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Grants/ Los Alamitos and Grants High School Share $200,000 Federal Award
Cibola Beacon Report
January 15, 2013
Two area schools, Los Alamitos Middle School and Grants High School, were recently awarded $200,000 for the next seven years from the U.S. Department of Education, Washington DC.
The award is to be divided between the two schools for their Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Under-Graduate Programs (G.E.A.R.-U.P.), which are designed to prepare students for post-secondary education careers after graduation.
Los Alamitos Middle School has scheduled a GEAR-UP "Kick-Off" event for Thursday, Jan. 24. "We will invite community leaders and university personnel to speak with students and parents about high school graduation requirements as well as college readiness for area and state institutions," according to Principal Joan Gilmore.
Parents and guardians of students are urged to mark their calendars to be at LAMS for the entire afternoon to help celebrate the GEAR-UP Program and to learn more about your student's future opportunities after high school graduation.. Lunch and dinner will be served to parents/students.
Door prizes will be given to the students and parents who participate and attend this entire afternoon of events, according to a recent press release.
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Santa Fe/ Kids Count Report Will be Released at NM Capitol
Alamogordo Daily News
The Associated Press
January 15, 2013
A New Mexico children's advocacy group is hoping the latest statistics on child poverty rates, teen birth rates and math and reading proficiency will spur action by the state Legislature.
- Officials with New Mexico Voices for Children, state Higher Education Secretary Jose Garcia and others will gather at the state capitol on Tuesday to release the annual Kids Count Data Book.
New Mexico Voices for Children says the state's percentage of teens abusing alcohol is among the nation's highest rates.
A separate report being released Tuesday shows New Mexico falling to 50th in the country when it comes to the percentage of low-income working families.
- The Working Poor Families Project found there were 89,000 low-income working families in New Mexico in 2011.
That's a 4 percent increase from 2007.
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ABQ/ APS Uses Surveillance Cams to Monitor Schools
By Celina Westervelt
KRQE-TV, Channel 13
January 14, 2013,
- "In light of the recent happenings in Connecticut, we are using the cameras maybe more, with an eye on how can we prevent some things or how can we keep an eye on campuses better" explained Albuquerque Public Schools Police Lt. Allan Rider.
Lt. Rider admits his 56 officers cannot be everywhere, so that's what the cameras are for.
Surveillance cameras are installed at most APS schools, and their monitored by APS Police at the dispatch center located in APS Headquarters.
- "We realize maybe we can use them more now and keep any eye on some of the campuses better," added Lt. Rider. "Especially those that are further out perhaps or don't have an officer there at the moment."
Because of what happened in Connecticut, more cameras are going up and more money from the state is making it happen.
The digital cameras are motion activated, grabbing onto people as they move. They're in hallways, libraries, cafeterias, playgrounds and parking lots.
- "Someone watching the camera can see if a person comes on campus who doesn't belong there, and they can immediately call help if they need to or go to the door and see who the person is," explained Lt. Rider. "They can address them before they even enter the campus."
So far they've helped solve vandalism and even keep an eye on teachers, but they're also tracking students.
- "If there's some kids doing something that they shouldn't, the person on the cameras will tell the other officers on campus to check that area, and they can catch kids doing something that's maybe unsafe or just against the rules."
APS also uses the cameras for other things. Monday they used them to monitor weather conditions especially at their East Mountain campuses.
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Cimarron/ School Superintendent James Gallegos Plans to Retire in June
By Bob Morris, Staff Writer
Raton Range
January, 15, 2013
After 25 years working in education, 19 of those in Cimarron, James Gallegos is calling it a career.
Gallegos, the Cimarron schools superintendent, submitted his letter of retirement to the school board at its meeting last Wednesday, which the board did accept. His retirement will be effective June 30, the end of his current contract year.
Gallegos told The Range after spending 25 years as a teacher and administrator, it seems like the right time to step away.
- "It's a good amount of time to be in education, and to get out while I'm still young enough," he said.
Gallegos first came to Cimarron schools in 1994, starting as a middle school math and science teacher. Before that, he worked as a teacher in Gallup and Raton.
After two years in Cimarron, he was asked to intern as a principal, which led him to becoming the principal of Cimarron Elementary/Middle School starting with the 1997-98 school year. While holding that position, Gallegos took on other duties with the district, such as federal programs director, special education director, bilingual director, cafeteria director, and district charter liaison and director for Moreno Valley High School, the charter school located in Angel Fire. The Cimarron school district covers the Cimarron, Eagle Nest and Angel Fire areas.
