Santa Fe/ NM to Receive $25 Million in Federal "Race to the Top" Education Funding
By Matthew van Buren
Taos News
January 1, 2013
New Mexico has learned it will be one of 14 states to receive millions in federal "Race to the Top" education funding.
According to information from the state Public Education Department (PED), New Mexico will receive $25 million over the next four years.
New Mexico did not receive the competitive grant when it applied last year, as the state's application received the 10th-highest score, but only nine states received funding, according to a PED release.
- "The strength of the state's 2011 application is the catalyst for New Mexico winning in this round," the release states.
Colorado is also among the phase 2 recipients; that state requested nearly $30 million in funding.
New Mexico is to receive funding as part of Race to the Top's "Early Learning Challenge."
- According to information from the U.S. Department of Education, the grant competition focuses on "improving early learning and development programs for young children."
According to New Mexico's application, submitted to the Department of Education, the funding will be used:
- to help develop a "coordinated system of early learning and development" in the state,
- including establishing common program standards,
- prioritizing communities and
- building an early learning data system to provide the public with information aimed at tracking and assessing students.
"Congratulations to Gov. Martinez and state leaders for your work and dedication to providing children with a strong start to a high-quality education," U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is quoted as saying in the PED release.
- "Investing Race to the Top - Early Learning Challenge resources to improve education quality and opportunity on the front end will help more of New Mexico's children be successful in high school, higher education and beyond."
According to information from the Department of Education, the federal funds are meant to:
- assist state efforts to "increase the number and percentage of low-income and disadvantaged children in each age group of infants, toddlers and preschoolers who are enrolled in high-quality early learning programs";
- "design and implement an integrated system of high-quality early learning programs and services"; and
- "ensure that any use of assessments conforms with the recommendations of the National Research Council's reports on early childhood."
Information from the PED states New Mexico's grant application constituted a collaborative effort among the PED, the Children, Youth and Families Department and the Department of Health.
- "Funds from 'Race to the Top' grant will be focused on helping the state's youngest students," the PED announcement states.
- "New funding will allow the state to develop standards and alignment across many early childhood programs allowing for better student achievement both before and after kindergarten."
- Literacy programs for students from pre-kindergarten through third grade will receive support as part of the award, according to the PED, and funding could start arriving in New Mexico by February.
"This is another huge victory for our students and schools," state Education Secretary-Designate Hanna Skandera is quoted as saying in the PED announcement.
U.S. Rep. Ben Ray Luján, D-NM, also spoke to the importance of the Race to the Top funding.
- "Education is the key to unlocking opportunities for our children and preparing them to be leaders in our community," Luján is quoted as saying in a release from his office.
- "It is vital that New Mexico's children get off to a strong start with a solid foundation, and these funds through the Race to the Top program will enable New Mexico to invest in early education that is a critical component to future success."
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ABQ/ School Overhaul Results Mixed
By Hailey Heinz
ABQ Journal Staff Writer
January 2, 2013
Destiny Arciniega feels her school has changed a lot.
"When I was a freshman, we got away with a lot of things," she said. "We never got opportunities like having tutoring or having a teacher come and help us."
Now an 18-year-old senior, Arciniega has been at Rio Grande High since the district began a redesign of the school, along with Ernie Pyle Middle School.
In fall 2009 - when Arciniega was starting her freshman year - Albuquerque Public Schools began an effort to turn around the two historically under-performing South Valley schools.
- The plan included paying teachers $5,000 annual stipends.
- In exchange, the teachers signed contracts, agreeing to extra teacher collaboration, training and work outside their normal school day.
- They also committed to a more open style of teaching.
The district has spent a total of about $4.5 million on stipends at the two schools, including this year's budget. Of that, about $1.4 million came from federal School Improvement Grants.
Results of the effort are mixed.
- Test scores and the graduation rate at Rio Grande remain essentially unchanged.
- The graduation rate is 52.1 percent.
- Overall, 31.4 percent of students are proficient in reading, and
- 24.5 percent test at grade level in math.
