ABQ/ State Public Education Commission Will Re-Do Vote on 2 Charter School Renewals
By Hailey Heinz
ABQ Journal Staff Writer
January 5, 2013
The state Public Education Commission is planning to re-do votes on two charter school renewals, after the voting was held one day early without public notice.
The decision to take the votes a day before they were scheduled was made with the OK of an assistant attorney general.
Martin Esquivel, an Albuquerque school board member and attorney who specializes in open government issues, said the commission violated the state Open Meetings Act and that holding a re-vote is not enough.
The Public Education Department referred questions to the Attorney General's Office, whose spokesman, Phil Sisneros, said the office cannot comment extensively because of threatened litigation, but he did give a written statement. "We maintain that after careful consideration, we determined that the right thing to do was to cure the alleged violation at the next board meeting," he said.
Commission Chairwoman Carolyn Shearman offered a nearly identical statement, also citing threatened litigation.
The commission will re-do its votes to renew the charters of North Valley Academy and Horizon Academy West.
Esquivel said the attorney general should take a stronger stand on the issue. He said that office, which is charged with enforcing the Open Meetings Act, should make it clear the act was violated, and the commission should have to start from scratch in considering the two charter renewals.
Esquivel said that, according to the Open Meetings Act, public boards have 15 days to "cure" or fix a violation. Otherwise, actions become null and void.
"You can't just say, 'Oh we screwed up, we'll fix it next time,' " he said. "There has to be some declaration that what happened at the last meeting is null and void."
Esquivel became involved in the case because he represents a former head of North Valley Academy, and he had hoped to comment on the charter's renewal. The vote was scheduled for Dec. 14 but was held on Dec. 13 instead.
According to minutes from the Dec. 13 meeting, then-commission chairman Andrew Garrison asked Assistant Attorney General Mark Reynolds whether the commission could legally move up the two votes. Reynolds is counsel for the commission.
Garrison asked what would happen if a member of the public showed up Friday, wishing to comment on the charters that had already been renewed. Reynolds told him there would be no legal problem. According to the minutes, Reynolds said: "Mr. Chair, I have absolutely no problem with that. That much is clear. I have much more heartburn with not hearing them today, rather than tomorrow. Changing around like this, there's absolutely no problem at all with that."
Sisneros would not make Reynolds available for an interview.
Esquivel said Reynolds' role in the decision makes the matter even more serious.
"I've seen many public bodies make mistakes without legal counsel," Esquivel said. "This one is vastly different, given that an attorney from the AG's office was giving the PEC the green light to proceed."
The next commission meeting is set for Feb. 1, and the agenda has not been finalized.
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Santa Fe/ SFHS Hopes for New Auditorium
By T. S. Last
ABQ Journal Staff Writer
January 5, 2013
Some Santa Fe High School teachers and students are hoping for a new auditorium, one that could bring bigger audiences and provide a more usable stage.
Their dream comes at a time when the school district is mulling reform in the secondary schools, and voters will decide on a general obligation bond question on Feb. 5 asking approval for $130 million in capital outlay projects within the school district.
With all that on the district's plate, Marilyn Barnes, choir director at SFHS, said that she and other school leaders are worried that performing arts might get "swept under the rug."
She was among a quartet of performing arts supporters who spoke in favor of building a new auditorium at Santa Fe High at last month's school board meeting.
- "I believe a thriving program like this should have an auditorium on campus," said Barnes, who later added that more than 250 students are involved in performing arts programs within the public schools. "This would allow bigger audiences and an enhanced community building and awareness for the arts."
Currently, big events, such as a recent holiday performance that involved the choir and band, have to be held at venues that can accommodate not only the students on stage, but also the audience.
Barnes said an on-campus auditorium would:
- alleviate a safety concern of sending students and their supporters to fight traffic downtown, locate parking spots and walk long distances to see a nighttime performance.
- It would also give students adequate opportunity to rehearse prior to performances, she said.
Barnes said performances are affected by the quality of the acoustics and aesthetics of the performance space.
- "Our students and audiences aren't getting the full experience that a carefully designed auditorium could offer," she said.
Barnes also mentioned a growing interest in dance, saying the stage at SFHS is oddly configured and too small to accommodate dance groups.
She emphasized that performing arts can have a positive impact on students, building character and discipline while forging friendships with others with common interests.
- "Students prove that the arts develop critical thinking skills and emotional awareness. While the world is desensitizing our children, let's give them the tools to develop their humanity," she said.
Barnes said a new auditorium would help performing arts to prosper.
- "We can grow a culture of artistic creativity among our students beyond our wildest dreams by investing in the arts," she said. "The basketball players get a gym, so we're really looking forward to a beautiful performance space."
