Española/ School Board Approves Master Facilities Plan
By Louis McGill
Rio Grande Sun Staff Writer
December 27, 2012
The Española School Board approved its new Facilities Master Plan at its Dec. 19 meeting, but not everyone agreed on the top 10 construction priorities outlined in the plan.
The plan outlines the following priorities for the next five years, in order:
- Complete 2012-2016 general obligation bond projects;
- Alcalde Elementary School replacement;
- Fairview Elementary School replacement;
- Velarde Elementary School renovation;
- Española Elementary School fields;
- Los Niños Kindergarten Center modernization;
- Hernandez Elementary School replacement;
- Española Valley High School design;
- Abiquiú Elementary School renovation;
- Chimayó Elementary School design.
While the first is a general goal, the first four projects are currently underway in some form or another. Alcalde Elementary is scheduled to be completed in the summer, Fairview and Velarde elementary schools are undergoing their design phases, and the middle school's athletic fields are currently under construction.
Dissatisfied with the order of the priorities, Board member Pablo Lujan cast the sole vote against the plan.
He argued for the modernization of Los Niños Kindergarten Center to be moved from priority number six to number eight, while the replacement of Hernandez Elementary School and work on Chimayó Elementary School be moved up to priorities six and seven, respectively.
Superintendent Art Blea responded at the meeting, saying the Los Niños project already had matching funds from the state allocated, and the project to build a new Hernandez Elementary building would be roughly triple the cost of renovating Los Niños
Board President Floyd Archuleta said the replacement of Hernandez Elementary will be approved in time.
Board member Coco Archuleta said at the meeting he didn't see any reason to change the order. The Hernandez project depends on state matching funds, which depends on rankings from the Public School Facilities Authority.
State rankings
The number of schools eligible for state matching funds changes from year to year, depending on how much money the legislature allocated to the Authority, Blea said. Some years, they fund the top 50 projects. Last year, it was the top 75.
While the project is a subject of debate, at number 128 on the Authority's list, a full-scale replacement of the Hernandez building would be unlikely to get funded. Blea said the District is appealing the ranks of both Hernandez and Chimayó.
However, the Dec. 19 vote is not necessarily an end to the debate on priorities. The Board reviews the priorities every year and makes modifications as needed, Blea said.
"It's not like it's in concrete for five years," he said.
The Authority's rankings depend on the condition of a building relative to the rest of the school buildings in New Mexico. Hernandez fell in the rankings since last year, despite no work being done to improve the building. However, it's likely Hernandez's position improved because other buildings around the state simply got worse.
This ranking change concerns Lujan, who wants to see it re-evaluated.
Lujan believes, with the square-footage available in the District right now, Los Niños should be moved to empty space in Española Elementary, the District's central office should be housed in the Los Niños building, and Hernandez should be built instead of renovating Los Niños.
"Hernandez is in dire need to be built," he said. "As representative (of) that district, I want it known that I'm trying to do due diligence in trying to get that project moved up."
While the school is set to get a roof replacement, Lujan said this would just be "putting a Band-Aid over it" rather than solving the larger problem of the building's age.
Floyd Archuleta said he felt pleased with the plan overall.
"I was okay with it," he said. "I know there was a concern about the rankings changing, but that's so far away that I don't know if we need to address it at this point."
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Española / Cariños Charter School Has Home Until 2016
By Louis McGill
Rio Grande Sun Staff Writer
December 27, 2012
The students, parents, employees, and administrators of Cariños Charter School can breathe a little easier for the next few years.
The Española School Board approved at its Dec. 19 meeting, its disposal plan for the old Middle School East building, currently occupied by Cariños.
The plan allows Cariños to stay in the building to the end of the lease, as long as the New Mexico Public School Insurance Authority continues to insure the facility.
After the lease expires, it will not be renewed, and the Española School District will either demolish or sell the building for a non-educational use.
Now that it's approved, this plan will be sent to the Public School Facilities Authority for final approval.
Cariños Chancellor Vernon Jaramillo said teachers, parents, and students will be relieved to know Cariños will stay in the same building for the next few years.
- "I'm thrilled," he said. "This decision gives everybody peace of mind and gives stability to our program, and also gives the Carinos board time to plan for the future."
Jaramillo said they were tired of being nomadic, and it is good to know where their home will be until the lease expires June 30, 2016.