The picture at Ernie Pyle is a bit rosier.
- While reading scores are flat, hovering around 33 percent proficiency,
- math proficiencies have doubled since the redesign began.
- In 2009, 17.1 percent tested at grade level in math. That number has steadily increased to
- its current rate of 34.4 percent.
- Also, Ernie Pyle now has twice as many students taking advanced math classes.
Although academic gains are uneven, officials said both Rio Grande and Ernie Pyle have seen changes in school culture - a crucial first step in the arduous process of revamping a school.
APS assistant superintendent Eddie Soto said improving school culture means creating a setting where teachers work together and where students take learning seriously.
Soto said you can see a difference just by spending time on campus, where students are in class rather than wandering hallways.
Officials point to several reasons for differences in success at Rio Grande and Ernie Pyle.
- Ernie Pyle has had steady leadership throughout the redesign, while Rio Grande has had four principals and a scheduling crisis.
- The school's master student schedule was deleted in fall 2010, meaning many students went for weeks without a solid class schedule.
"Rio had a catastrophe, and that was supposed to be the first year of the structures put in place," said Yvonne Garcia, who is in her second year as principal of the high school. "That was very frustrating for everyone."
Several aspects of the redesign deal with student schedules, aiming to give students more consistent time with an adviser and ensuring that clusters of teachers have students in common.
The goal is to make sure every student is known well by a caring adult, who has them for multiple classes or as an adviser. Garcia said this is the first year that smaller "academies" of students are really in place.
Still, there are some encouraging signs. Garcia said academic expectations at Rio Grande are higher.
- "The increase of level of rigor in reading and writing that students are doing has increased," Garcia said, adding that she has seen that change just since she started last year.
Soto said one of the most promising - but hardest to measure - impacts is the change in school culture.
- "We've created professional cultures that are really beginning to make some significant inroads," he said, emphasizing that teachers are working together and promoting academic seriousness for students.
Soto also said changing a school can take a long time, and plans can be adjusted as necessary. But he said over time, cultural shifts will translate to academic gains.
- "I think any large-scale, meta-change that you want to conduct takes time, and we have to analyze it year in and year out," Soto said. "We say to transform a school takes about three to five years, but now we're thinking maybe it takes five to seven."
The changes have led to different teaching styles.
"When you signed the commitment letter and received the design differential, you entered a school where your instructional strategies are based on collaborative effort with your peers," said Albuquerque Teachers Federation President Ellen Bernstein. "And you're saying, 'At this school, I may change the way I teach, based on the influence of my peers, and I'm doing that openly and purposefully.'
"To teach at Rio or Ernie Pyle ... is to say 'I agree that I'm going to teach according to this design, not according to my personal way of teaching."
Arciniega agrees a cultural shift is happening. The senior was taking advantage of after-school tutoring time recently, working at a computer in the library.
She goes there every day and appreciates the help from teachers. "Sometimes we don't have parents that know what we're learning," she said. "It's helping me to pass my classes, because I'm here in tutoring."
Elsewhere in the library, a geometry teacher helped students with math, and an honors student helped with algebra at another table.
Judy Stewart Vidal, Rio Grande instructional coach, oversees tutoring. When students come into the library, she ambushes them with friendliness, asking if they need tutoring help or are just there for a place to study.
Technically, all students with a "D" or "F" grade are supposed to come to tutoring. Stewart Vidal is the first to admit they aren't all there.
"Do they all come? No. And do we have the manpower to pursue them all? No," she said.
But she said the number of students participating has steadily increased, and she hopes with stable leadership, the redesign effort will start to yield more concrete results.
"Obviously, all the change of leadership was problematic, because you need continuity," she said.
Ernie Pyle, which has benefited from steady leadership, will now also have to contend with change.
Within the past month, former principal James Lujan became an assistant superintendent in Santa Fe. The new principal is Gene Saavedra, who previously headed La Mesa Elementary.
Lujan said the cultural changes at Ernie Pyle have been profound, and that such turnarounds should be tried nationwide.
