funding for centers that provide academic-enrichment opportunities during nonschool hours for children, especially those who are considered poor and attend low-performing schools.
- The $1.2 billion program is formula-based and allows states to decide how to distribute the money. There's no mandate for a rural set-aside, although some states award grant applicants more priority points if they are rural.
- An estimated 8.5 million children are in after-school programs nationwide, and more than 1.5 million are in those funded by that pot of federal money, according to the Afterschool Alliance.
Sylvia Lyles, the director for academic improvement and teacher-quality programs in the U.S. Department of Education's office of elementary and secondary education, which oversees the 21st Century grants, has rural areas on her agenda because they face so many difficulties. She has worked closely with some states on solutions.
"From my vantage point, I don't believe it's getting harder [for rural schools]," she said. "I think it's a hard issue."
In some communities, the lack of money can lead to a lack of access, which is troubling for rural after-school advocates.
- One national study found that 57 percent of rural parents who said their children didn't participate in after-school programs cited the unavailability of such programs, compared with 37 percent of suburban parents and 36 percent of urban parents.
Ms. Rinehart of the Afterschool Alliance pointed to data that show children in rural areas were the least likely of all geographic groups to take part in after-school programs because those programs didn't exist where they lived. That was particularly true among low-income rural families, she said.
"Given the research that we have, perhaps there should be additional focus on rural communities because we know that kids in those communities are least likely to be able to access after-school programs," Ms. Rinehart said.
The isolation of rural communities can make transportation to and from out-of-school programs a costly and time-intensive prospect. Rural areas typically don't have the public-transportation systems available in more-populated areas.
"It's harder to keep the kids here and to get them home," said Ms. Comer, the Missouri after-school provider. "Transportation is a huge barrier."
Ms. Comer spends roughly 15 percent of her program's budget on transportation, but that's still not enough to be able to deliver students to their front doors. The program trimmed costs by creating drop-off points, and those work well until later in a given month, when parents run low on money, she said. When parents can't afford the gas to get to work, much less pick up their child from a drop-off point, the child can't stay after school, she said.
Finding the staff needed to run out-of-school programs can also be difficult. A smaller workforce, low education levels, and high poverty rates make it tough to recruit and retain employees.
In Wyoming, it's hard to find employees who are willing to come in and work for two hours in the middle of the afternoon with no benefits, Ms. Barton of Lights on in Lander said.
Finding Success
It's also hard to find money or time to offer additional training, and there's no money set aside to provide for cost-of-living adjustments or raises, which Ms. Barton called a flaw in the federal 21st Century grant program.
"How do you run these programs effectively and meet the requirements that are becoming much more demanding in terms of expectations?" she said.
The international child-welfare organization Save the Children began its work in Appalachia about 75 years ago, so its roots are in rural communities.
- It started focusing more on after-school programs in 2005, which was when Ann Mintz designed a literacy-based program to build children's skills outside of school.
- What started in about 30 schools now has spread to 156 serving more than 19,000 students in 14 states. Save the Children targets high-poverty schools with a high percentage of struggling readers.
"We have found our niche to be rural, but the program we've designed would work anywhere," Ms. Mintz said. "There wasn't another entity that was coming into rural areas to provide out-of-school programs. If you look at cities, there are some fabulous out-of-school programs. We didn't see any for rural areas."
In some ways, she said it's becoming easier to operate rural programs, but other issues have made it more difficult.
"Transportation just doesn't get any better," she said. "It probably gets worse with gas prices going up."
Equipping staff members with the necessary tools and skills requires creativity and resourcefulness. Long-distance communication tools such as online video chats have made it easier to support those implementing on-site programs, but it's been harder to provide the ongoing, face-to-face training that's needed, Ms. Mintz said.
"There's no replacement for face-to-face time," she said.
Despite the problems, after-school programs have become embedded in many Wyoming communities, which have come to rely on and expect them, said Ms. Barton, who is also the executive director of the Wyoming Afterschool Alliance. Still, rural programs struggle to follow the best practices of national programs and policy models that often don't translate well in their communities, she said.
Localized Application
She described her home state as an example. National out-of-school advocacy groups have suggested scheduling meetings with mayors' policy aides, but that is out of touch with what goes on in Wyoming, she said.