Cariños Governance Board President Quentin Wilson said the news came as a huge relief.
"I think that's wonderful," Wilson said. "If we don't get to stay in it in perpetuity, at least getting to go to the end of our lease gives us time to figure something out."
The passage of the plan also pleased Española School Board President Floyd Archuleta, who said he respects the right of parents to have a choice.
"I like the fact that we're able to give Cariños time to look at finding a more permanent situation for them," he said.
However, if the Insurance Authority decides to stop insuring the building for any reason, Superintendent Art Blea said the District could not possibly allow students to stay in it. Though at this point, the building remained insured.
The school's governance board will be aggressively hunting for a new location in the new year, Jaramillo said.
Wilson said he already has four properties in mind, including some existing buildings and some undeveloped property. However, he said he still holds out hope to be able to work something out with the current building or another property owned by the District.
"It's always easier to start with an existing building, and it's always easier to start with an existing building that's a school," he said.
The school community has endured a lot of uncertainty about the future of their location since June, when the Facilities Authority released an alarming assessment of the building in which they stated it was unfit for students and staff and recommended it be evacuated and demolished. The Authority released a second, final report days later which toned down the language, but the central message remained the same.
"Facility systems are beyond repair. There are numerous life, health, and safety risks throughout the facility," the final report states.
The next challenge came after money allocated by the Public School Capital Outlay Council for Española Middle School's athletic fields in 2009 was awarded again to the District at a July 26 meeting, but under the condition that the Board determine a plan to phase that building out as a school.
However, the District sent a letter to the Cariños administration on Oct. 29 informing them that, if the Facilities Authority approved, the District would be booting Cariños out of the building at the end of the year so Fairview Elementary could hold classes there instead of in the middle of a construction zone during the building of the new Fairview facility.
The Facilities Authority did not approve, Blea said.
"They didn't want to allow it without us making more improvements than we would really want to make for a one-year use, and they felt the other school could be built while the students are there," he said.
After the Board's decision, the future is now a bit clearer for Cariños.
"It's close enough to Christmas, we'll call it a Christmas present," Wilson said.
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Santa Fe/ COLUMN: Power-Packed Workshops for Teachers, Voluntary Board-Candidate Financial Disclosure
By Robert Nott
The New Mexican
December 30, 2012
"Modern life would be impossible without energy - far more energy than human muscles can muster," Los Alamos National Laboratory staffer/researcher Greg Swift said via email recently. He wasn't talking about the way some of us may feel when we wake up New Year's Day. He went on to point out that humans use gas for our vehicles and home heating and lighting, among other uses, and that we utilize electricity to maintain communication in this technologically driven society of ours.
- "And all this would be GREAT except for one big, global problem," he continued via email. "The carbon dioxide from burning all that fossil fuel hangs around in the atmosphere and ocean for thousands of years, warming the climate and acidifying the ocean."
What's all this got to do with education?
Swift and one of his colleagues, Rajan Gupta, are presenting "Climate Change and Other Environmental Impacts of Energy Use," the first in a series of four professional enrichment workshops for teachers hosted by the Santa Fe Alliance For Science this coming semester.
The series starts Saturday, Jan. 12, at a yet-to-be-determined locale. The alliance, founded in spring 2005, will pay teachers a stipend of $48 plus offer light refreshments for attending any or all of these Saturday-morning events.
- "The basic idea of these workshops ... is to provide teachers with a bit of perspective on topics of great current interest in the math or science world," explained SFAI founder/director Robert Eisenstein. "Hopefully, the topics are not only of interest to the teachers but also represent ideas that are relevant to their curricula. Teachers also receive professional enrichment credits from Santa Fe Public Schools."
The alliance may still be best known for its regularly scheduled Science Cafe for Young Thinkers series - the next in that series, slated for February 2013, is "Heads Up! Asteroid Impacts on Earth." But it also holds these teacher-oriented programs to help educators find new topics and ideas to incorporate into the classroom. This Saturday series revolves around energy, with upcoming sessions including
- "Where Today's Energy comes From And How We Use It" (Feb. 9),
- "The Future of Energy: Science and Technology" (March 16) and
- "The Future of Energy: Ethics, Justice, Economics and Politics" (April 20).
The deadline for enrolling is next Monday, Jan. 7, 2013. Visit www.sfafs.org for details.
