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Clovis/ COLUMN: Starting New School Presents Unique Challenges
By Cindy Kleyn-Kennedy [Instructional technology coordinator for the Clovis Municipal Schools, monthly columnist]
Clovis News Journal
January 2, 2012
Thinking of the year-end and new beginnings, there is increasing anticipation about the extensive, ongoing construction taking place throughout our school district.
- The Arts Academy at Bella Vista is now complete. Ground is being prepped for the new James Bickley Elementary school building.
- The new Lockwood Elementary school building is well under way and will be ready for students in August 2013.
- Great progress is being made on the brand new middle school, named for the old, W.D. Gattis Middle School, located north of town, straight out Thornton Street. It, too, will be ready for students in August 2013. This new middle school will allow us to adjust our grade configuration to align with a true middle school model, containing sixth, seventh, and eighth grades.
That means that all of our sixth-grade classrooms will move to one of three middle schools: Marshall, Yucca or W. D. Gattis next year.
Starting a brand new school, completely from scratch, presents a particularly unique set of challenges. Recently, the principal of the new middle school, Tandee Delk, shared an update. Faced with the unique demands, there is no typical day, not yet anyway. In fact, every day is a brand new adventure, including tasks as diverse as designing teaching curriculum in accordance with the Literacy Design Collaborative, to selecting colors for tile and grout, to making lists of all the materials and resources needed for school.
- "It's been a truly unique experience to be involved with every single aspect of starting a new school."
This process involves having to function not only as a "big picture" type of person, but also as a very detail-oriented individual. When asked what the status was of the hiring of staff, Delk responded,
- "About 70 percent of our team has been hired, and the process will be ongoing through the spring semester.
Continuing the already established procedure of working closely with the other two middle school principals, Jay Brady of Marshall and Loren Hill of Yucca, this tradition will continue, to ensure consistently high standards of expectation and excellence for all of our middle school students.
- "It's exciting to implement a true middle school design with teaming throughout. There's a great deal of research now that shows the importance of including sixth graders with seventh and eighth because of the cognitive, physical, emotional and intellectual development. We want a very academically rich, safe and secure learning environment for our students. It is really a humbling honor to be part of the process of rolling out this new school."
The planning is extremely thorough and will continue through the spring and summer. Delk shared her favorite quote from Max Lucado, "Don't measure the size of the mountain; talk to the one who can move it."
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Detroit MI/ Compuware, United Way Aim to Better Early Child Literacy
Education Week [Edweek.org]
Detroit Free Press Report
January 1, 2013
DMC Sinai Grace Hospital, software company Compuware Corp. and students from Detroit's College for Creative Studies are collaborating on a child literacy program that aims to get parents to read to their children for at least 15 minutes per day.
For some time, the parents of new children born at the Detroit hospital have been receiving a free children's book a month through the United Way for Southeastern Michigan's Early Literacy Initiative. The program aims to help children from poor families overcome a common education skills gap.
Last fall, the United Way turned to Compuware for help in tracking the families' participation in the program, the Detroit Free Press reported (http://on.freep.com/YM2HSp).
The software company paired its concept developers with a dozen students from the college for a 15-week process of conceiving and designing an Internet and smartphone-based application to measure and report on the reading.
The finished product is due out by early spring and will offer encouragement and added incentives for the parents and children such as child-rearing tips and video game-like "badges" for each completed book.
Organizers say the goal is to engrain a reading habit in each child.
"This is a really important tool to help our kids be kindergarten-ready," said Amanda Itliong, family literacy manager for the United Way. "You think, 'Oh, I'll send my kid off to preschool and then they'll be ready for kindergarten.' But that's not enough. You have to start these habits in the home from Day 1."
The students got class credit for the work, and some are being considered for job openings once they graduate, according to Compuware.
"A lot of these things I didn't learn until after I left school," said Blake Almstead, a Compuware creative director and adjunct professor at the college.
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New York NY/ Deferring Six Figures on Wall Street for Teacher's Salary
By Scott Eidler
The New York Times
January 2, 2012
Four years after the financial crisis, Wall Street hiring has remained weak, and many college graduates have searched for jobs and even careers in other fields. In the last several years, hundreds of such would-be finance professionals and management consultants have taken their high-powered ambitions and spreadsheet modeling skills to the classroom.
Teach for America, the 22-year-old nonprofit organization that recruits high-achieving college graduates to teach in some of the nation's poorest schools for two years, in particular has garnered renewed interest among the business-oriented set.
- Teach for America says that its 2012 class contained about 400 recent graduates with a major in business or economics.
- Of those with professional experience, about 175 worked in finance.
Those participants include Zachary Dearing, 23, a recent graduate of M.I.T. Two summers ago, he was an intern at McKinsey & Company, and the year before, Goldman Sachs.
Yet, he was one of 21 teachers in this year's class who had deferred job offers from a Wall Street bank, a management consulting firm or another corporate partner to join Teach for America.
