Santa Fe/ PED Seeks 6% Increase in Education Spending
By Hailey Heinz
ABQ Journal Staff Writer
December 19, 2012
The state Public Education Department is requesting that lawmakers increase the overall education budget by about $141.9 million next year, an increase of nearly 6 percent.
The funding request is a preliminary one, as Gov. Susana Martinez has not yet submitted her budget for the Legislature to consider.
The state budget this year included about $2.4 billion for education.
Of the new money in the request, about $67.7 million would be channeled through the state education funding formula, which awards money to districts on the basis of size and need. That would be a 3 percent increase in money flowing through the formula.
The rest would be channeled directly to programs and districts chosen by the PED for things like specific reforms.
This is the subject of some controversy among districts, which would prefer to have local control over their spending.
- At a recent annual dinner with Albuquerque lawmakers, Albuquerque Public Schools officials specifically asked that new money be funneled through the formula, not parceled out by the PED.
- But Rep. Jimmie Hall, R-Albuquerque, said he supports more structured funding. Hall, who sits on the Legislative Education Study Committee, said districts, including APS, "have not shown results for me to justify giving them money above the line without any supervision."
- State education chief Hanna Skandera said program-specific funding is important because it improves accountability at the state level.
"We believe, and the governor believes, it's important to have an expectation of return on investment," Skandera said. "The governor is holding herself accountable for what she's recommending."
Skandera also said the PED will work with districts to ensure the funds are flexible enough to be used in districts that vary greatly in size.
- Some proposals in the PED's recommendation are an additional $17.6 million for replacing aging school buses, and
- $11.3 million for "rewarding highly effective teachers and principals."
Skandera said that money will be used to provide stipends to highly rated teachers and principals next school year, when the PED's new teacher evaluation system begins in earnest.
- Parts of that system are currently being piloted around the state, and the full system will evaluate teachers based on classroom observations, their students' test score improvement, and other measures to be determined locally.
In addition to the money for stipends, the recommendation also includes:
- $5 million for the adoption of the teacher evaluation system, up from $1 million in last year's budget.
The budget also includes increases in funding to early childhood programs. Early reading has been a priority of this administration, and the budget recommendation includes:
- an additional $5 million for early reading,
- an extra $500,000 for the K-3 Plus program, and
- an additional $1 million for preschool.
A report earlier this year by the Legislative Finance Committee found that preschool and the K-3 Plus program, which lengthens the school day for students from low-income areas, had significant impacts on students' test scores.
The recommendation also includes:
- $8.4 million to support computer upgrades that will be needed for new online tests of Common Core standards;
- $3.2 million in rewards for schools that receive "A" grades or improve significantly under the new A-F school grading system; and
- $2 million for a statewide math test to be used in the early grades for helping teachers determine students' strengths and weaknesses.
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Santa Fe/ UNM-CEPR Truancy Presentation to the Legislative Education Study Committee
UNM Center for Education Policy Research
December 17, 2012
CEPR presents "Truancy in New Mexico: Attendance Matters" at the December meeting of the NM Legislative Education Study Committee.
Truancy Presentation to the Legislative Education Study Committee
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Santa Fe/ State Studies Problem of Habitual Truancy in Public Schools
By Robert Nott
The New Mexican
December 18, 2012
Nearly one in seven public-school students in New Mexico was considered habitually truant last year - meaning he or she accumulated at least 10 days of unexcused absences - according to a new report, "Truancy in New Mexico: Attendance Matters."
The report, prepared by Peter Winograd, Angelo Gonzales and Jason Timm of The University of New Mexico Center for Education Policy Research, was presented to members of the Legislative Education Study Committee at the Capitol on Tuesday afternoon.
"It's a problem across the state," Winograd said, noting that high school truancy rates in some regions of the state are "stunning."
The report noted that 51,034 of the roughly 338,220 students - about 15 percent - were habitually truant last year. And if they aren't in school, Winograd said, "our kids are getting in trouble."
He displayed charts showing a correlation between truancy and substance abuse, teen sex, bouts of depression and thoughts of suicide among youth. "Truancy matters," he said.
When speaking of the economic costs, Winograd said data show that many truants eventually drop out of school. Workers in New Mexico who haven't earned a high school diploma make an average of $16,000 a year, which impacts the state's economic well-being. The report links truancy to poor reading and math skills.