Campaign finance reform
Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2013, is the deadline for candidates to withdraw from the February 2013 school-board election for the two open seats in Districts 3 and 5.
Five candidates are in the race to take the seats currently held by Barbara Gudwin and Frank Montaño: Susan Duncan and David Zimbler in District 3 and Louis Carlos, Lorraine Price and Edward Worten in District 5.
Earlier this month, the Santa Fe Board of Education approved board member Glenn Wikle's proposed resolution calling for the voluntary disclosure of all campaign contributions and expenditures for these school-board candidates. The state does not mandate such disclosures, probably because school-board candidates usually raise and/or spend somewhere between a few hundred dollars to $10,000 along the campaign trail.
- "It's about transparency and about knowing who is behind a candidate," Wikle said earlier in the month. "Now that we added expenditures to the resolution, it provides a little bit of accountability for people who make contributions - how was their money spent?"
The League of Women Voters of Santa Fe County hosted a campaign contribution website for candidates in the last board election, held two years ago (board elections occur every two years, with three seats being elected in one cycle and the other two seats in the next cycle; all members serve four years).
Disclosure forms are available at the district's Educational Services Center, 610 Alta Vista St., and the district may provide a Web page with this information.
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Santa Fe/ OPINION: Adelante Homeless Student Program Needs Your Help
By Gaile Herling [Coordinator of Santa Fe Public Schools' Adelante Program since 2003]
The New Mexican
December 29, 2012
Today, as I watch the beautiful snow bringing much-needed moisture to our town, I can't help but think about the more than 1,400 children and youth living in homeless situations that the Santa Fe Public Schools' Adelante Program annually serves. Although the majority of our children have a temporary roof (in shelters or in doubled-up, overcrowded situations), many are a few days away from eviction or already have been evicted. Some are without heat on this frozen day, and others are without water and electricity.
I wonder, who won't be able to get three meals today? Weekends can be difficult for our students, because they don't have access to the free breakfast and lunch at school. Their family may be living in one small room, without any books, space or fun games to play. Instead, they may be witnessing their parents' stress, or worse.
Children, youth and families are the fastest-growing and most invisible population experiencing homelessness in Santa Fe. I want to make you aware of the plight of these invisible families with children. The Adelante Program is now serving 40 percent more children and youth than at this same time last year. Adelante has assisted almost 550 families since August, and we can barely keep up with the growing demand.
Most Adelante families are in crisis due to lack of work or low wages. Many families have serious health concerns and large medical bills. If housed, most family income is used for rent and utilities. Parents may skip meals themselves so their children can eat.
Many Adelante students, including elementary children, are often absent due to taking care of family members. Adelante students are sick, have stress-related illnesses, developmental delays and learning disabilities more than their permanently housed peers. They may be escaping an abusive parent or have to move often due to crises related to mental health, medical or substance abuse issues.
Adelante is Santa Fe's only agency focusing specifically on schoolchildren and their families in homeless situations. Our bilingual services can make the difference for a child to graduate school, attend college and contribute to their community. Adelante provides school supplies, clothing and jackets, food, tutoring, transportation, emergency funds, case management, advocacy, referrals, creative after-school workshops and evening family programs. Adelante's high school liaison has helped increase our seniors' graduation rates to more than 80 percent in both Capital High and Santa Fe High School!
At Adelante, we believe that every child deserves a warm, safe place to live, plentiful nutritious food, familial love, support, stability and all the educational and other opportunities needed to reach their highest potential.
How do I persuade you that we need your $25 or perhaps your $1,000 or more for our Homeless Emergency Fund that helps prevent homelessness among our families? Your contribution will help prevent evictions and utility disconnects, and will provide essentials during family emergencies.
Please visit us and see what a tiny staff accomplishes. Join us at our weekly evening program - you will fall in love with our children and youth. Call me at 467-2571 to schedule a visit.
Please write your tax-deductible donation to: Partners in Education Homeless Fund. Mailing address: Adelante Program/PIE Homeless Fund, SFPS Student Wellness, 610 Alta Vista St., Santa Fe, NM 87505.
Thanks for your generosity and may you have an abundant, warm and cozy 2013.