- "If somebody had told me I was going to be a high school math teacher in Dallas, Texas, when I entered college, I'd be like, 'No, there's no chance of that being true,' " said Mr. Dearing, who has deferred an offer from McKinsey. The teaching skills easily translate to office environments, he said. "I'm effectively the leader, every day, for 46 minutes, in front of seven different groups," Mr. Dearing said.
Teach for America also became a sought-after option for students like Eric Rodriguez, who was a senior at Harvard when the financial crisis hit. Mr. Rodriguez had completed two internships at Lehman Brothers and was fully expecting to work at the firm after he graduated. But as he started his senior year in September 2008, Lehman Brothers collapsed and Wall Street was in a free fall.
But that fall, Teach for America began its to woo him to join its ranks.
- "At Harvard, they harass you: 'I'm going to be at this place, come meet me,' " he said. "It wasn't until I was desperate that I said 'I'll check this out and speak to this person.' " In 2009, Mr. Rodriguez joined Teach for America and taught in an elementary school in San Francisco for two years. Afterward, he landed a job at Facebook in its user operations department.
At least a dozen other teaching programs also compete to attract talented college graduates and professionals.
- NYC Teaching Fellows, a 12-year-old program that is run by the city's education department, said that nearly 7 percent of its applicants in 2012 were business majors. It is similarly selective and had nearly 12,000 applicants last year for about 1,400 spots, mostly for positions in Brooklyn and the Bronx.
- Other publicly and privately run teaching enterprises, like Chicago Teaching Fellows and City Year, a one-year service program, attract applicants from across the country. But among most graduates, Teach for America holds a higher profile, said Monica Wilson, acting co-director of Dartmouth College's office of career services.
"As Teach for America has been around longer and hired very smart people, it's gotten even better at how they recruit students, while the financial services industry has slowed down and experienced negative publicity in the media," Ms. Wilson said. Many regard earning a spot in Teach for America a "badge of success."
Teach for America in particular said that its applicant pool had swelled during the recession and lackluster recovery. More than 48,000 applied for 5,800 spots in 2012, nearly twice as many as those who had sought positions for the 2008 class.
The relationship between the teachers in the program and those outside the program has often been tense. Critics of the Teach for America program say teachers, in general, aren't at their best until they've been working for at least five years.
Teach for America contends that many of its teachers last beyond the required two years. Of its 28,000 alumni, two-thirds remain in education roles, including as principals and superintendents (about half of those educators are in classroom settings).
- "It wouldn't have the same appeal if it were for a longer period of time," said Kaitlin Gastrock, a spokeswoman for Teach for America. "Two years is a reasonable ask to make of folks who are just finishing up their college experience."
Teach for America participants receive the same starting salary as first-year teachers in their districts, which is about $25,500 to $51,000 a year. That pales in comparisons to the six-figure salary and bonus structures that many elite college graduates can expect in finance.
The program fully expects that it will not keep all of its recruits. Mr. Dearing, for one, said he intended to work at McKinsey after his commitment was over. But the teaching program could lead to a career in public service one day, he said.
In many ways Teach for America was modeled on the success of top Wall Street firms, which seek to recruit the best and the brightest college graduates. In her 2001 memoir, the program's founder, Wendy Kopp, wrote that she hoped to both improve the stature of the profession and give the recruitment process a much-needed jolt. In the book, she said she envisioned creating "a teachers corps that would recruit as aggressively as the investment banks and management consulting firms that were still swarming all over campus."
Indeed, some of Teach for America's outreach is taken straight from Wall Street's recruiting book. On campuses, career advisers and applicants say, the program's presence is large, with ambassadors compiling lists of impressive candidates from the recommendations of professors, academic advisers and alumni. Now, the number of teachers who joined this year from Ivy League schools is nearly 50 percent higher than it was in 2008.
- "They take the time to visit campus, to get to know our students, our student groups, where and when they should present," said Patricia Rose, director of career services at the University of Pennsylvania. "Most of the other people who use this model are for-profit organizations."
The previous internships in finance have proved to be effective teaching aids for some of the participants. Ross Peyser, a 2011 graduate of Cornell and a second-year teacher in New Orleans, was once an intern at Oliver Wyman, a financial services consulting firm. As a teacher, he still plays the role of data analyst, creating Excel spreadsheets to diagnose his students' learning needs.
At the end of day, he administers a five-question quiz to students to assess who understood the lesson. When class is over, he performs exhaustive data pulls in Excel, just as he did as a finance intern.
"I had a stronger basis to do my data analysis compared to all the other teachers in my school," Mr. Peyser said. "It came more naturally just based on that one summer in finance."
And more important, he and others do regard the program as one that provides essential job skills.
"T.F.A. is a really strong name," he said. "It seems as if going to work for McKinsey or something like that; they hold the same value."
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