The president of the band's booster club, an SFHS student and a theatrics arts teacher also spoke for a new auditorium.
The booster club president said a new auditorium would create another performance venue that could be used by other groups in town.
A lot of the booster club's fundraising efforts, she added, are directed toward paying for venues to hold big events such as the holiday performance, which was held at St. Francis Auditorium.
"St. Francis is beautiful, but it came with a large cost," she said.
With a new auditorium, the school's band could use money it generates to pay for uniforms, equipment and clinicians, she said.
- Danny Romero, a sophomore studying musical theater at SFHS, simply asked the board to build a newer and bigger auditorium, saying it would help choir, band and theater students and would draw larger audiences.
- Reed Meschefske, who heads the theatrical arts program at SFHS, said the school's 128-seat auditorium hosted 15 public performances since May 15 and seven times people had to be turned away for lack of room.
Meschefske said the auditorium is suitable for his relatively small group of students, but inadequate by almost any other measure. In a community that thrives on the arts, he said, the lack of a suitable auditorium was an "embarrassment."
- "A classroom is for learning," he said. "A structure for experimentation and projects, which is what my classroom essentially is, is perfect for what our students need. However, an auditorium represents this district's commitment to both art and the sharing of it with the students, community and the staff. We need this auditorium."
At an earlier meeting, school board members discussed ideas for secondary school reform that would expand options for students.
The district is developing surveys to be sent to parents and planning a series of public forums to obtain feedback on secondary school reform. While no schedule for the public forums has been released, they are planned to begin this month and continue into February.
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ABQ/ EDITORIAL: APS Reform Delivers Weak Bottom Line
ABQ Journal
January 5, 2013
Albuquerque Public Schools says there are some encouraging signs three school years and $4.5 million into its plan to overhaul historically under-performing Rio Grande High and Ernie Pyle Middle schools.
Unfortunately, the progress is mostly anecdotal: better learning culture, kids in class more, less disruption and more help for struggling students. Unfortunately, the hard data don't reflect much in the way of progress.
Rio Grande's test scores and graduation rate remain abysmal - 31.4 percent of students are proficient in reading, 24.5 percent test at grade level in math, the graduation rate is 52.1 percent.
Ditto for Ernie Pyle's reading scores: around 33 percent of students are proficient. The one bright spot is better but still awful math scores: up from 17.1 percent of students testing at grade level to 34.4 percent.
Parents, taxpayers, teachers and especially students deserve better.
The extra investment involves paying teachers - who agree to extra collaboration, training and work outside their normal school day and a more open style of teaching - $5,000 annual stipends. Yet results are dependent on buy-in from all involved. Rio Grande instructional coach Judy Stewart Vidal admits when it comes to the students required to attend tutoring, "Do they all come? No. And do we have the manpower to pursue them all? No."
Yet APS' approach going forward can't be the education establishment's fall-back position of throwing more money at a problem and hoping for the best. If Rio Grande shows nothing else, it's that if you build it, they don't all come.
Rio Grande officials are quick to blame inconsistent leadership (four principals) and a class-scheduling crisis for less-than-stellar progress. At best, that's an argument to give it more time because many school turnarounds really revolve around a special principal. But the results also show that high school and even middle school may be too late for many students, and make a strong case for the early intervention programs pushed by Gov. Susana Martinez aimed at third-grade literacy.
APS assistant superintendent Eddie Soto says "any large-scale, meta-change that you want to conduct takes time, and we have to analyze it year in and year out." He's already upped the estimate of time needed to register improvement from "three to five years" to "five to seven."
Perhaps, and APS deserves credit for making an effort. But continued reforms that replicate best practices that deliver are vital to parents, taxpayers, teachers and students - that is, if APS is going to get past improving a culture and finally deliver improved student performance.
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ABQ/ EDITORIAL: Keep Improving Bid Process
ABQ Journal
January 7, 2013
Albuquerque Public Schools has taken steps to improve its bidding rules in response to criticism after a construction contract for a building at Sandia High School was awarded to the highest bidder last fall.
Changes were needed, but will these be enough for top New Mexico construction companies to feel the playing field has been leveled and compete for future projects?
APS uses a qualification-based bidding process that awards contracts not just on price but also on other subjective factors, like a contractor's past performance. That gives the district some needed flexibility in not just taking the lowest bid and then having the final cost rise as shoddy work has to be addressed. Value and good work for taxpayers' money is the goal.
Under the new rules, APS bumped up the weight for price to 50 percent - 60 percent would have been even better - instead of just 40 percent. Among other changes, categories will become more objective by including a rating scale in some cases and APS set a 30-page limit for bids with a penalty for those who exceed it.
These are positive steps toward fixing the process, but the district should bring industry players in and listen to their concerns before considering this work to be complete. The public is better off if more companies compete for public contracts, and more will go to the trouble and expense to compete if they are convinced their bids are getting a fair shake.