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New Delhi INDIA/ An Idea Promised the Sky, but India is Still Waiting
By Pamposh Raina [reporting from New Delhi and Amritsar, India; Ian Austen from Montreal and Heather Timmons from New Delhi. Mia Li contributed reporting from Beijing]
New York Times
December 29, 2012
The idea was, and still is, captivating: in 2011, the Indian government and two Indian-born tech entrepreneurs unveiled a $50 tablet computer, to be built in India with Google's free Android software. The government would buy the computers by the millions and give them to its schoolchildren.
Enthusiasts saw the plan as a way to bring modern touch-screen computing to some of the world's poorest people while seeding a technology manufacturing industry in India. Legions of customers placed advance orders for a commercial version of the tablet, thrilled at the prospect of owning tangible proof that India was a leader in "frugal innovation."
Even the secretary general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, lavished praise on the audacious project, called Aakash, the Hindi word for sky.
- "India is a superpower on the information superhighway," Mr. Ki-moon said at a ceremony in November at the United Nations headquarters in New York.
Stoking expectations was Suneet Singh Tuli, the charismatic C.E.O. of the small London-based company that won the bid. "I am creating a product at a lower price than anyone else in the world with the hope that it impacts people's lives and I make money out of it," he said in a recent interview.
But over the last few months, it has become increasingly evident that Mr. Tuli, 44, and his older brother, Raja Singh Tuli, 46, are unable to deliver on most of their ambitious promises.
The Tulis acknowledge that their company, DataWind, will not even come close to shipping the 100,000 tablets it has promised to India's colleges and universities before its year-end deadline.
- Most of the 10,000 or so tablets delivered through early December were made in China, despite the company's early pledge to manufacture in India.
- Financial statements filed with British regulators show that the company is deeply in the red.
- And the project's entire premise - that India can make a cheap tablet computer that will somehow make up for failures of the country's crippled education system - is fundamentally flawed, according to some experts in education and manufacturing.
Leigh L. Linden, an assistant professor of economics and public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin who has studied the use of technology in schools in India and other developing countries, said that, at best, computers merely match the performance gains from far less costly projects that involve hiring additional teachers or teaching assistants. And in some cases, Professor Linden said, the introduction of computers can actually lower students' test results.
- "Based on the available research," he said, "this would not be the most effective strategy for education in developing countries."
The notion that India's weak manufacturing sector can catch up to China in advanced computer hardware also strikes some experts as far-fetched.
- "China became the manufacturing center of the world, and India missed that boat," said Surjit S. Bhalla, an economist and managing director of Oxus Investments.
So far, the Indian government is standing firmly behind the project.
"All path-breaking ideas do look too ambitious when conceived," the Ministry of Human Resource Development, which oversees the Aakash project, said in an e-mailed statement. Aakash is "an all-encompassing project," not just the creation of a tablet computer, the ministry said. With it, the government plans to create "an entire manufacturing ecosystem" in India.
Interviews with DataWind executives, government officials, Chinese manufacturers, business partners and former and current employees paint a picture of a small family company that was overwhelmed by a complex project that even China's cutthroat technology manufacturers would find challenging to execute at the price expected by the government.
Leading a tour last month of the company's small touch-screen factory in downtown Montreal, Raja Tuli, DataWind's co-chairman and chief technology officer, said he had initially opposed his brother's desire to bid on the Aakash contract, and he expressed lingering regrets.
"We got stuck in it," he said. "We're doing our best."
DataWind's real goal, Mr. Tuli said, is to sell low-cost wireless Internet access for tablets in developing countries like India. He said DataWind's proprietary data compression technology, which made its debut in Britain years ago with a device called the PocketSurfer, efficiently delivers Web pages over older, slower cellphone networks.
- "Our biggest contribution is our software," Mr. Tuli said. "The fact that we're making the actual hardware is a sideline that we got into in the process. We never meant to do it, but here we are."
For India's government, the Aakash project was supposed to usher in a computer revolution.
Although India pioneered the information technology outsourcing business, and still does much of the computing work for many big companies, only a small portion of the population has access to computers or the Internet.
Others had tried to bring cheap computing to developing countries like India -
- most notably the One Laptop Per Child project. Founded by Nicholas Negroponte of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and backed by a host of Western technology companies, that effort aimed to bring $100 laptops to children around the world but faltered amid a host of technical, manufacturing and competitive challenges.