Gallegos was then hired as Cimarron schools superintendent in 2007, a position he has held since.
- "It's been a joy and a pleasure" to work for Cimarron schools, Gallegos said. "I wouldn't have traded it for anything."
The board will begin its search for a new superintendent "as soon as possible," Gallegos said, adding he gave his retirement notice at this time to allow the board to have as much time as possible to find his replacement.
He said the board has not yet scheduled any meetings to discuss parameters for a superintendent search, but expects the board will have such meetings and make some decisions about the search "probably by the end of the month."
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Washington DC/ Gallup Student Poll: Student Engagement Drops with Each Grade
By Ellen Wexler
From Francesca Duffy's Teaching Now segment
Education Week [Edweek.org]
January 11, 2013
With every year that passes between 5th and 12th grade, the number of students who are engaged in school declines steadily, according to the Gallup Student Poll, released last month.
- A majority of elementary school students-almost eight in 10-qualify as engaged, the poll found.
- By middle school, however, that number drops to six in 10 students.
- And when students enter high school, it drops to four in 10.
The poll surveyed approximately 500,000 students from 37 states in over 1,700 public schools in 2012.
Each year, as we've previously covered, Gallup measures students' levels of engagement, hope, and well-being at any schools that opt to participate. According to Gallup, those three measures account for one-third of the variance in student success.
- "The drop in student engagement for each year students are in school is our monumental, collective national failure," executive director of Gallup Education Brandon Busteed said in The Gallup Blog.
- "Imagine what our economy would look like today if nearly eight in 10 of our high school graduates were engaged-just as they were in elementary school."
Actually, in a small number of high schools, that prospect is almost true. While the overall levels of high school engagement are still quite low, the best high schools Gallup surveyed had approximately seven in 10 students qualify as engaged-nearly as many students as the average elementary school. Gallup interviewed the principals of these high schools and asked what they had done to successfully engage their students. Sometimes, according to Busteed, Gallup would get responses like, "Our high school feels like an elementary school."
And as for the rest of the middle and high schools?
Busteed posits a few possible causes for the lack of student engagement, including
- "our overzealous focus on standardized testing and curricula [and]
- our lack of experiential and project-based learning pathways for students-not to mention the
- lack of pathways for students who will not and do not want to go on to college."
In Iowa, for example, Des Moines Education Association president Andrew Rasmussen thinks that an emphasis on standardized testing doesn't allow teachers to focus lessons on topics that students would find interesting or thought-provoking, according to the Des Moines Register.
Rasmussen, who is also a middle school teacher, is unable to go into depth about topics like the Second Amendment and freedom of religion because teachers have to spend a six-week unit focusing on the Bill of Rights. "That leads to more disengagement," he said. "It's not as relevant to students."
And when schools fail to effectively engage students, according to Busteed, another problem arises:
- Schools inadvertently stifle students with entrepreneurial potential. While 45 percent of students surveyed by Gallup say they plan to start their own business someday, only 5 percent have spent more than one hour in the last week working, interning, or exposed to real business.
"With each year that these students progress in school, not engaging with their dreams and thus becoming less engaged overall, the more our hopes of long-term economic revival are dashed," Busteed said.
The 2013 Gallup Student Poll will take place between Oct. 1 and Nov. 1. Schools that wish to participate free of charge can find more information about the poll here: http://www.gallupstudentpoll.com/home.aspx.
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San Jose CA/ California to Give Udacity Web Courses a Big Trial
By Tamar Lewin and John Markoff
New York Times
January 15, 2013
A plan to offer an array of online college classes at a California state university could, if the students are successful, open the door to teaching hundreds of thousands of California students at a lower cost via the Internet.
Udacity, a Silicon Valley start-up that creates online college classes, will announce a deal on Tuesday with San Jose State University for a series of remedial and introductory courses.
Because the courses are intended to involve the classroom instructor, it could also help to blunt professors' unease with the online classes.
The state university's deal with Udacity is also the first time that professors at a university have collaborated with a provider of a MOOC - massive open online course - to create for-credit courses with students watching videos and taking interactive quizzes, and receiving support from online mentors.
Eventually, such courses could be offered to hundreds of thousands of students in the state.