He emphasized that part of what has made the redesign effective at Ernie Pyle is that teachers were involved in developing the plan and are invested in it.
"I wish this design could be applied to many schools across this country, if not all schools," he said. "Just because it has your name on it, your feel, your philosophy and your passion - why you're an educator."
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ABQ/ OPINION: High-Stakes Testing Still Favors Whites
By Tony Watkins [Member, Families United for Education
ABQ Jurnal
January 2, 2013
Esther Cepeda's article in the Dec. 17 issue of the Albuquerque Journal, "Ethnic Stereotypes Don't Aid Literacy" calls attention to the important facts that weak attempts at multicultural education can tokenize students of color, and that all students can benefit from learning cross-culturally, but her critique of Motoko Rich's recent New York Times article misses a deeper point.
In the Dec. 4 article "For Young Latino Readers, an Image is Missing" Rich demonstrates that the content of the new national common core standards is still skewed heavily toward a white, Eurocentric perspective. This is profoundly disturbing given that we have had data on the education gap between white students and students of color for decades, and the recent news that Albuquerque Public Schools is poised to invest millions of dollars in a new computer system so it can begin testing students in the new standards.
Not only will the content be unlikely to resonate with the majority of our students, but the fact that the test will be administered on a computer will pose an additional barrier to many.
To compound the problem, the stakes of high-stakes testing are growing increasingly higher. Students must now pass the Standards Based Assessment in order to graduate.
Without a critical analysis of this situation and collective action, we are at-risk of perpetuating or exacerbating the education gap for another generation.
Thank goodness for local initiatives that are advocating for a different paradigm. I am thinking of the New Mexico Education Equity Alliance which recently dramatized the connection between standardized testing and the eugenics and human capital movements while honoring 23 educators who teach from a social justice perspective in spite of the pressures to "teach to the test."
I am thinking of the Learning Alliance of New Mexico which recently convened a community forum to discuss the current state of standardized testing and brainstorm alternative assessments.
I am thinking of Families United for Education which successfully wrote and advocated for a family engagement policy for Albuquerque Public Schools that calls for utilizing the histories and cultures of our families as a foundation for education.
And I am thinking of the APS Cultural Proficiency Leadership Team which has worked for three years to develop curriculum on the root causes of the education gap, but which is struggling to survive after losing key leaders to retirement just as the initiative was scheduled to roll out to schools.
On Jan. 10 at 6 p.m. there is an opportunity for the aforementioned collective action. Families United for Education will be hosting a candidates forum in anticipation of the Feb. 5 APS board election at the Ladera Golf Course (3401 Ladera Dr. NW) in the new District 5.
The intent of the forum is to identify the candidates who will be most likely to carry an agenda forward that would embrace family engagement, cultivate community partnerships, and advocate for more inclusive, respectful and responsive educational experiences for all of our children.
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New York NY/ Educators Debate Academic Merits of Free Online Courses
By Melissa Korn and Jennifer Levitz
Wall Street Journal
January 1, 2013
As millions flirt with free college-level courses online, educators are still debating their academic merits.
Elite schools allow their professors to offer courses on Coursera, Udacity and edX, but so far, most aren't willing to award students credit for those classes, which suggest that they're not fully endorsing the pedagogy quite yet.
While the most sophisticated MOOCs-massive open online courses-go beyond a video lecture, some academics still question the quality of additional content such as quizzes and group discussions.
- MOOC homework assignments are often different from those required in their classroom counterparts.
- For example, exams may require less analytical thinking-and some users say their online classmates lack the knowledge to contribute meaningfully to conversations.
- Using a peer-review model to grade essays, as Coursera has done, exposes similar issues.
And only a fraction of students-under 10% in most classes-makes it all the way through those massive online courses. That's proof, some say, that MOOCs aren't acceptable replacements for traditional classes.
"There's a huge disconnect between the massive enthusiasm...and evidence of serious students who actually complete these courses," said Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.
For their part, MOOC providers say that many students pick and choose lessons that interest them, and never have the intention of working all the way through the multiweek courses. However, they say they are trying to improve retention rates. That's important not just for their reputations but also for their proposed revenue plans, as many are banking on selling certificates of completion or earning money by matching successful students with employers.