Local officials often serve in those roles part time, and they don't have a staff. The same is true for state lawmakers, who don't even have offices.
"I think that people don't really understand the definition of rural in the same way," Ms. Barton said.
Many rural programs have come to rely on statewide after-school networks in 41 states that are committed to helping ensure children have access to high-quality after-school care, Ms. Rinehart said.
"Those have really taken on the challenges with rural communities," she said, adding that they've tried to create infrastructure to link rural programs.
Ms. Comer agreed, saying Missouri's statewide network has helped her programs be successful.
"You have a cohesive system that helps you sustain," she said. "It's not easy, and it's work."
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Washington DC/ Common Core School Standards Have States, Teachers On Edge
By Ben Wieder
Huffington Post [Courtesy of Stateline, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news service of the Pew Center on the States that provides daily reporting and analysis on trends in state policy]
December 12, 2012
In Kentucky this year, the percentage of elementary and middle-school students who rated "proficient" or better on statewide math and reading tests declined by about a third. Kentucky high schoolers also experienced a double-digit percentage point decline in both subjects.
Those results may sound dismal, but they were better than state education officials had expected. Kentucky is the first state to tie its tests to the new national Common Core standards in English and math, and state officials had projected that the new, tougher standards could yield declines of as much as 50 percent.
Kentucky's experience is likely to be repeated in dozens of other states. Forty-five states have signed on for the Common Core in both subjects, while Minnesota has adopted them just for English. The standards, which were developed jointly by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers and released in 2010, are designed to be more rigorous than the current standards in most states, and to encourage deeper critical thinking.
Chris Minnich, incoming executive director at the Council of Chief State School Officers, says all 46 states are beginning to implement the standards, though few are as far along as Kentucky.
"Generally most of the states are in the information sharing and training stage with their teachers," he says.
National standardized tests linked to the Common Core will be released in 2014, and Minnich thinks that many states will see dramatic changes that school year.
Anticipated Backlash
Education experts say those changes won't be easy.
- "I don't think people fully realize the challenges that will come when the reality sets in that so few of our kids are college and/or career ready," former Florida Governor Jeb Bush said recently, speaking at an education conference in Washington, D.C.
The conference was sponsored by the Foundation for Excellence in Education, which Bush created to promote some of the ideas he backed as governor, including early reading tests, vouchers and charter schools.
- "Moms and dads are going to be mad," Bush said. "The reality is going to create problems for elected officials across the spectrum."
Kentucky's Commissioner of Education, Terry Holliday, knew this year's results might cause a backlash from parents and students, so his department partnered with the state's Chamber of Commerce and the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, an education advocacy group in the state, to help get the message out to parents about what was in store.
"Everybody knew it was coming," Holliday says.
Federal Involvement
In addition to the shock of the initial test results, there has been growing concern about whether implementation of the standards will reduce local control of schools and make it easier for the federal government to dictate what schools teach.
Proponents of the standards maintain they were developed by states without federal involvement.
- "When we started this discussion with the chiefs and the National Governors Association, there wasn't anybody from the Department of Education in the room," Holliday says.
But the Obama administration did provide incentives for states to adopt the standards through its competitive Race to the Top grant program and the waivers it granted to states seeking to avoid certain provisions of the No Child Left Behind law.
In both cases states had to adopt college- and career-ready standards, such as the Common Core, though they had the option to develop their own alternative. The federal government also provided support for the development of standardized tests pegged to the standards.
However, Minnich doesn't think those federal incentives are the reason so many states have signed on for the standards.
"If I was sitting in a commissioner's position," he says, "I wouldn't have done anything to get federal money if it wasn't the right thing for my state."
But the perception of federal involvement in the Common Core has persisted, with political ramifications. Weeks before Bush spoke in Washington, an education chief he championed, Indiana Republican Tony Bennett, lost to a challenger, Democrat Glenda Ritz, who made it known she intended to raise questions about the state's adoption of the standards.
While it's unclear whether Ritz's stance on the standards actually swayed the election, Bennett saw it as a ploy to attract the support of Tea Party Republicans who have been skeptical of the standards.
"She was fairly direct in trying to curry favor with the ultra-conservatives," he said, speaking the day after the election.
Ritz, who had been backed by the state's teachers union, defended her position, saying that teachers in the state felt as though they had not been asked for input on whether to adopt the standards.