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Santa Fe/ COLUMN: Nikhil Goyal - Savvy Teen Offers Recipe for Reform
By Robert Nott [Learning Curve columnist]
The New Mexican
January 06, 2013
"School is really screwed up," 17-year-old Syosset High School senior Nikhil Goyal writes in his recently published book, One Size Does Not Fit All: A Student's Assessment of School, published by the Alternative Education Resource Organization in New York (where Syosset High School also is located).
Goyal's book, which details the author's firsthand observation of the public-school system and his ambitious ideas for school reform, already has garnered national media attention and praise.
I read the book over winter break (school resumes today) and encourage local educators, including school-board members and candidates, to read it. Since Santa Fe Public Schools Superintendent Joel Boyd is asking high school students to offer input on the district's planned high school reform model, students also should commit to reading Goyal's book. I imagine it would stimulate a lot of discussion in the classroom.
Much of Goyal's book offers seemingly simple but structurally gutsy ideas for reform - group kids in class by their talent and not their age; cut back or eliminate standardized testing; get rid of Race to the Top and whatever is left of No Child Left Behind; and incorporate both play and experimentation into the classroom to prepare students to adapt to a fast-changing world.
One chapter praises teachers, noting that we don't blame soldiers when a war goes badly, but rather place the responsibility and blame on their superiors. Goyal argues that we must do the same when it comes to accountability in the classroom. He opens critical fire on proposed teacher-evaluation systems that rely heavily on student test scores to rate teachers, and he notes that more than 60 percent of all American teachers hold down second jobs because they don't earn enough from teaching. (He makes some sound arguments against the policy of merit pay for teachers, however.)
He details his bold and exciting belief that it's time to drop our obsession with mastering the three R's - reading, writing and 'rithmetic - and divert that energy into the four C's: critical thinking, creative thinking, collaboration and communication. He then adds a fifth C: curiosity. While I love this idea, I think Goyal does make some broad assertions: "When kids are fully assimilated into kindergarten," he writes, "they quickly learn that teachers value the right answers rather than stimulating questions." Though this may be valid in some classrooms, my experience watching Santa Fe teachers interact with elementary students does not reflect this view.
Goyal includes an insightful and fun-to-read chapter on the problems facing India and China's public-school systems. He notes that they may not be faring quite as well as some educators and statisticians suggest and stresses that schools in those nations test their students to the point of mental and emotional exhaustion. He lauds Finland's much-touted public-school system but notes that it's tough to compare schools in that country - a parliamentary democracy (some label it socialist) with about 5.5 million citizens - to schools in the U.S.
What sticks with me the most is Goyal's persistent argument that we have to give students the opportunity to experiment with a combination of hands-on and minds-on learning techniques and let them fail - as long as they are making progress and remain creatively engaged. And he makes a good point that educators should start incorporating social media into the classroom, since that's a venue today's kids will use to connect, communicate and even land work.
"This book is not the end - it is a call to action," Goyal notes. That's a good way to look at it. He includes about 20 pages of notes and interview sources, and a bibliography that indicates he did his homework. You may not agree with all his suggestions, but Goyal has written a lively autopsy of our public-school system. Google "Education Revolution" to find out more about the Alternative Education Resource Organization and the book.
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ABQ/ OPINION: Let's Help New Mexicans Further Their Educations
By Jamie P. Merisotis [President and CEO, Lumina Foundation]
ABQ Journal
January 7, 2013
As New Mexico embarks on a new year, leaders from every corner of the state are contemplating what actions should be taken in 2013 to more effectively grow jobs, strengthen the economy and build for a better tomorrow. It's an interesting time to be sure, but a significant challenge threatens to block future progress.
Education attainment, or lack thereof, is the issue and it's poised to single-handedly decide New Mexico's economic future and whether New Mexicans will enjoy greater prosperity and a better quality of life. Here's why and some thoughts on what needs to be done.
When it comes to education beyond high school, New Mexico ranks a disappointing 41st in America. Only three out of every 10 adults hold at least an associate degree, and that's troubling when you consider that a study - by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce - found that 58 percent of jobs in New Mexico will require some form of postsecondary education or training by 2018.
The gap between where New Mexico is and where it needs to be is significant and that challenging reality requires state and local leaders to appreciate - and act upon - the critical connection that exists between economic prosperity and education beyond high school. Some still question that connection, but the Great Recession made the relationship painfully clear.
During the Great Recession of 2008-2010, four out of five jobs that were lost were held by Americans with a high school education or less. Sadly, this same group is still losing jobs during our so-called recovery that began in 2010.