"This is our answer to M.I.T.'s $100 computer," said Kapil Sibal, the minister of communications and information technology, when he announced the Aakash project in 2010.
Suneet Tuli, whose family emigrated from India to Canada when he was a boy, certainly bought into that vision. Just as the huge drop in the price of mobile calling prompted a communications revolution in India, a cheap tablet could transform India's classrooms and eventually all of the country's poor, he said in an interview in October 2011.
In India, "there are one billion people left out," he said, "and the way to include them is lower the price."
But DataWind was in over its head from the start.
The government's specifications were challenging, and none of India's information technology giants, like HCL or Wipro, competed for the contract. DataWind made the lowest bid, promising to supply the tablets for 2,276 rupees, including delivery - about $50 at exchange rates at the time, and about $40 now.
In a recent interview, Suneet Tuli said DataWind figured that it could cut costs by improving on standard industry designs and by making touch screens itself, in Canada, at a lower price than it could buy them in China.
In a fateful decision, Mr. Tuli also promised to build the tablet in India, even though the country's manufacturers had no real experience in building such hardware. While not required by the government, the pledge added to the patriotic fervor surrounding the project and generated publicity for DataWind's plan to sell more expensive commercial tablets and $2-a-month wireless Internet service to the public.
Rather than build its own plants, DataWind sought out Indian partners, starting with Quad Electronic, from Andhra Pradesh, which had made cash registers, electronic typewriters and printers but never tablets.
Within months, though, the two had parted ways.
According to Suneet Tuli, the problems started when the university overseeing the project rejected the early tablets and demanded improvements. The relationship collapsed after DataWind discovered that Quad planned to produce a rival tablet, he said.
But Raminder Singh Soin, Quad's managing director, said DataWind's product "was not good enough." "Many things were missing in the Aakash tablet," he said in a phone interview this month, noting that its microprocessor could not support the tablet's advertised features.
Mr. Soin said DataWind never paid for the tablets Quad did produce, or for the components Quad bought to build an additional 30,000 units. He estimates that the failed partnership cost him 150 million rupees, or about $3 million. Suneet Tuli said DataWind didn't owe Quad any money.
Compounding DataWind's problems, the company started taking orders for the commercial version of its tablet, the UbiSlate, just a week after unveiling the Aakash tablet. Within six weeks, it had 300,000 orders, Suneet Tuli said in an interview in early 2012. Last month, he said, orders for the UbiSlate tablets had reached about four million.
Yet DataWind still lacks the manufacturing, marketing and customer service capacity to handle even a substantial fraction of those orders. A result has been a wave of customer fury.
Edwin Richard Toppo, 25, a human resources professional in Delhi, placed an order in August for an UbiSlate. Weeks after he received the tablet, he said in a phone interview, its two USB ports stopped working. Then the slot for a SIM card went dead, and now the touch screen is unresponsive, he said.
"It's like a dummy," Mr. Toppo said, adding that several dozen calls to DataWind customer support went unanswered.
In a recent interview, Suneet Tuli acknowledged that the company has struggled. "Unfortunately, the scale of everything here has been beyond our imagination," he said.
DataWind is trying to prioritize orders, he said, delivering about 2,500 tablets a day and offering refunds to people who don't want to wait. Customers "will get a world-class product, I think, at a fraction of the price," he added.
To help clear the huge backlog of orders, DataWind said it had signed up four new Indian partners to help make the tablets.
Still, the company won't meet the Dec. 31 deadline to deliver 100,000 tablets to the Indian government. It recently received an extension until March 31, and Raja Tuli said he expects DataWind to fulfill the government contract by that time.
In an attempt to meet its commitments, the company moved production to China in the fall. At least three Chinese companies have been manufacturing an improved tablet, known as Aakash-2, for DataWind, and shipped thousands to India, according to interviews with Chinese manufacturers and documents reviewed by The New York Times.
Officials at the Chinese companies, who said they make as little as $1 in profit on each tablet, expressed doubts that India would ever be able to compete in electronics manufacturing.
"DataWind's tablets can be made in Shenzhen, but not in India, because Shenzhen has a fully developed industry chain," said a project manager with Kalong Technology, one of the companies, who spoke on the condition that his full name not be used, because he wanted to avoid media attention. "It's just like, if you want to open a bakery, you need to know where to get the best flour both near you and at a good price."