Ms. Schneider-who took a Princeton University world history class through Coursera-said the most likely path for MOOCs is probably to establish them as general education classes at community colleges and other broad-access universities. But that is also the most dangerous, in her opinion because that would target a population best helped by small, personalized classes. "If you go down that path, it will be in complete defiance of everything we know about helping vulnerable students persist and succeed in college," she said.
In November, edX announced a partnership with the Gates Foundation linking students at Massachusetts-based Bunker Hill and MassBay community colleges with courses taught by faculty from nearby Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Students at those community colleges will be able to earn credit by enrolling in certain classes that are taught via MOOCs, and supplemented with classroom instruction.
Administrators at some big schools are warming to MOOCs as a way to complement traditional instruction. One experiment underway at San Jose State University could help prove MOOCs' value in augmenting classroom lessons, said Ping Hsu, interim dean at the university's College of Engineering.
This fall, students in its Circuits course-which 40% of students usually have to retake-were assigned lectures from edX's course on the same topic, taught by an MIT professor. In-person meetings were spent doing lab projects, a switch that educators call "flipping the classroom."
On the first big test, the 84 San Jose State students beat last year's average score. The class averaged a correct-answer rate of 70% on a midterm this fall well above the typical 50% score from years past.
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Washington DC/ OPINION: Consensus on Schools is Crucial
By Walt Gardner [Gardner taught for 28 years in the Los Angeles Unified School District and was a lecturer in the UCLA Graduate School of Education]
Education Week [Edweek.org]
December 31, 2012
The beginning of the new year is a propitious time to ask a direct question about public schools: Just what do we want them to do? Without a clear vision, the contentious debate over their future will never end.
I was reminded of this after reading an essay by Louis Menard in The New Yorker ("Today's Assignment,"Dec. 17). Although the subject of his piece was homework, Menard made a larger point. He explained that countries with the most successful schools are characterized by agreement about the role of their schools. He cited Finland and South Korea as prime examples. But there are others as well.
If Menard is right - and I think he is - then the outlook for schools in the U.S. is bleak. Unlike other countries, the U.S. can't find common ground on what schools should be doing.
- For example, some taxpayers want back-to-basics schools; others want schools that emphasize creative thinking.
- Some want teacher-centered classrooms; others want classrooms where students study what interests them.
As Menard wrote: "Americans have an egalitarian approach to inequality: they want everyone to have an equal chance to become better-off than everyone else. By and large, for most people school is the mechanism for achieving this."
But even this conclusion is controversial. If all students were given an equal opportunity to achieve, I doubt that we would accept unequal outcomes.
In other words, we want it both ways. The achievement gap is a case in point. No matter what we do to provide equity, we are not satisfied when differences exist between ethnic groups. This leads to heated exchanges over causes and remedies. Other countries have no such problem, probably because they are far more homogeneous than the U.S. Our multicultural society, which is a great asset, can be a huge liability because it makes it extremely difficult to develop a consensus. Others countries also do not have the huge disparities in income that exist here.
As Menard explained: affluent parents are most hostile to homework because they want their children to spend their after-school time taking violin lessons, while less affluent parents support homework as a way of keeping their children off the streets.
Public schools have a vital role to play in the new world economy. Yet they won't improve unless we can first agree on what they should look like.
About the only thing everyone wants are safe schools, as the Sandy Hook carnage made clear. But it will take more than that to assure their continuation in the years ahead.
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Washington DC/ COLUMN: Robbed
By Brock Cohen
Valerie Strauss [The Answer Sheet daily columnist]
Washington Post
January 2, 2013
To start off the new year, here's a personal look at the problems that face public education from Brock Cohen, a teacher and student advocate in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Cohen believes that school reform begins with social justice and that school reformers everywhere have to stop trivializing the role that poverty plays in student achievement. His students were featured in this NPR piece.