Though Winograd's presentation Tuesday focused mostly on Albuquerque and Las Cruces truancy rates, the report does include the truancy rates for Santa Fe Public Schools: Some 19 percent of elementary and middle school students are habitually truant, while more than 32 percent of high school students are habitually truant.
- According to Santa Fe Public Schools accountability data, the district's average rate of habitual truancy is about 24.6 percent.
- Santa Fe Public Schools' graduation rate hovers around 56.5 percent. Winograd noted that many habitually truant young people simply stop coming to school and thus do not graduate, a point echoed by Kris Meurer, executive director for Albuquerque Public Schools' Student, Family and Community Support Department.
She told the committee, "If I've been out seven days and find out I'm going to flunk anyway, why would I stay?"
According to state statutes governing truancy policies:
- the state Public Education Department reviews and approves all district and charter-school truancy policies.
- Schools are supposed to maintain policies that provide for early identification and intervention for truants, with schools then giving written notices to parents that includes a time and place for parents and school officials to meet to halt the problem.
- If unexcused absences continue, the school is supposed to report the student to both the Probation Services Office and the Children, Youth and Families Department.
- Juvenile court can suspend the student's driving privileges and, if the parent is responsible for the truancy, the matter can be referred to prosecutors.
- Charges can be filed, and a parent can be fined $25 to $100 or sentenced to community service.
But that rarely happens in Bernalillo, according to Valerie Lopez, juvenile probation supervisor for the Prevention and Intervention Unit of the state Children, Youth and Families Department in that county. She said the general public probably believes that many of these truancy cases go to court, but in her eight years of experience, she's only seen one make it that far.
- When Rep. Ray Begaye, D-Shiprock, asked Lopez if laws couldn't be passed to fine parents or perhaps halt their food stamps if they are responsible for their children's truant behavior, Lopez said, "The short answer is yes. The kind answer is no."
Most presenters and legislators on Tuesday agreed that schools should work to provide more welcoming environments to parents and students in an effort to keep them engaged in the learning process, but beyond that there were few solutions offered.
- Rep. Mary Helen Garcia, D-Las Cruces, asked Winograd and his staff to return next year with a list of recommendations.
- Sen. Lynda Lovejoy, D-Crownpoint, said the report's findings that more than 20 percent of elementary school students are habitually truant in some districts is "very, very disturbing. This is absolutely troublesome. We should not tolerate this."
The report does not compare New Mexico's numbers to the nation as a whole. A May 2012 Johns Hopkins University study notes that since every state compiles data on truancy in a different manner and states don't have to report those rates to the federal Department of Education, national statistics are hard to come by. The Johns Hopkins report did look at the truancy ratio of six states, including low-ranked Florida (10 percent truancy rate) and high-ranked Oregon (23 percent truancy rate).
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Deming/ Language Programs Not Just for Spanish Speakers
Deming Headlight Report
December 18, 2012
Dual language programs are not just geared toward helping non-English speakers learn the language anymore. With Deming Public Schools, the programs help students learn English, but also help English speakers grow up while learning a second language.
Michael Chavez, director of Bilingual Education, has set out to help the public understand what exactly he and the teachers of DPS hope to accomplish with the dual language courses offered for various grade levels.
- "Our dual language programs are for all kids," he said. "The goal of the dual language program is to develop bi-literate kids."
He says there are to basic approaches along which most of the children involved are taken, one-way and two-way.
- The one-way approach is geared toward helping Spanish speakers learn English.
- The two-way methods help Spanish speakers to learn English, but the classes are taught in such a way that English-speaking students are immersed in an environment that fosters learning Spanish.
"The only difference between a single language track and a dual language track is that you're learning in two languages. The content is still the same we're responsible for teaching," he explained. "Even our text books are the same. The only difference is the contents are in English and Spanish. "It's not a watered-down program."
In other words, elementary school students whose native language is English can learn the same course material as English speakers in traditional programs, but with the added benefit of learning Spanish at a young age.
"We've worked really hard to really, really change our bilingual programs from a transitional model where we're trying to get the kids pushed out of the program to a dual language model, where we're trying to hold the kids in and develop bi-literacy," he said.
"Our goal is to have our dual language programs represented in K-12 so a child can go from kindergarten all the way through 12th grade and learn in both languages."
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ABQ/ EDITORIAL: Lay Out Options To Cut NM's Teen Pregnancies
ABQ Journal
December 19, 2012
On paper, New Mexico has a serious teen pregnancy problem. The state has the second-highest teen birthrate in the nation, at 53 per 1,000 teens ages 15 to 19. Southeast Albuquerque is more than double that, with 122. (The national average is 34.2.)