"We're going to have to look at the Common Core," Ritz said. "We need to be sure that we're on the right track for what Indiana wants."
Utah's Concerns
Two groups of states are working to develop competing sets of tests based on the Common Core standards. Ritz says she'd like to reconsider Indiana's participation in one of those groups and the terms under which it was issued a waiver for No Child Left Behind.
Political pressure already has led another state to pull out of one of the testing groups: In August Utah announced that it would no longer be participating in the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium.
Several months before Utah pulled out, its state Senate passed a resolution urging the State Board of Education to reconsider its adoption of the Common Core.
"My initial concern with the Common Core was the level of influence and control that would eventually come from the federal government," says state Senator Aaron Osmond, who introduced the resolution. "Utah is a very conservative state, we're very concerned about what is taught in our schools."
Osmond has since revised his view somewhat, and says he sees value in making it easier for states to compare academic performance and for students to move between states without falling behind.
However, he still believes Utah was right to leave the testing consortium, because now that it's less invested in developing one of the tests, it can be freer in deciding which of several Common Core tests to adopt. And while his position on the standards has softened, Osmond anticipates that there will still be several bills introduced in the state's next legislative session objecting to implementation of the Common Core.
Fact or Fiction
There's been concern elsewhere about how the Common Core standards will affect what teachers teach. Ideally, the new standards would be implemented with extensive professional development for teachers, but there wasn't funding to support that in Kentucky-the education department worked to establish networks of teachers to train each other-and funding has been scarce in many other states still recovering from the recession.
Recently, English teachers have expressed concern about the push for more non-fiction, including government documents, in the curriculum. Ideally, that reading would be pushed across all subjects, including science and social studies classes.
In practice, though, English teachers across the country have reported that they've borne the brunt of the new emphasis on non-fiction, according to the Washington Post, in some cases sacrificing units on poetry to make room for the new material.
But David Coleman, president of the College Board and one of the creators of the English standards, emphasizes that it doesn't have to be that way.
"Fiction remains at the center of the Language arts classroom," he said, speaking at Bush's education conference.
Coleman emphasized that schools will control how the Common Core is implemented, and how teachers teach it.
"Standards do not educate children, localities do," he said. "If you have a common standard, what's exciting is that you have lots of different ways to get there."
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Washington DC/ Mind Research Network & UNM Study: Concussions Alter Children's Brains for Months
By Bryan Toporek
Education Week [Edweek.org]
December 11, 2012
Months after sustaining a mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) such as a concussion, the changes in a child's brain still persist even if the child is symptom-free, according to a study published online today in The Journal of Neuroscience.
Researchers from the Albuquerque-based Mind Research Network and the University of New Mexico studied 15 children between the ages of 10 and 17 who had sustained a concussion to examine the lasting effects of the injury, comparing the results to 15 healthy controls between the ages of 11 and 17.
Previous research has suggested that concussions affect the brain's white matter, which contains nerve fibers that transmit signals from one area of the brain to another, according to the National Institutes of Health.
Thus, both the healthy and concussed children underwent "diffusion tensor imaging" (DTI), which specifically images white matter in the brain, and neuropsychological testing two separate times. The concussed children were tested and imaged within 21 days of sustaining their injury, and then once more in a follow-up visit roughly three to five months after their initial screening.
- In the first visit, children with the mTBIs had "cognitive dysfunction" in terms of attention and processing speed compared to their healthy peers, according to the study. The concussed children also had subtle changes in their brains' white matter.
- In the follow-up visit, the researchers found that even after concussion symptoms subsided, the structural changes found in the children's white matter remained months after sustaining the original injury.
"The magnitude of the white matter changes in children with mild traumatic brain injury was larger than what has been previously been reported for adult patients with mild traumatic brain injury," said one of the study's authors, Andrew Mayer from the Mind Research Network, in a statement. "This suggests that developmental differences in the brain or the muscular-skeletal system may render pediatric patients more susceptible to injury."
Second-Impact Syndrome Implications?
Mayer and his colleagues aren't the first to posit that youths may be more susceptible to the effects of concussion due to developmental reasons.
In his recent book, Concussions and Our Kids, Dr. Robert Cantu recommends restricting tackle football and soccer headers only to student-athletes who are 14 years of age or older due to developmental immaturity.