By comparison, Americans with a bachelor's degree or above have been steadily gaining jobs - even during the recession - and have seen an increase of more than 2 million jobs during the recovery. That's good news for New Mexicans with degrees and high quality certificates, but significantly more of them are needed statewide.
Perhaps the clearest evidence of New Mexico's talent shortage comes from the fact that area employers cannot find enough people with the skills they need to fill all of their job openings. A scan of classified ads from around the state reveals that there are currently nearly 300 job openings in the fields of engineering, medical and technology alone. Those jobs are open today and if employers are unable to find the talent that they needed locally, they will look to fill those jobs elsewhere.
In the year ahead, state and local leaders must work together to find a way to supply the labor market with more people who have the knowledge and skills that are required. That certainly starts by more effectively preparing students for success beyond high school and by making college more affordable. But, it also requires a redesign of the educational institutions that provide for accelerated degree programs and greater opportunity for success among low-income students, first-generation students, racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, veterans and adults with some college, but no degree.
The work won't be easy, but strategic and targeted efforts can yield big results. For example, there are currently more than 277,000 adults (roughly 26 percent of the adult population) in New Mexico who started college but have never earned a degree. Many of these adults are only a few credit hours short of completion.
If state and local leaders create a pathway that allows just 20 percent of these people to complete their degrees, New Mexico would add an additional 55,400 degree holders to its ranks and help address the state's skills gap.
To address New Mexico's education attainment challenge, a new dialogue (and an increased sense of urgency) between policymakers and corporate, civic, educational and philanthropic leaders is needed. We applaud those organizations already working together to address this issue and as the nation's largest private foundation focused on graduating more Americans from college, we stand ready to assist in the effort.
Every state across America is grappling with the challenge of how to grow jobs, investment and individual opportunity. The challenge here is no different. To succeed, New Mexico desperately needs more people with postsecondary credentials and degrees.
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Sacramento CA/ School Facilities Improve Learning
California Department of Education Report
http://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/fa/re/
September 27, 2012 [posted 1/4/13]
There is a growing body of research demonstrating that clean air, good light, and a small, quiet, comfortable, and safe learning environment are important for students' academic achievement. The entire report with footnotes may be found here:
http://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/fa/re/documents/learnercenter.pdf
Here are a few examples of the research results:
- Students who receive instruction in buildings with good environmental conditions can earn test scores that are 5-17 percent higher than scores for students in substandard buildings.
- There is a negative relationship between classroom noise higher than 40 decibels and student achievement.
- Schools with better building conditions have up to 14 percent lower student suspension rates.
- Improving a school's "Overall Compliance Rating" to meet health and safety standards can lead to a 36-point increase in California Academic Performance Index scores.
- Substandard physical environments are strongly associated with truancy and other behavior problems in students. Lower student attendance led to lower scores on standardized tests in English-language arts and math.
A complete bibliography for this report may be found here:
http://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/fa/re/learnercenteredbib.asp
For more information, contact the California Department of Education, School Facilities Services Division, at 916-322-2470.
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Mountain View CA/ Students Rush to Web Classes, but Profits May Be Much Later
By Tamar Lewin
New York Times
January 6, 2013
In August, four months after Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng started the online education company Coursera, its free college courses had drawn in a million users, a faster launching than either Facebook or Twitter.
The co-founders, computer science professors at Stanford University, watched with amazement as enrollment passed two million last month, with 70,000 new students a week signing up for over 200 courses, including Human-Computer Interaction, Songwriting and Gamification, taught by faculty members at the company's partners, 33 elite universities.
In less than a year, Coursera has attracted $22 million in venture capital and has created so much buzz that some universities sound a bit defensive about not leaping onto the bandwagon.
Other approaches to online courses are emerging as well.
- Universities nationwide are increasing their online offerings, hoping to attract students around the world.
- New ventures like Udemy help individual professors put their courses online.
- Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have each provided $30 million to create edX.
- Another Stanford spinoff, Udacity, has attracted more than a million students to its menu of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, along with $15 million in financing.
All of this could well add up to the future of higher education - if anyone can figure out how to make money.
Coursera has grown at warp speed to emerge as the current leader of the pack, striving to support its business by creating revenue streams through licensing, certification fees and recruitment data provided to employers, among other efforts. But there is no guarantee that it will keep its position in the exploding education technology marketplace.
- "No one's got the model that's going to work yet," said James Grimmelmann, a New York Law School professor who specializes in computer and Internet law. "I expect all the current ventures to fail, because the expectations are too high. People think something will catch on like wildfire. But more likely, it's maybe a decade later that somebody figures out how to do it and make money."
For their part, Ms. Koller and Mr. Ng proclaim a desire to keep courses freely available to poor students worldwide. Education, they have said repeatedly, should be a right, not a privilege. And even their venture backers say profits can wait.