California Gov. Jerry Brown, who has been pushing state universities to move more aggressively into online education, approached the company to come up with a technological solution for what has become a vexing challenge for the state.
- Ellen N. Junn, provost and vice president for academic affairs at the university in San Jose, said the California State University System faces a crisis because more than 50 percent of entering students cannot meet basic requirements.
"They graduate from high school, but they cannot pass our elementary math and English placement tests," she said.
The Udacity pilot program will include a remedial algebra course, a college-level algebra course and introductory statistics.
For the pilot project starting this month, however, the courses will be limited to 300 students - half from San Jose State University, and half from local community colleges and high schools - who will pay lower than usual tuition.
- The cost of each three-unit course will be $150, significantly less than regular San Jose State tuition.
Sebastian Thrun, one of the founders of Udacity, would not disclose how much the company would be paid for its participation.
San Jose State will receive funds from the National Science Foundation to study the effectiveness of the new online classroom design.
Open online courses exploded in American higher education in 2011 after Mr. Thrun, a nationally known artificial-intelligence researcher at Stanford, and Peter Norvig, Google's director of research, offered to teach an introductory artificial-intelligence course online. More than 160,000 students initially registered for the class.
After two other Stanford courses each attracted more than 100,000 students, Dr. Thrun started his venture. Two other Stanford computer scientists, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, also established a competing private company, Coursera, to develop technologies necessary to change the reach and effectiveness of online education.
The courses have rapidly moved from the periphery to the center of higher education policy as a growing number of schools have begun experimenting with ways to offer the courses for credit toward a degree.
EdX, a university collaboration initiated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard last year, this month will begin offering some of its courses at two Massachusetts community colleges, in a blended format.
Recently edX completed a pilot offering of its difficult circuits and electronics course at San Jose State to stunning results: while 40 percent of the students in the traditional version of the class got a grade of C or lower, only 9 percent in the blended edX class got such a low grade.
- Last fall, for the first time, Udacity's courses were tried on a small group of struggling high school students, at the Winfree Academy Charter School system, a cluster of schools near Dallas-Fort Worth created to help struggling students and reclaim dropouts.
"I was a little scared to put our kids, who are struggling and at risk of dropping out, into a class written by a Stanford professor," said Melody Chalkley, Winfree's founder.
- "But of the 23 students who used Udacity, one withdrew from the school, and the other 22 all finished successfully. And two young women got through the whole physics course in just two weeks."
Until now such courses have been seen as a threat to professors' jobs. The San Jose chapter of the California Faculty Association has not yet taken any formal position on the Udacity pilot. Many members were not aware of it, and some of those who did know of the plan said they had learned of it only informally.
"My personal opinion is that it's not by accident that this is being announced at a time when most faculty are not on campus, but I have no evidence for that," said Preston Rudy, a sociology professor at San Jose State who serves as vice president of the chapter. "I don't know enough about Udacity to take any position, but over all, I know the university is concerned about who will teach courses if they go online, who has control, and whether they will be university employees."
The Udacity deal could blunt some faculty opposition, because the effort will continue to involve professors - but it will also use online course assistants, or "mentors," hired and trained by Udacity.
The program is an attempt to overcome the biggest failure of open online courses today - their 90 percent dropout rate.
Despite high enrollments, about half the students who sign up for such courses, whether at Udacity or other providers, fall away at the beginning, never even looking at the first assignment. Many of them are browsers without real commitment to the classes. But others, Mr. Thrun said, just need more support.
- "I am personally troubled by the 90 percent dropout rate," Mr. Thrun said. "The students signing up are highly motivated - and MOOCs will only succeed if they make normally motivated students successful."
In the San Jose pilot, Udacity will have staff mentors monitoring the courses and offering a range of student support services that could include regular check-ins with a mentor, or automated e-mails providing encouragement and help for students stuck on a problem.
Dr. Thrun said that the new approach being pursued by Udacity came in response to a phone call from Mr. Brown. "For me this started cold turkey with a call from the California governor who said, 'Hey Sebastian, we have a crisis in the state.' "
A San Jose State professor who was one of the designers of the new statistics course said that he was hopeful that the new approach would have an impact.
- "One of the challenges of these massive courses as an instructor is how do you maintain contact with your students. It's just impossible," said Ronald F. Rogers, chairman of the psychology department at San Jose State.
He said the new course model that Udacity has designed would be a significant test of a new approach to online education and a refinement of the open course idea: "It's an empirical question. I think in some ways it is a test tube and we're going to see if it can scale."