In an interview for this blog back in September, Cantu said that youths are "bobble-head dolls with big heads and weak necks," making them potentially more susceptible to injury. He noted that at the age of 14, some people are "physiologically 11 or 10," while others are "skeletally mature adults."
The finding that changes in children's white matter can persist months after a concussion, even if a child is asymptomatic, could have "important implications about when it is truly safe for a child to resume physical activities that may produce a second concussion," said Mayer in a statement.
A number of student-athletes deaths caused by head trauma over the past three decades were potentially preventable, according to a June 2011 study from the journal Pediatrics.
- It found 17 cases where a youth-football player died from second-impact syndrome (a brain sustaining a second concussion before fully healing from the first), which the researchers said was entirely preventable.
Mayer and his colleagues note their study's small sample size as a potential limitation, suggesting that further research is necessary to determine whether the changes detected in the three-to-five-month follow-up visit are permanent.
Updated youth-concussion law map: http://www.edweek.org/ew/section/infographics/37concussion_map.html
Of note: Both Michigan and Hawaii have passed youth-concussion laws since July, making 43 states (including the District of Columbia) that now have such laws. Not far behind is Ohio, whose youth-concussion bill just passed through the state Senate last week after being approved by the state House in June. It's waiting to be sent to Gov. John Kasich for a signature.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Washington DC/ ESSAY: No Teachers, No Class, No Homework. Would You Send Your Kids Here?
By Emily Chertoff [Writer and producer, The Atlantic's National channel]
Theatlantic.com
December 5, 2012
Democratic schooling may be the most radical experiment in education of the past 100 years.
In Massachusetts farm country, not far from Boston, a group of about 200 students of all ages are part of a radical experiment. These students don't take any classes they don't specifically ask to have taught. They can spend their time doing whatever they want, as long as it's not destructive or criminal - reading, playing video games, cooking, making art. There are 11 adults, called "staff members"; no one technically holds the title of "teacher." The kids establish rules and mete out punishments by a democratic process whereby each member of the community has one vote - which means the adults are "outnumbered" by the kids almost 20 to one. Unlike at most private schools, students are admitted without regard to their academic records.
Sudbury Valley School will this spring find itself one focus of a book by the psychologist and Boston College professor Peter Gray, whose own son attended Sudbury Valley in the 1980s. At the time, Gray was a professor and neurobiology researcher whose work focused on the basic drives of mammals. At his lab, he worked with rats and mice. The experience of his young son, who was struggling in school, convinced him to entirely shift the focus of his career.
"He clearly was unhappy in school, and very rebellious," Gray said of his son in a phone interview. In fourth grade, the son convinced his parents to send him to Sudbury. It was obvious early on that he was "thriving" there, but his father "had questions whether someone could graduate from such a radical school and go on to higher education."
Gray wound up becoming a developmental and learning psychologist in order to do a study of Sudbury outcomes. The results impressed him. Gray described his son as "precocious and articulate"; his problem was not with mastering the material, but with the "waste of time" that normal schooling, with its average pace and rigid structures, entailed.
But not all of Sudbury's students and alumni were precocious learners: "Some had been diagnosed with learning disorders." And while some came from privileged backgrounds with supportive parents who had deliberately sought out alternative education, other parents had been desperate. (Gray notes that most students when he did his study came from public school, not from another private school.) But most seemed to do well at the school, and alumni reported high satisfaction later in life. How was it that students who followed such an out-there program appeared to become relatively well adjusted adults? Gray began to inquire into why.
***
Nothing enrages parents like the idea that their kids might be educated to do or say or think things they don't agree with, by people they don't trust. Yet as different as parents might be, most could nonetheless probably agree on some things. Many would agree that schools should teach values and behaviors - like sharing, thinking critically, or empathizing with others - and not just specific skills. Most would approve a program that teaches personal responsibility. A pretty large number would probably also say it's important to foster creativity and allow the student to discover his or her own interests.
There are schools that purport to directly teach those values. They're called democratic schools, and most parents would never consider sending their kids to one. That's because they're run, in great part, by the kids themselves.
While democratic schools vary greatly, the basic concept is the same. When it comes to governing the school - whether it's deciding what lessons will be taught or setting curfew - the decision-making rule is "one person, one vote." A teacher's vote counts the same a student's, whether that student is six or 16. And since, at most schools, the body of faculty is smaller than the body of students, the kids ultimately do have it when it comes to making decisions.