- "Monetization is not the most important objective for this business at this point," said Scott Sandell, a Coursera financier who is a general partner at New Enterprise Associates.
- "What is important is that Coursera is rapidly accumulating a body of high-quality content that could be very attractive to universities that want to license it for their own use. We invest with a very long mind-set, and the gestation period of the very best companies is at least 10 years."
But with the first trickles of revenue now coming in, Coursera's university partners expect to see some revenue sooner.
- "We'll make money when Coursera makes money," said Peter Lange, the provost of Duke University, one of Coursera's partners. "I don't think it will be too long down the road. We don't want to make the mistake the newspaper industry did, of giving our product away free online for too long."
Right now, the most promising source of revenue for Coursera is the payment of licensing fees from other educational institutions that want to use the Coursera classes, either as a ready-made "course in a box" or as video lectures students can watch before going to class to work with a faculty member.
Ms. Koller has plenty of other ideas, as well. She is planning to charge $20, or maybe $50, for certificates of completion. And her company, like Udacity, has begun to charge corporate employers, including Facebook and Twitter, for access to high-performing students, starting with those studying software engineering.
This fall, Ms. Koller was excited about news she was about to announce: Antioch University's Los Angeles campus had agreed to offer its students credit for successfully completing two Coursera courses, Modern and Contemporary American Poetry and Greek and Roman Mythology, both taught by professors from the University of Pennsylvania. Antioch would be the first college to pay a licensing fee - Ms. Koller would not say how much - to offer the courses to its students at a tuition lower than any four-year public campus in the state.
"We think this model will spread, helping academic institutions offer their students a better education at a lower price," she said.
Why would colleges pay licensing fees for material available free on the Web? Because, Ms. Koller said crisply, Coursera's terms of use require that anyone using the courses commercially get a license, and because licensing would give colleges their own course Web site, including access to grades.
Just three days before the announcement, Ms. Koller discovered that the deal would have a very modest start. For the pilot, Antioch planned to have just one student and a faculty "facilitator" in each course. She expressed surprise but took the news in stride, moving right on to greet a delegation from the University of Melbourne that was waiting for her in the conference room.
Coursera recently announced another route to help students earn credit for its courses - and produce revenue. The company has arranged for the American Council on Education, the umbrella group of higher education, to have subject experts assess whether several courses are worthy of transfer credits. If the experts say they are, students who successfully complete those courses could take an identity-verified proctored exam, pay a fee and get an ACE Credit transcript, a certification that 2,000 universities already accept for credit.
Under Coursera's contracts, the company gets most of the revenue; the universities keep 6 percent to 15 percent of the revenue, and 20 percent of gross profits. The contracts describe several monetizing possibilities, including charging for extras like manual grading or tutoring. (How or if partner universities will share revenue with professors who develop online courses remains an open question on many campuses, with some professors saying the task is analogous to writing a textbook and should yield similar remuneration.)
One tiny revenue stream has begun flowing into the nondescript Silicon Valley office building where Coursera's 35 employees work to keep up with the demand for their courses: the company is an Amazon affiliate, getting a sliver of the money each time Coursera students click through the site to buy recommended textbooks or any other products on Amazon.
"It's just a couple thousand, but it's our first revenue," Ms. Koller said. "When faculty recommend a textbook and people buy it on Amazon, we get some money. The funny thing is that we're getting more than twice as much money from things like Texas Rangers jackets as from what the textbooks are bringing in."
Other possibilities around the edges include charging a subscription fee, after a class is over, to continue the discussion forum as a Web community, or perhaps offering follow-up courses, again for a fee. And advertising sponsorships remain a possibility.
Like the Antioch deal, some early attempts have gotten off to a slow start. For example, the University of Washington has already offered credit for a fee in a few Coursera courses. But while thousands of students enrolled in the free version, only a handful chose the paid credit-carrying option. David P. Szatmary, the vice provost, said part of the problem was that the credit option was posted only shortly before the course started, when most students had already enrolled free.
"We're going to try it again," he said. "We think that if students know about the possibility of doing it for credit, they might be willing to pay a fee and get their own discussion board, an instructor who guides them through the course and some additional readings and projects."
Some Coursera partners say they are in no hurry to cash in.
- "Part of what Coursera's gotten right is that it makes more sense to build your user base first and then figure out later how to monetize it, than to worry too much at the beginning about how to monetize it," said Edward Rock, a law professor serving as the University of Pennsylvania's senior adviser on open course initiatives.
The Coursera co-founders have become oracles of higher education, spreading their gospel of massive open online courses at the World Economic Forum in Abu Dhabi, the Web Summit in Dublin and the Aspen Ideas Festival. They describe how free online courses can:
- open access to higher education to anyone with an Internet connection;
- liberate professors from repeating the same tired lectures and jokes semester after semester; and
- generate data, because the computers capture every answer right or wrong, that can provide new understanding of how students learn best.