A recent visit to DataWind's three-story Indian plant in the Amritsar neighborhood known as Ghee Mandi showed just how far the company has to go.
On the ground floor, rows of brown shipping boxes were piled atop one another, some printed with "Easydy," the name of a Shenzhen tablet manufacturing company. Ibadat Singh, DataWind's vice president for operations, said DataWind was not buying finished tablets from China, but just recycling boxes that happened to come from there. "Why use new boxes?" he said.
Two floors up, 16 men at a rectangular table were programming tablets and adding standard applications, Mr. Singh said. One man was working on an opened tablet with a big green screwdriver. Others were soldering wires or testing units. One man diligently wrapped tablets in Bubble Wrap and packed them into white boxes.
The factory makes about 1,000 units a day, Mr. Singh said. Each tablet takes five minutes to assemble and two to program. It's so easy, he told a reporter, "even you can do it."
During the November interview in Montreal, however, Raja Tuli described the difficulties of manufacturing in India, citing issues like prolonged border delays and poor infrastructure.
"Listen, it's obviously easier in China just because the whole infrastructure is set up, capital is so much cheaper," he said. "In India, it can be done but the process is longer."
He declined to say whether DataWind would bid on future Aakash supply contracts from the government. But he said the company would not abandon its plans to build and sell inexpensive tablets in India.
"We're not going to give up because of these little issues," he said. "We're committed to it. Always in life, it's tougher than you think it was going to be."
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Washington DC/ OPINION: Literature and Nonfiction: Common-Core Advocates Strike Back
By Catherine Gerwertz
Education Week [Edweek.org]
December 28, 2012
As we've told you, a particular slice of the common standards in English/language arts has become pretty flammable lately: the rise of nonfiction reading. The standards' expectation that students read more informational text has sparked fear-some would say misinterpretation-that great works of literature will be displaced from classroom instruction.
- Even though mainstream news media have by and large ignored the common standards, this issue got enough traction to break through that quietude, garnering a Page One story in The Washington Post, and even becoming the butt of jokes on National Public Radio's popular "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" show.
- And the literature-being-squeezed-out people have been just about the only voices in the general-interest media on the issue. The Los Angeles Times ran an editorial saying that regardless of the standards writers' intent to preserve a hefty place for literature, it is sure to take a major hit under the common core.
- With all this stuff flying around, education historian and blogger Diane Ravitch opined, it's going to take something big-a major speech, or a partial retraction of the standards, to make the issue go away.
- Until recently, the closest we'd come to a major speech on the nonfiction-versus-fiction question was a piece in the Huffington Post by the English/language arts standards' co-authors, David Coleman and Sue Pimentel, insisting that literature "is not being left by the wayside."
The message to rally the troops must have gone out, however. Because since the Coleman/Pimentel piece appeared, the common core's defenders have stepped up to counterbalance the literature-pushout crowd.
In a recent email blast, the Foundation for Excellence in Education-led by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, one of the common core's biggest backers-declaimed the "misinformation flying around" about what will happen to literature under the common standards. "Contrary to reports," it said, "classic literature will not be lost with the implementation of the new standards."
A glance at the standards' own suggested text lists, it noted, "reveals that the common core recognizes the importance of balancing great literature and historical nonfiction pieces."
The email directed readers to other recently written articles that "show how this latest attack on common core doesn't withstand fact-checking," including:
- Porter-Magee's piece, an op-ed in The Boston Globe headlined "Required Reading, or Just Misread?,"and
- a piece by nationally recognized literacy scholar Tim Shanahan titled, "Willful Ignorance and the Informational Text Controversy."
- Cultural-literacy guru E.D. Hirsch weighed in on the issue with an essay in The Wall Street Journal.
- Cari Miller, a policy adviser for the Foundation for Excellence in Education, wrote a post for the group's blog, Ed Fly, arguing that "Don Quixote and To Kill a Mockingbird aren't going anywhere."
- The email blast also included an article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel by former longtime education reporter Alan J. Borsuk, an intriguing inclusion, since that story said that the nonfiction expectations of the standards "almost certainly will mean fewer classics. ..." It also explored, however, the ways that fiction and nonfiction study can weave together to bolster students' engagement in reading, and their skill with it.
Whether this issue lives or dies-and what form it takes if it survives-will be very much worth watching in the coming year.
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