Of the democratic schools that exist today, the oldest is Summerhill, a co-ed boarding school founded in 1921 by the British educator A.S. Neill. It opened at a time when a lot of experiments in bohemian education methods were sprouting - and failing - in England. But Summerhill still thrives, with a student body of about 100 and a large international population. The school went through a rough patch in 1999 and 2000 when it was nearly shuttered due to a conflict with Ofsted, Britain's national school accreditation body, over what inspectors described as the rude and unruly behavior of students. After a long legal battle, the school was saved, and by 2007, it had been accredited for the first time in its history. Inspectors gave it a stand-out review, praising the students as "well-rounded, confident and mature."
Sudbury Valley is to some extent America's Summerhill, although it is less well known here than its British counterpart is in the UK. The "free school" movement in the U.S. was at its peak in the late 1960s and the 1970s. To a great extent, its ideals meshed with the aims of the anti-war movement, black power, and other ideologies of the era. So did the schools' countercultural, vaguely anarchic vibe. It was in this context, in 1968, that a professor of the history of science at Columbia decided to leave his university teaching post and found a free school in rural Massachusetts. For the past four-plus decades, it has quietly and effectively graduated generations of students. The school is little-known outside education circles, but it has spawned about 20 schools around the world that are run on Sudbury (that is, democratic) principles.
When Gray began studying Sudbury, the school had been around for just long enough to have graduated its first students. Yet the the findings from his Sudbury study, limited though they were, inspired Gray to shift his research focus to the study of learning, play, and education. He has been a firm backer of both the unschooling movement and the Sudbury schools, both of which are prominently featured in his forthcoming book Free to Learn. In particular, he stresses the value of the Sudbury schools' age-mixed communities - where children as young as four and as old as 18 regularly interact. "Young kids learn from older kids. They learn to read by playing games that involve reading with older kids who can read. They play complicated card games with older kids that they could never play by themselves." Older students benefit too: "They learn how to care, to nurture. They get a sense of their own maturity."
For the younger kids, age mixing replaces the teacher-student dynamic. Both traditional education and Sudbury work to some extent because they take advantage of the "zone of proximal development": the category of things that a child can do with help but not without it. Children learn, according to some theories, when they work with a more skilled person to master activities in their zone of proximal development.
Theoretically, a school doesn't have to be democratic to allow age mixing, and some Montessori schools (for instance) allow a limited amount of it. But as Gray notes, the rigid, age-tracked curricula that are used in most schools make meaningful age mixing almost impossible. Conversely, a Sudbury school where all the kids were the same age "simply wouldn't work."
In some ways, it's the democratic meeting that allows the school to run: It takes a potentially lawless and chaotic setup and gives it structure. It's a mechanism for dealing with bullying (which is almost nonexistent at Sudbury) and with disruptive behavior when just a warning from another student won't do. It's also a way of evolving sophisticated laws for the community. "The school," says Gray, "has a very thick rulebook."
He gives an example. "A number of years ago, there was a new teenage student who was coming to school in a black leather jacket with a swastika on it. And so, because it was offensive, it led to a desire to make a rule in the school meeting saying that you could not display a swastika on your clothing in the school." The proposed rule provoked a discussion over the limits of free speech that was, in Gray's view, "worthy of the Supreme Court."
Students quickly hit on the fact that there was a tension between limiting speech and the democratic values of the school. "There were all sorts of people taking part, mostly teenagers and staff, but every once in a while a young kid would say something too. And those who weren't talking were listening, rapt, learning about history, about Nazism, about why wearing a swastika might be exceptional, why it might be different, say, than wearing a hammer and sickle." The meeting ultimately decided to pass the rule, and it led in time to a larger rule prohibiting hate speech at the school, and distinguishing between hate speech and regular speech.
***
Most of the major democratic schools that exist today have good track records. Sudbury's founders have been eager to tout their students' success at meeting the demands of the "real world." Gray tells me his research indicated that about 75 percent of Sudbury graduates went on to college, and that those who didn't reported fulfilled lives.