Many educators predict that the bulk of MOOC revenues will come from licensing remedial courses and "gateway" introductory courses in subjects like economics or statistics, two categories of classes that enroll hundreds of thousands of students a year. Even though less than 10 percent of MOOC students finish the courses they sign up for on their own, many experts believe that combining MOOC materials with support from a faculty member or a teaching assistant could increase completion rates.
The University of Pennsylvania has high hopes for the mass marketing of Robert Ghrist's single-variable calculus course, which starts this month and features his hand-drawn animations.
- "What Rob has done is figure out how to make PowerPoint dance," Mr. Rock said. "I think it'll revolutionize the teaching of calculus both by allowing kids to take it on Coursera and by making the normal textbooks obsolete. It could become a way that more high schools that want to offer BC Calc can do so, and junior colleges that don't have good quality calculus instruction can license it and use it in a blended format, with the teacher now not giving frontal lectures but answering questions and exploring concepts in great detail."
Mr. Rock, whose university has produced 16 Coursera courses, said each one costs about $50,000 to create, the biggest expenses being the videography and paying the teaching assistants who monitor the discussion forum.
The University of Pennsylvania is just beginning to think about how to recover those costs. Last fall, at the conclusion of its Listening to World Music course, for example, the university sent out a questionnaire asking students whether they would be interested in a follow-up course, what they would want to cover and how much they would be willing to pay for it.
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a Penn bioethicist who served as health adviser to the Obama administration, is teaching two Coursera courses: one on the Obama health care law, the other on rationing scarce medical resources.
He said he was not trying to produce a course that can be offered over and over, with no additional costs, but simply hoping to spread understanding of important health issues. And rather than reuse his materials from last summer's course on the new law, Dr. Emanuel overhauled the course, using not one but two videographers to film his live classes at Penn.
But Dr. Emanuel is not immune to the commercial possibilities: he is considering whether to develop a MOOC that could be marketed to those seeking health care ethics certification.
Even Ms. Koller is unsure about the future of MOOCs - and her company.
"A year ago, I could not have imagined that we would be where we are now," she said. "Who knows where we'll be in five more years?"
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New York NY/ Ergonomic Seats? Most Pupils Squirm in a Classroom Classic
By Al Baker [Alain Delaquérière and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research]
New York Times
January 4, 2013
Education trends come and go: Mandatory pledges of allegiance, the new math, forcing left-handed children to write with the right hand.
And then there is the classroom chair. In New York City public schools, a top chair of choice since the mid-1990s has been the Model 114, also known as the "super stacker," 15 pounds of steel, sawdust and resin that comes in 22 colors and has a basic, unyielding design little changed from its wooden forebears.
- "They don't die," said Ali Salehi, the senior vice president for engineering and operations for Columbia Manufacturing, a 135-year-old company in Westfield, Mass., that makes the super stacker. "They just don't die."
The staying power of the super stacker, a version of which can be found in schools all over the United States, is a symbol of continuity in a world of constant change. Children who attend the same schools their parents attended are likely to, at some point, plunk down in the very same kinds of seats, if not the very same seats.
But in some quarters, the chair and others like it are seen as stubborn holdovers from before the age of ergonomics, when American schools' main job was to turn out upright citizens, and rote learning was the student's lot.
- "The chair, in short, originated in the industrial ordering of education," said David W. Orr, an environmental studies professor at Oberlin College who frequently writes about design.
- "It is maintained by profit-seeking school suppliers and unimaginative administrators who see no other possible arrangement of the body, or bodies, or any possible downside to the lower back from six hours of enforced sitting."
Wes Bradley, the principal of Thomas Nelson High School in Bardstown, Ky., said he doubted many school districts had "ever had a discussion about chairs."
Never in the six years he taught in a Bronx high school, Mr. Bradley said, had he seen chairs like the 1,000 new ones he put into his school's 40 classrooms in August - each chair a vessel of student sovereignty.
Pupils can turn them to face front or back, or use a handle to pull them into football-like huddles or to fan out for more independent work. While not perfect, Mr. Bradley said, they are "human friendly, form to the body" and come in "energizing colors."
In Albuquerque, as Michael P. Stanton set out to furnish the nex+Gen Academy High School that was opening in 2010, he sought seats to match its progressive philosophy, which relies on common areas and "learning studios" with no doors, instead of classrooms.
The new chairs, Dr. Stanton, the principal, said, "are popular." They come in two styles, both with wheels. One model has holes like a Wiffle ball. The other is fully cushioned.