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Washington DC/ OPINION: Waving the Flag for Formative Assessment
By W. James Popham [Professor emeritus in the graduate school of education and information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, in Washington. His next book, Evaluating America's Teachers: Mission Possible? will be published by Corwin Press in April]
Education Week, Vol. 32, Issue 15 [Edweek.org.]
January 14, 2013
Every educator knows what "a teachable moment" is. It's the brief period of time when events serendipitously conspire to teach students something that otherwise might be difficult for them to learn. Teachable moments are really quite special, and they don't come along all that often. A teacher who wastes a teachable moment, therefore, commits a pedagogical sin of omission.
Interestingly, American educators are now on the cusp of a different sort of special moment. In this instance, it stems from a unique historical occasion during which teachers' adoption of the formative-assessment process should be advocated with both honesty and unparalleled zeal. Yes, this is formative assessment's "advocatable moment."
First off, it is important to recognize that formative assessment works. That's right: Ample research evidence is now at hand to indicate emphatically that when the formative-assessment process is used, students learn better-lots better. This should come as no surprise, for the essence of formative assessment is surely commonsensical.
Formative assessment is simply a planned process wherein teachers, or their students, use assessment-elicited evidence of student learning to decide whether to make changes in what they're currently doing. Teachers find out if they need to adjust their ongoing instruction. Students find out if they need to alter the ways in which they're trying to learn. Formative assessment is, at bottom, an ends-means process in which teachers and/or students rely on assessment consequences (the ends) to decide whether any adjustments are warranted in what they're doing (the means). It's really not surprising that formative assessment works so well.
"Ample research evidence is now at hand to indicate emphatically that when the formative-assessment process is used, students learn better."
What is surprising is how few U.S. teachers use the process.
It does work, and it can make teachers more effective. Yet, although considerable rhetoric has been expended in recent years calling for teachers to employ formative assessment, its usage in our classrooms is meager. Nonetheless, two events now taking place in American education provide us with a unique opportunity to remedy this shortcoming. In fact, they set the stage for a special moment when education leaders of all stripes can legitimately advocate the use of formative assessment.
Let's briefly consider what they are.
The first event stems from adoption of the Common Core State Standards by almost all our states. Not surprisingly, commercial publishers are inundating U.S. educators with instructional materials ostensibly directed at promoting student mastery of the standards. But let's be honest, we really won't know the true nature of the common core's success until the two assessment consortia-the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, or SBAC-complete their test-building, by the spring of 2015. Only then will U.S. educators know with certainty how the common core has been operationalized, and whether students have mastered the content.
And here's where formative assessment can prove beneficial to the nation's teachers.
Remember, formative assessment helps students master curricular targets. Rather than asking teachers to guess about what the common core really means, shouldn't we urge teachers to sharpen their instructional skills through the use of formative assessment? Then, when the assessment-consortia tests are released, those teachers can focus their more potent instruction on the skills and knowledge the tests are measuring. The choice for educators shouldn't be between curricular guessing and becoming more instructionally skilled.
A second event that's setting the stage for full-on advocacy of formative assessment is the installation of more-stringent teacher-evaluation procedures throughout the United States. Spurred by federal incentives, including the Race to the Top grants, state officials have recently adopted teacher-evaluation systems in which student growth must be "a significant factor." Indeed, in many states, fully 50 percent of a teacher's evaluation will hinge on student performance on state or other achievement tests. Once again, this is an instance where formative assessment can help teachers.
Remember, formative assessment works. When it is used, students learn better. By using this assessment-rooted instructional process, teachers can increase the test-based achievements of their students. Regardless of the particular array of achievement tests used by a given state to evaluate its teachers, the teachers who employ formative assessment are apt to get their students to perform better on those tests. "Student growth" will be demonstrated on the tests because, in fact, student growth will have occurred.
These two stage-setting educational events are nontrivial developments. The adoption of the common standards and the explosion of federally initiated teacher-evaluation programs are both likely to make whopping differences in what goes on in our schools. Teachers who are adept at carrying out the formative-assessment process, therefore, will be better positioned to deal with either of these precedent-setting events.
This is an extraordinary moment in time when leaders of American education can legitimately advocate that teachers should adopt formative assessment because it will be in teachers' best interests to do so. Happily, if teachers follow this advice, those who benefit most will be their students.
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