The measure of success partly depends on what you consider a good life outcome. When Summerhill - the famous UK free school - celebrated its 90th anniversary in 2011, the Guardian ran reflections from a handful of its alumni. (The British, who have a tradition of strictly hierarchical boarding schools, have been fascinated by Summerhill practically since its founding.) Among the group were several artists, a dentist, and a writer, and many commented that their education had made them "like being themselves."
As Gray admitted in our interview, it's hard to know whether other factors apart from school influence these students' success. Parents involved enough to research and send their children to such an unusual school probably already give their kids a leg up, compared to less attentive parents who expend less energy on school choice or have less time to focus on it. And with a yearly tuition of $7,800 (prorated if multiple children attend), many students who attend Sudbury are relatively privileged economically.
Writers like Jonathan Kozol have asserted that low income kids stand to benefit from alternative education methods as much as wealthy ones. The question of implementation, however, is vexed, and data on the efficacy of democratic schools are heavily anecdotal and therefore subjective. Since democratic schooling has never been tried at scale with kids from low-income or troubled backgrounds, it's difficult to know exactly how it would work for them.
As with all schooling, whether democratic school appeals to you may depend on what you value more. Would you rather your child be prepared to advance economically and socially, or would you rather he be an idiosyncratic thinker? Would you rather teach your child to operate successfully in the bureaucratic structures of the real world, or would you prefer that she learn to participate in a near-perfect democracy? It isn't an either-or choice, but democratic schools heavily stress the latter values. Even some parents and teachers who consider themselves progressive think the schools lack balance. The Sudbury model could be criticized for not teaching kids the basics they need to learn to function as adults, though proponents say most kids wind up teaching themselves the skills they need to function anyway. You could also argue that, on a more abstract level, a certain shared basic knowledge helps makes us human (or American), and that Sudbury students lose that. (This is the ethos behind core curricula at universities, for instance - and one totally opposed to the Sudbury philosophy.)
Sudbury survived, but most of the democratic schools founded in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s failed. In an article Gray co-authored in 1986, he and Sudbury staff member David Chanoff asked themselves why:
It is true that numerous so-called free schools were started in the 1960s and the 1970s and that most of them failed as institutions. ... People do not want to take chances with their children. When parents and teachers see that children, genuinely given a choice, do not choose to engage in the kinds of activities that everyone thinks of as "school activities," they understandably become nervous. "What if my child falls behind and can't catch up?
Maybe he is being spoiled in this school, developing lazy habits, lack of discipline. Perhaps he will be unable to get into college, get a job, keep a job. His life may be ruined." In many ways, conventional schooling may not be appealing, but at least it is known, and the known is less frightening than the unknown. The fact is that in the United States today we have virtually no models of people who have "made it" without conventional schooling. Consequently, we have a nagging feeling that such schooling, whatever its defects, must be one of the essential ingredients of success. ...
And so when an alternative school begins to look not at all like school, that is, when it becomes a real "alternative," it is seen by the adults (and many children too) as failing and is either closed or modified.
Many agree that the generation of Americans now in their teens and 20s had some of the most over-supervised and over-structured childhoods in U.S. history. It will be interesting to see whether these trends will continue, or whether these next-generation parents react to their own disciplined upbringings by becoming more hands-off. If they grow to resent the way they were raised, democratic schools may come to look like a pretty appealing option for their own children.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Washington DC/ OPINION: Confusing Achievement with Aptitude
By Dave Powell [High school social studies teacher for six years in suburban Atlanta and now an assistant professor of education at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. He teaches courses on the foundations of education, educational psychology, social studies methods, and teacher action research]
Education Week, Vol. 32, Issue 14 [Edweek.org]
December 12, 2012
My wife and I read and reread the words several times, allowing them to sink in. "Being in an academic class would cause him harm," the principal wrote about our son, "as the rigor would be too great." The report continued, "He would be the lowest-ability student in the class and by a large margin." It is a day you don't soon forget when the principal of your son's school tells you-in an email, no less-that your child simply is not capable of managing academic work.
My wife and I used to be sanguine about the impact of the No Child Left Behind Act, the education reform law that everyone loves to hate. And we thought, as a colleague of mine once suggested, that we could "school proof" our child, that the advantage of having two educators as parents would give him a leg up in life. We assumed that a kid who visited museums in the summer, spent hours on end outdoors, traveled widely, slept under a safe and comfortable roof each night, ate well, and had health insurance would surely find a way to be successful in school.