- "I chose them due to their flexibility, in the seat itself, so the students could 'wiggle' or move easily without leaving their seat," Melissa A. Grant, the Albuquerque Public Schools' interior designer, said in an e-mail.
Anecdotally, administrators who have used newer, more flexible or free-moving chairs say that children find their new seats more comfortable and that they seem more engaged. Few studies have been conducted on whether chairs affect student performance, though a four-year study of 400 students conducted by a German nonprofit devoted to "posture and mobilization support" said children were able to concentrate for longer periods if they were given more mobile seats, combined with lesson plans that involved moving around.
But unleashing students is a disputable concept, particularly in complicated learning environments. After all, schools have traditionally been synonymous with a hushed subservience reflected in the Industrial Age's glib commands: "Do not slouch"; "Respect your elders"; "Speak when spoken to" - notions that some educators still find worthwhile today.
"They did not have solid plastic a hundred years ago, but the concept is the same," Bob Keller, the chairman of Nickerson Corporation, said of the Columbia chairs. Nickerson is the main distributor of chairs for the New York City public schools, including Columbia's super stacker. "They are not made for comfort. They are made for students to sit up and for students to be working. They are what we call a straight-backed chair."
As with most issues the city confronts, cost is paramount.
- The chairs at Thomas Nelson High School, made by Hon, cost roughly $120 apiece, though Mr. Bradley said the school got discounts of 50 percent to 60 percent based on state contracts; and the Albuquerque chairs, manufactured by Izzy, cost $115 per chair on an order of 400. The super stacker model costs New York's Education Department $45 to $70, depending on the size of the order, Mr. Keller said.
The schools chancellor, Dennis M. Walcott, said the city embraced innovation, and he emphasized that it was "always open" to cost-efficient opportunities to buy chairs fitting students' needs.
"If there is an ability to balance those two, we are always interested in seeing what is out there," he said, noting that many of these kinds of decisions were handled at individual schools.
But the chair the city has gone to time and again, Mr. Keller said, is the super stacker, which Columbia's Web site says was designed "to optimize student comfort and maximize stackability."
Its legs, forged into shiny tubes, consist of low-carbon steel imported from two factories: one in southern Canada and the other in Massachusetts. Steel gliders and support rods are robotically welded to the frame. The seat and back are separate pieces, each made of sawdust and resins that are compression-molded under high temperatures and usually coated with a trademarked paint called "speck fleck," Mr. Salehi of Columbia said.
Tamper-proof screws come from a plant in Agawam, Mass., and are "exclusive for New York City," Mr. Salehi said.
Besides the super stacker, Mr. Salehi said, the city buys a "variety of sizes and styles" of chairs to fit the needs of students in different grades. Mr. Keller said the Education Department had bought smaller chairs, made of wood, for its youngest pupils. The department said it had also begun buying chairs from another company, Academia, in the last four years.
But education officials are pleased with the super stackers, Mr. Keller said, because the chairs are "very strong" and easy to clean. He said the school system - which has an enrollment of about one million - probably had "four million of them" in circulation.
"They last 5o or 60 years and they are probably replacing 50,000 a year," Mr. Keller said.
Still, Galen Cranz, a researcher and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of the 1998 book "The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body and Design," said she wished child movement were accorded more consideration in the standard designs.
Professor Cranz said schools in Denmark, where she has lectured, very often used chairs that were tall, with seats that could tilt forward or have front parts that slope forward. Those kinds of seats, she said, put children in a position "halfway between sitting and standing."
"There is a fairly long history of physicians being worried about what the chair is doing to little bodies," Professor Cranz said.
The school chair, she said, "has been replicated unconsciously, and if we bring even the tiniest bit of consciousness to it, we recognize it as problematic and it needs to be rethought."
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Chicago IL/ Comic Books in Education? Schools Embrace Graphic Novels as Learning Tool
By Diane Rado, Chicago Tribune
Denver Post
January 7, 2012
In honors English class at Alan B. Shepard High School, sophomores are analyzing Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood" with the help of another book filled with drawings and dialogue that appears in bubbles above characters' heads.
"Capote in Kansas" is what generations of kids would recognize as a comic book, though it has a fancier name - a graphic novel.
That honors students at the Palos Heights, Ill., high school are using it illustrates how far the controversial comic-strip novels have come in gaining acceptance in the school curriculum, educators say.
Once aimed at helping struggling readers, English language learners and disabled students, graphic novels are moving into honors and college-level Advanced Placement classrooms and attracting students at all levels.
They're listed as reading material for students in the new "common core" standards being adopted across the country, even though some naysayers still question their value in the classroom.
There's no data on precisely how many schools nationwide use graphic novels. But no one disputes that in other markets the popularity of the comic-style books - adapted to classic literature, biographies, science, math and other subjects - is on the rise.