I stared into the now unlocked and vacant steel filing cabinet drawer that formerly contained three valuable tools of my trade as a high school English-Hanguage Arts and Humanities teacher: an LCD projector, an Elmo projector, and a Macbook Pro - all resources that I had fully incorporated into my daily instruction. Now they were gone. My classroom had been robbed.
After reporting the incident, I was informed that the perpetrator likely acquired a duplicate key; entered through my rain-warped, ill-fitting bungalow door; and simply unlocked the console. No matter that I was obsessive about securing my belongings each night: What I foolishly assumed was an impregnable hunk of steel in the corner of my class was, in reality, a delicate turn of the wrist away from its contents becoming Craig's List fodder.
The lost resources, while inconvenient, aren't my biggest concern. Every day, teachers in underfunded schools make due with inadequate materials. Moreover, I can always write another grant in hopes of replacing at least one of the pieces - a tactic I had used to acquire both the MacBook and Elmo in the first place.
What really troubles me is that the key is still out there, and it's in the wrong hands. It's unsettling when I consider the multitude of items to which this individual might gain access (and, on a broader scale, the kinds of horrors that could come about if the NRA and its power brokers are successful in their campaign to arm school staff and faculty with firearms that can be stolen as easily as a MacBook).
I begin with this anecdote not to garner sympathy or to show how naïve I was, but to underscore something that occurred to me as stared down into that empty cabinet drawer - and that has gnawed at my conscience ever since. Sometimes, we take for granted the enormous power of keys.
Moments before discovering that my room had been robbed, I had ambled into my bungalow an hour earlier than normal, sleep-deprived and yet rejuvenated. With my first semester as a doctoral student finally behind me, I was buoyed by the thought of being able to fully immerse myself in teaching again. It wasn't so much that I had been consciously holding back, but the four-hour nights of sleep had piled up. As a result, there were too many moments when I simply could not be the teacher I wanted to be.
This information will likely come as a surprise to many of my current students (if they end up reading this). The truth is, even on half a tank, I'm still a ball of unbridled energy. I attribute this to one of the many paradoxes of teaching: Working with so many teenagers each day is, on the one hand, physically and emotionally taxing; at the same time, being around young people has always fueled me with a sense of urgency that serves as a catalyst for my high-energy teaching style. This is not to imply that I'm some paragon of righteousness: I challenge any rational adult with half a conscience to share a classroom filled with 40-some-odd teenage faces and not feel a sense of moral obligation.
Even back when I was an overmatched, self-doubting first-year teacher (and there are still those moments when I feel like that same fumbling neophyte), I was no less inspired by the reality that my students were relying on my colleagues and me to somehow fill the gaps punctured by an array of adverse social, institutional, and environmental factors that were, in reality, beyond our control. It's completely irrational to believe that a collection of even the most gifted educators can expunge years of domestic strife and ill-fated legislation. And yet, we never lacked for trying. (My sense is that most teachers would probably agree that this on-the-job denial of harsh external realities is an occupational prerequisite.)
I was also quick to learn that leading with the heart can sometimes compensate for limitations in one's pedagogical expertise. Not that this will come as a staggering revelation, but it bears repeating that students are far more open to learning when they feel as though the keys to their well-being have been conferred to someone who they deem as sincere and trustworthy.
Still, the process takes time, and not everyone buys in. Because they are burdened by what education scholar David C. Berliner refers to as "out-of-school factors" that "unquestionably affect achievement," (and that occasionally rattle my faith in humanity), some students suffer severe deficits in what, for social cognitive theorists, is the troika of motivation: self-efficacy, self-regulation, and goal-orientation. Without these components, successful learning outcomes are extremely difficult for anyone to achieve.
Absent a catalyst to elevate their value of the task at hand, these students remove themselves emotionally and intellectually from their learning environment in an ongoing attempt to run out the clock until they're no longer obligated to legally attend school each day. By doing so, they refuse to give either of us a fighting chance and instead continue down a path that leads them further away from stability. In what at first manifests itself as apathy cycles into ineptitude: even if they eventually decide to make academics relevant to their lives, their weeks, months, or years of disconnection have already set them far below grade level.