Instead, by the end of 5th grade, our son had already been labeled a "basic" reader. His 3rd grade teacher had suggested that he do his career-day project on becoming a garbage man. She later told us not to get our hopes up. "Let's face it," she told my wife at a conference that year, "he's not going to be the next John Steinbeck." His 4th grade teacher, a veteran of almost 40 years in the classroom, churned out worksheet after worksheet with expiration dates from the Reagan era. In 5th grade, our son was placed in a remedial-reading program with a name that would have made George Orwell proud: Soar to Success. Instead of soaring, his interest in reading hit rock bottom. And now this: Barely through one quarter of 6th grade, the die had been cast. Our son had reached his academic limits, and he was only 11.
But his school record did not indicate that he lacked the ability to do "academic" work. He had consistently passed his end-of-year tests, and had even scored above grade level in reading before 3rd grade.
What happened?
Slowly, the problem came into focus: His school district had made the mistake of confusing achievement with aptitude and worsened it by using tests as an exclusive measure of both. His teachers and principals had presumed that the year-end state tests, which measure whether or not students have mastered the standards supposedly taught the previous year, could also be used to predict future performance, though the tests have no such predictive validity.
And these year-end tests are only a small part of the problem. Our children have grown accustomed to taking tests throughout the year, tests with exotic and inscrutable names like "4sight," "DRA2," and "DIBELS," disseminated by entities with names that conjure more images of Orwellian overreach-Success for All, Dynamic Measurement Group Inc.-and, of course, by the omnipresent Pearson.
They come with a dizzying array of scientific-sounding diagnostic procedures used to measure such things as "ORF" and "LNF" and my personal favorite, "prosody"-things that make you wonder how anybody ever learned to read before we started measuring them.
And there is another thing these tests do: They measure failure better than they do success. In our district, the testing regimen is used to decide which students are in need of "remediation" or "learning support" or whatever other vaguely patronizing euphemism is favored by the test administrator.
You can almost feel the scores being talked about in hushed tones at meetings of the "data team," just as consequential decisions are being made about who will be "fine" and who will need "extra support" to succeed (i.e., pass his tests) in the coming year.
We began to realize that 30 years of educational dogma had come home to roost in a painful and very personal way. This is the ideology of public schooling in the era of No Child Left Behind: It is one that encourages people to look for and remediate failure, instead of trying to find and nurture success. It is an ideology that promotes the use of jargon ("heterogeneous ability groups," "learning styles," "multiple measures of student effectiveness") as a substitute for genuine conversation about what kinds of people we want students to be and become.
It is an ideology that privileges testing over teaching, a system that makes the beguiling promise that sophisticated instruments (administered incongruously with the oldest technology around-pencil and paper) can tell us everything we need to know about human cognitive ability in just a few hours. How could we blame our son's teachers for believing everything they had been told? After all, as Upton Sinclair once said, it's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.
"When people look back on this era decades from now, I suspect it will be seen as a time when school personnel, with the wool pulled tightly over their eyes, allowed schools to be invaded and occupied by an almost invisible enemy: their own insecurity."
At the same time, how can we let his teachers off the hook? When people look back on this era decades from now, I suspect it will be seen as a time when school personnel, with the wool pulled tightly over their eyes and self-preservation well in sight, allowed schools to be invaded and occupied by an almost invisible enemy: their own insecurity.
A clear sign of the inability of educators to handle the pressure being placed on them is visible wherever school districts hand over responsibility for educating students to testing companies, then complain that they had to because their hands were tied by federal law. The surest sign that you've been fully subjugated is your own complicity in it.
I'm not sure that my son's teachers asked so little of him because they thought he was incapable of doing more. I think they had grown weary of working within an irrational education system focused on a senselessly narrow handful of goals, but had also internalized many of the assumptions upon which that system was based. That's a toxic combination for kids.
Sometimes the easiest solution is the best one: no nonsense, just good sense. It will take a lot of courageous teachers and parents to arrest the continued slide of public schools into brain-numbing educational irrelevance, but the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. The next time you see a kid's future being framed by a test score, ask yourself: Is this what I would want for my kid? That alone may start a powerful internal struggle, and, if it does, you will have already taken the first step of a journey well worth taking. Making the decision to work with another teacher or parent to do something about it is a crucial step two.