Karen Gavigan, an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina who has focused her research on graphic novels, points out that their sales have increased by nearly 40 percent over the past 10 years. And public libraries have seen significant increases in circulation after adding such material to their collections.
"A whole range of kids just love these," Gavigan said.
Fans abound in English teacher Eric Kallenborn's sophomore honors class at Shepard.
"It perfectly complemented 'In Cold Blood,'" sophomore Kyle Longfield said of "Capote in Kansas." He believes the story helped him better understand Capote's groundbreaking book about two killers and their brutal murders in Kansas.
On a recent day, Kyle, 16, led his fellow honors students through a discussion that compared the depiction of Capote in the comic-book novel to the author's voice and literary style in "In Cold Blood."
That discussion would have been considered unusual in the past.
Just ask Daniel Argentar, a communication arts instructor at Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire. Along with a colleague, he introduced the graphic novel "Maus" to some struggling freshman readers about eight years ago.
"People thought we were crazy," Argentar said.
The Holocaust-related book won a special Pulitzer Prize award in 1992, the first graphic novel to do so.
- "You're always going to have the traditionalists say comic books aren't real literature, and I guess to a certain extent they have a point," he said. "But my point is that it is different literature. It is visual literature, and I'd be failing my kids if I didn't train them for all the visual reading they do today."
Gavigan said graphic novels help students develop language skills, reinforce vocabulary and develop critical thinking skills.
More recently, graphic novels moved further into the mainstream when most states began adopting the new common core learning standards that guide schools on what students should learn.
Illinois adopted the rigorous standards in 2010, and the state's public school students are scheduled to be tested on them beginning in 2014-15.
"Graphic novels are specifically addressed in the common core standards," said Michelle Ryan, president of the Illinois Association of Teachers of English.
The standards refer to "texts" as the medium through which literature and reading skills are taught, Ryan said, and can include picture books used in kindergarten or the graphic novels in high school.
"Graphic novels ... are specifically identified in the expected reading materials for students," she said in an e-mail.
Whether districts will increase their use of graphic novels is unclear and likely will depend on a buy-in from teachers and curriculum officials, experts said.
"I don't teach a lot of graphic novels only because there are certain hoops to jump through," said Brian Curtin, an English teacher at Schaumburg High School and the 2013 Illinois Teacher of the Year.
In most districts, an approval process determines which textbooks and other books are used. In his district, very few graphic novels get a green light, he said.
Curtin said he loved the graphic novels he read in his master's classes and believes they can help build comprehension and engage unmotivated readers. But "I think you'd be on a slippery slope to look at graphic novels as a substitute for the real thing," he said.
James Bucky Carter, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, wrote a book that guides teachers in pairing graphic novels with traditional texts.
"I think we live in an age where we should not study text in isolation," he said. "Every text should be put in relation to something else," such as graphic novels as supplements to traditional literature.
Carter works to dispel naysayers' notions.
"Comics," he said, "are for everybody."
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Washington DC/ OPINION: Should Feds Host Separate Competitions for Rural Schools?
By Diette Courrege
Education Week [Edweek.org]
January 4, 2013 10:40 AM
Although the U.S. Department of Education has attempted to address disparities in competitive grant competitions for rural and small districts, one rural advocate says those efforts haven't worked and the time has come to create separate competitions for rural schools.
Andrew Hysell, associate vice president for policy and advocacy for Save the Children's U.S. Programs, recently wrote an opinion piece for the Huffington Post on how some federal competitions are resulting in few rural winners. Although it's not a new issue, he says it's significant considering the large number of at-risk, low-income youth who attend rural schools.
Hysell wrote that changes to level the playing field, such as giving rural districts priority points and creating rural-specific categories, haven't been successful, and that's because "small, rural districts lack tested, proven programs, have limited access to skilled workers, and cannot reach as many children as larger school districts."
He specifically discussed the federal Race to the Top district competition and his involvement with Roane County schools, a rural district in Spencer, W.V. that applied for but did not receive those funds.
Save the Children has developed a system, the Rural Empowerment Model, to help rural districts compete for and win public grants. Save the Children worked with Roane County to strengthen its application, and the 2,300-student district also received assistance from the Rural School and Community Trust, Apple, Inc., and Marshall University.
The district didn't win (nor was it named a finalist), and Hysell gave a number of reasons, such as it lacked funding to build the evidence necessary to compete with applicants who already were scaling proven models, and a lack of a pool of highly skilled teachers.
Although Save the Children has continued to help Roane, he questioned how rural districts can compete head-to-head with larger districts.
"Rural school districts should participate in separate competitions for innovation funding against their peers," he wrote. "Children deserve an equal chance to receive innovative approaches to their education regardless of their zip code."
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