And on paper, reducing that birthrate involves clear steps: male involvement, comprehensive sex education, confidential clinic services, service learning programs, and programs that teach parents to talk to their teens about reproductive health.
It is vital New Mexico take all those steps, because in real life that high birthrate translates into a high dropout rate, which translates into low rates of employment, preventive health care and opportunities for a better life - for new parents and newborns alike.
So it is promising that the New Mexico Teen Pregnancy Coalition is hosting home health parties that provide solid information on anatomy, birth control, sexually transmitted diseases and communication. It's all part of Hablando Claro, a bilingual program developed by the Annie E. Casey Foundation to teach parents to talk with their teens about sex.
That honest conversation - which emphasizes abstinence as the only 100-percent no-pregnancy solution but also lays out birth control for sexually active teens - is important for New Mexico's young men and women to hear, and sooner rather than later.
Because according to a University of New Mexico survey, nearly half of high school students and around 11 percent of middle school students in Bernalillo County say they've engaged in sex.
Albuquerque Public Schools is doing what it can to encourage student parents to stay in school, offering on-campus day care and even maternity leave. That's a sad social commentary with a poor prognosis for individual advancement and collective success.
A better one is having more of these honest conversations with male and female teens as well as their parents, and providing services when necessary, before teen moms need help as they and their children face a bleak future.
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Washington DC/ Security Steps Said to Avert More Deaths at Connecticut School
Experts warn against knee-jerk changes elsewhere
By Nirvi Shah [Education Week staff writers Catherine Gewertz, Lesli A. Maxwell, Sarah D. Sparks, Andrew Ujifusa, and Jackie Zubrzycki contributed to this report]
Education Week, Vol. 32, Issue 15 [Edweek.org]
December 18, 2012
By nearly all accounts, the administrators, teachers, and students at Sandy Hook elementary did everything right Friday-and long before that day-when a young man armed with powerful weapons blasted his way into the school with gunfire.
- A school security system delayed the shooter, at least by a few seconds, from just walking through the front door.
- A secretary switched on the Newtown, Conn., school's public address system as shots rang out, alerting the entire school that something was amiss without saying a word.
- Teachers and other school employees quickly herded students into closets, kept them quiet, and locked their doors while the principal and school psychologist tried to act as human shields.
"At Sandy Hook, a number of things went very well," said Ronald Stephens, the executive director of the National School Safety Center, an advocacy and advisory group in Westlake Village, Calif. But when someone is intent upon committing an act of crime or violence, "we have to realize that even on the best of days schools have certain limitations," he said. "The standard of care that schools have at the end of the day... is whether or not the schools took reasonable steps."
The death toll at Sandy Hook-20 1st graders and six staff members-makes it the deadliest K-12 school shooting in American history.
For years, especially following the massacre at Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colo., in 1999, schools have been redesigning security systems and practicing the steps they would take in emergencies. Some of their decisions have been driven by finances; others by the message the measures might send.
From the 1999-2000 school year to the 2009-10 school year, the Indicators of School Crime and Safety show that there was an increase in the percentage of public schools reporting installing features such as controlled access to their school buildings and grounds during school hours, requiring faculty to wear badges or photo identification, using security cameras, equipping individual classrooms with telephones, and requiring students to wear uniforms.
Dennis McCarthy, a former U.S. Secret Service agent in Blue Valley, Kan., who consults on school safety and security issues, said that safety procedures such as lockdowns, which have become more common since the school shootings in Columbine, likely saved lives in Newtown.
Mr. McCarthy said that school administrators responding to the shootings at Sandy Hook should make sure that students and school staff are well-trained in such drills.
- "Have a close look at your current procedures.
- Do you really do your lockdown drills? Are they efficient?
- Do you train staff, including substitute teachers, to identify, assess, and manage threats?"
- Having a single point of entry to a school or using guidelines like Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design-a strategy that aims to thwart crime through schools' architecture-could also help reduce threats, Mr. McCarthy said.
While visible security measures are a necessary deterrent, overdoing those and overusing emergency drills can actually be counterproductive, especially with younger children, said Richard W. Fry, the superintendent of the 3,000-student Big Spring School District in Pennsylvania.
- "If you do more than [necessary] they're going to internalize it," Mr. Fry said. "Making them love school-how can you do that if you're scared?"