We are confident that our son will be fine because we have taken these first steps, and many more, though it has not been easy. We have decided, heeding the words of Mark Twain, not to let schooling interfere with his education. If only schooling could be made to enhance his education. Now that is an idea worth fighting for.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Washington DC/ OPINION: A State of Emergency for American Indian and Native Students
By Dr. Heather Shotton [Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, Kiowa, Cheyenne, President of the National Indian Education Association (NIEA) and Assistant Professor at the University of Oklahoma]
Huffington Post
December 12, 2012
The recent release of Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate data from the U.S. Department of Education was certainly shocking to the nation. But for American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian communities, the data just confirms that education for our Native students is in a state of emergency.
- In nine states - Arizona, Colorado, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, and Washington - the graduation rates for American Indian and Alaska Native students in 2010-2011 are lower than 60 percent.
- And just 61 percent of Native students served by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Education graduate from high school.
- Meanwhile in three states, one out of every two Native Hawaiian students graduates on time.
The achievement gap between Native and Caucasian students remains as wide as ever.
- Only three states - Alabama, Arkansas, and Tennessee - have graduation rates for American Indian students equal or greater to that of white peers.
- More typical is Minnesota, where the graduation rate for Native high school students is half that of the 84 percent rate for their white school mates.
The problems for Native students begin long before they reach high school.
- The percentage of American Indian and Alaska Native fourth-graders scoring Below Basic on the National Assessment of Educational Progress increased by two points between 2005 and 2011 - even as the percentage of fourth-graders struggling in math declined by five points in that same period
Even when our Native students do graduate, they are not adequately prepared to achieve success in higher education, which is critical to helping them become future leaders of their communities.
- 74 percent of American Indian and Alaska Native students in 2010-2011 have never taken an Advanced Placement course even when they are capable of successfully mastering it, according to the College Board.
The result is a lost generation of young men and women, at a time in which Native communities and the United States as a whole can ill-afford to lose them. This is especially true for our American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian communities, which have been damaged by past federal education policies designed to eradicate our languages and cultures.
One cause of this state of emergency is that our Native students are not provided curriculum that respects their cultures and traditions. For our children, who must attend schools in communities where harmful Native stereotypes and mascots are common, the lack of cultural knowledge means they have few opportunities to build pride in themselves and what they can achieve.
- Just 32 percent of American Indian and Alaska Native eighth graders reported having some knowledge of their history, according to the 2011 National Indian Education Study, while
- only 33 percent of Native fourth-graders reported that their teachers integrated cultural knowledge into reading instruction at least once a month.
Another culprit lies with the lack of access to high-quality teaching and comprehensive college-and-career content that is critical to preparing Native students for an increasingly knowledge-based society.
- In Arizona, New Mexico, South Dakota, and North Carolina, one out of every two Native students attends a high school with graduation rates lower than 60 percent, according to Robert Balfanz and Nettie Letgers of Johns Hopkins University.
- Native students are shortchanged when they attend schools that are not equipped to educate them.
These problems are compounded by the fact that Native communities - especially tribal governments - are left out of decision-making about the kind of education our children receive.
- Forty years ago, the federal government took small steps toward empowering Native communities when it passed the Indian Education Act of 1972.
- But tribes still don't have the same standing in education policy as traditional districts and state education departments, even though they are recognized as sovereign governments under the U.S. Constitution and treaties between tribes and states.
This state of emergency cannot continue. We must take three critical steps to improve education for our Native children.
- The first is to pass the Native CLASS Act, which will help Native communities play stronger roles in making education decisions. The law, which is currently under consideration by Congress, would grant tribes the same authority over education as states and districts, as well as fund culturally based education programs that improve academic achievement.
- The second step is for the U.S. Department of Education to fulfill its obligation to consult with tribes on improving Native education. There's no reason why federal officials should not be working more-closely with the very governments, communities, and families most-concerned about the futures of our children.
- Finally, as Native communities, we must work together to make sure that our students have access to an education that better prepare them to succeed in higher education. This includes leveraging innovations such as charter schools, as well as working with teacher training programs on recruiting and training high-quality Native and non-Native teachers.
The new graduation rate data should serve as another call to action on behalf of our Native children - and a new opportunity to help every student get the education they deserve.
|