These are the slip-through-the-cracks kids that have yet to be saved by a decade of high-stakes assessments and lofty platitudes. Their wayward momentum is simply guiding them down the path that has long-since been carved out by generational poverty and the clown car of charlatans that refuse to acknowledge it as the primary antecedent to academic deficiencies. These are the kids who have seldom (if ever) read an entire book, have likely never been read to, and who often return to households that are light on reading materials or stable adult guidance but infused with the perpetual din of raised voices, junk TV babble, and even spasms of violence.
To illustrate this point, I give you the case of one of the novels I assigned to my ninth-graders this past semester, The Catcher in the Rye. Because many of my students are reluctant readers (or are reading well below grade level), I attempt to scaffold their literary experience with an assortment of multi-sensory activities. This process includes class discussions that touch upon the story's themes and issues; dramatic readings by myself; staged re-enactments performed by small groups of students; and writing tasks that keep them mindful of essential story elements. All the while, I keep things lively and facilitate movement whenever possible.
By the time we reached the book's midpoint, most of my students were reading autonomously and analytically. This was no small feat. Because my students are immersed in a culture of academic mediocrity that has been foisted upon them from all angles, there is considerable social risk in coming to class each day with something to say about why Holden Caulfield is so terrified of change, or why red is such a predominant motif. Many of them did, and I'm proud of them for it.
Despite the gratification of witnessing so many of my students evolve into active, avid readers, I was nonetheless brought back down to earth by the sobering social realities with which they must contend each day.
Right before holiday recess, for instance, one student flagged me down in the quad, his copy of Catcher in hand, and begged me to let him keep the book over break so that he had something to read when he was bored. When I asked if he'd already completed the book, he responded that he had, but that the only reading materials in his home were car magazines.
In contrast, several weeks earlier, another student refused to check out the novel altogether, attributing her snub to a hatred of reading. As an alternative to Catcher, I presented her with a young adult reading list, which included popular titles like Speak and Cirque Du Freak, along with a brief description for each. She nodded politely, then, at the end of class, discretely deposited the list in the trash. To my knowledge, she hasn't read a word of text since entering my class last August. Even more disconcerting was her chilling rationale for why reading is unnecessary: "Mister, no offense, but reading's for white people."
And yet another student verbalized what has become a common refrain throughout my years of teaching. Her decision to stop reading Catcher had little to do with the story itself but was instead a product of her inability to sustain focus for more than a few sentences at a time (a common symptom of an overstressed short-term memory). Despite conveying to her some of the reading strategies that I've used to assuage my own ADHD, she countered that her home was too noisy for reading. She never made it through the first chapter.
While these situations are obviously not restricted to low-income households, the triadic correlation among poverty, repeated environmental stress, and learning struggles is irrefutable. It is a reality reflected in reams of peer-reviewed empirical studies and in the words of expert practitioners like Dr. Vincent J. Felitti, the director of the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study at Kaiser Permanente, who cautions, "What happens in childhood, like a child's footprint in wet cement, leaves its mark forever." It is also a reality that classroom teachers struggle to address every day.
These students are the children left behind by No Child Left Behind and other failed social experiments that purport to elevate the kids of disadvantaged families. In actuality, such legislative sleights of hand saddle low-income and high-needs kids with the inferior learning experiences that are largely constituted around feeding the beast of for-profit testing and textbook companies, rather than in creating lifelong learners, innovators, and leaders.
If bridging the achievement gap truly mattered to our nation's policy makers, why would they continually ignore research that details the ways in which children learn, why would they insist on turning poor kids into bubble-filling automatons, and why would I only have one balky PC in a classroom brimming with 47 high school students?
Giving voice to a growing dissatisfaction with the once-vaunted school reform movement spearheaded by Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Geoffrey Canada, and a host of others, Louis Menand of The New Yorker writes, "The educational system is supposed to be an engine of opportunity and social readjustment, but in some ways it operates as a perpetuator of the status quo."
Which is further evidence that we've let the keys fall into the wrong hands.
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