That's especially challenging with young students, he said.
Avoiding Worse
The massacre at Sandy Hook could have been much worse.
"The loss of life could have been in the hundreds," said Randall I. Atlas, the president of Atlas Security & Safety Design, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based security consulting firm. "Essentially, the killing zone was confined to two classrooms. It was a bad day for them, but many others survived because of the design, technology, training, and practice put into place because of Columbine and Virginia Tech."
But those crises also set a macabre bar for future episodes of violence, said Mr. Stephens of the National School Safety Center.
"Our school crises that we experience today, we expect a certain amount of one-upsmanship," he said, with some shooters making plans to make their attacks bigger and more devastating.
In Newtown, suspected shooter Adam Lanza fired at least 100 rounds, and Connecticut's chief medical examiner said everyone killed suffered multiple gunshot wounds.
In some school violence plots foiled by educators or law enforcement, he said, the would-be perpetrators have declared, "we're going to make Columbine look like kindergarten stuff."
While promoting ways to increase security-related intelligence may be worthy endeavors, such as providing ways for students to report rumors or concerns and ensuring that students trust and feel connected to adults at their school, one school safety expert cautioned district leaders against rushing to introduce other additional security measures in the aftermath of the Newtown tragedy.
Placing armed police officers at elementary schools may be a natural reaction for wary school administrators he said, but such decisions have to be carefully considered.
- "If you are going to rush this week to fix things, you are probably going to make some mistakes," said Michael S. Dorn, a former schools police chief in Georgia who runs the Atlanta-based Safe Havens International Inc., a widely consulted, nonprofit school-safety organization. "Districts need to take their time and build something that will work for the next decade."
Chiefly, Mr. Dorn said, security measures and preparedness have to make sense for numerous emergency scenarios that can unfold at school, not just an active shooter, which is still quite rare.
Training every staff member to look for signs of "off behavior," even subtle ones, from people who come into school buildings, is critical. It could be how a person walks, he said, how they shift their eyes, or speak. That same training applies in many other, more common scenarios in schools, he said, including learning to spot signs of students who are having a medical emergency, for example.
- "You need to be comprehensive," he said. "You want to do things that are going to give you benefit on every single school day."
Indeed, said Eric C. Eshbach, the superintendent of the 3,200-student Northern York County School District in Pennsylvania and the president of the state's association of school administrators, good decisions, not knee-jerk ones, are required right now.
That said, he asked parents in his district Monday to provide feedback about any school security concerns they may have.
"We really need their help in being vigilant," Mr. Eshbach said. "If they're seeing things that they think are holes in our processes, let me know about that."
If a parent notices a door being propped open, for example, or wasn't asked for his or her identification when picking up a child, "we need to know that so we can shore up some of the loose ends."
Regardless of school safety experts' opinions, some districts plan long-term change following last week's mass shooting.
- In the Los Angeles public school district, city Police Chief Charlie Beck said at a press conference Monday that by January, police will visit schools in the system at least daily.
"This is a significant, significant task because as you well know, we have over 600 of these schools," Chief Beck said. The offer will be extended to charter and private schools in the nation's second-largest school district's boundaries as well.
"Our schools are safe. We'll make them safer. We can't let a tragedy, no matter how great it is, 3,000 miles from here, affect the education of our children."
However, what schools may be more likely to take away from the horrific events in Connecticut is whether they provide adequate mental health screenings and services for students, Mr. Fry, of the Big Spring district, said.
While the shootings and acts of violence such as those at Columbine reshaped school safety procedures, he said, "I think three months from now, six months from now, I suspect it will be more looking at the mental health side of how we serve children throughout the day here," noting that the suspected shooter in Newtown was a product of the public school system to which he laid siege. "That's what districts will be talking about-not the procedures or drills that they obviously did oh so well."
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New York NY/ Arts as Antidote for Academic Ills
By Patricia Cohen
New York Times
December 18, 2012
Stationed in front of one of his large self-portraits, the artist Chuck Close raised his customized wheelchair to balance on two wheels, seeming to defy the laws of gravity.
The chair's unlikely gymnastics underlined the points that Mr. Close was making to his audience, 40 seventh and eighth graders from Bridgeport, Conn.: Break the rules and use limitations to your advantage.
The message had particular resonance for these students, and a few educators and parents, who had come by bus on Monday from Roosevelt School to the Pace Gallery in Chelsea for a private tour of Mr. Close's show. Roosevelt, located in a community with high unemployment and crushing poverty, recently had one of the worst records of any school in the state, with 80 percent of its seventh graders testing below grade level in reading and math.
Saved from closure by a committed band of parents, the school was one of eight around the country chosen last year to participate in Turnaround Arts, a new federally sponsored public-and-private experiment that puts the arts at the center of the curriculum.
- Arranging for extra funds for supplies and instruments, teacher training, partnerships with cultural organizations and high-profile mentors like Mr. Close, Turnaround is trying to use the arts to raise academic performance across the board.
- "Art saved my life," Mr. Close told the children. And he believes it can save the lives of others, too.
So now he was giving a pizza party and answering a question about why he started to paint.
- "I wanted people to notice me, not that I couldn't remember their faces or add or subtract," he said, referring to the learning and neurological disabilities that set him apart from his classmates when he was growing up in Monroe, Wash.
A terrible writer and test-taker, Mr. Close used art to make it through school. Instead of handing in a paper, he told the children, "I made a 20-foot-long mural of the Lewis and Clark trail."
Starting in Pace's large central gallery, where his giant portraits of other artists like Philip Glass, Paul Simon and Laurie Anderson looked on, Mr. Close told the group that "everything about my work is driven by my learning disabilities."
- Born with prosopagnosia, a condition that prevents him from recognizing faces, Mr. Close explained that the only way he can remember a face is by breaking it down into small "bite-sized" pieces, like the tiny squares or circles of color that make up his paintings and prints.
- "I figured out what I had left and I tried to make it work for me," he said. "Limitations are important."
With Mr. Close were a few other members of the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, which helped develop the Turnaround program. One of them, Damian Woetzel, a former principal dancer with the New York City Ballet who is a mentor to two other Turnaround schools, picked up on his theme.
"In dance we limit ourselves, as well," he said. "There are five positions and everything comes from that," he added, quickly demonstrating the basic ballet poses.
Filling out the cultural spectrum were:
- the Broadway producer Margo Lion, a chairwoman of the committee, and the
- musicians Cristina Pato, Shane Shanahan and Kojiro Umezaki, all members of the Silk Road Ensemble, an international collaboration founded by the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who is also a committee member and a mentor.
One by one, they entered from different doors, startling the students with an impromptu concert featuring a tambourine, a gaita (a Spanish bagpipe) and a Chinese flute.
Clapping and stamping in time to the music, Mr. Woetzel soon turned the gallery's open space into a dance floor. A couple of students whipped out phones to record the proceedings, while others raced across the room to avoid getting pulled in as participants. One reluctant dancer, captured by Rachel Goslins, a filmmaker and the executive director of the president's committee, rolled his eyes and mouthed "Oh my God" as she circled him around the floor. Other students joined hands and began dancing as Ms. Lion and the school principal, Tania Kelley, her head flung back, swung each other around.
Mr. Close swerved through the crowd in his wheelchair.
"I never danced before," Carolyn Smith, 13, said excitedly when the music stopped. "Usually I sing." Carolyn was the lead in the school's production of "The Wiz" last year. A brain tumor had caused her to miss so much school that her literacy teacher initially wanted her to turn down the part and focus on catching up, Ms. Goslins said. But being in the play - and reading and memorizing the script - helped her reading skills so much, Ms. Goslins said, that the literacy coach later told her, "I'm a believer."
The afternoon offered a series of firsts for many of the students. Most had never seen such instruments, heard of Mr. Simon or Mr. Glass, or even visited Manhattan.
"It's pretty cool to be in New York," said David Morales, 14, who later asked Mr. Close about his technique, explaining, "I like how he makes it, how it comes all together."
David, like the other Roosevelt students, had studied Mr. Close's work in class and met him when he visited the school last month. So Mr. Close patiently answered questions.
"Is it easy to make these pictures?" (Well, it can take a while, Mr. Close replied.)
"How do you know what colors to use?" (Trial and error.)
"Can you draw? (Yes.)
"There is no artist who enjoys what he does every day more than I do," Mr. Close told the group, setting off applause from the students. Repeating advice he often gives to young artists, he said: "Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up for work."
When the bus arrived for the return trip, Ms. Pato and Mr. Shanahan again took up their instruments, this time to lead a parade of clapping students and teachers out the door.
Carolyn Smith, a pink rose in her hair, paused at the doorway and turned to Mr. Close. "I had a blast," she called out. "Bye, Chuck. See you later."
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