[ECP] K12 Newsletters Headlines and Resources

From: "K.E." <admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: K12NewsLetters@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2011 11:09:55 -0400

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[ECP] Educational CyberPlayGround K-12 Newsletter

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Happy Reading for Today

<Karen>

HERE WE GO . . .
Milwaukee's voucher system, which allows low-income students to attend private
schools using tax dollars, discriminates based on disability, according to a
complaint filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Wisconsin
Foundation and Disability Rights Wisconsin.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/07/milwaukees-voucher-progra_n_872712.html

Zero tolerance for Zero Tolerance Coming to your Town
Nearly two decades after a zero-tolerance culture took hold in American
schools, a growing number of educators and elected leaders are scaling back
discipline policies that led to lengthy suspensions and ousters for such
mistakes as carrying toy guns or Advil. This rethinking has come in North
Carolina and Denver, in Baltimore and Los Angeles ? part of a phenomenon driven
by high suspension rates, community pressure, legal action and research
findings. In the Washington region, Fairfax County is considering policy
changes after a wave of community concern; school leaders in the District and
Prince George?s, Arlington and Montgomery counties have pursued new ideas, too.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/more-schools-are-rethinking-zero-tolerance/2011/05/26/AGSIKmGH_story.html

More Money - More Money Winners / Losers
California and Wisconsin each have formed a consortium with other states and
applied for the full $10.7 million available in a grant competition to create
English-language-proficiency tests for the states' common-core academic
standards. Their applications will force the U.S. Department of Education to
decide if it will split up the money or choose one winner. Each of the two
consortia has recruited enough states to meet the 15-state minimum required by
the Education Department to get bonus points in the application-review process.
California's consortium includes 17 other states; Wisconsin's includes 26
others. The Education Department hasn't confirmed yet that the California and
Wisconsin applications were the only ones submitted last Friday, deadline day
for applicants, but that's believed to be the case by parties who wrote the
applications.
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/learning-the-language/2011/06/wis_calif_take_lead_to_propose.html

A higher percentage of young Hispanic adults are finishing high school, and the
number attending a two-year college has nearly doubled over the last decade,
according to Census data. Yeah, but is anybody getting hired for a job?
http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2011/06/08/more_hispanic_students_finishing_high_school/

EPA Regulators Should Not Hide Behind Children To Push For Costly New
Regulations
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/228186.php

Fender Music Foundation: Grants
Fender Music Foundation grants are awarded to music academies, schools, local
music programs and national music programs across America, particularly
in-school music classes in which the students make music; after-school music
programs that are not run by a school; and music therapy programs, in which the
participants make the music. Maximum award: $5,000. Eligibility: established,
ongoing and sustainable music programs in the United States, which provide
music instruction for people of any age who would not otherwise have the
opportunity to make music. Deadline: July 15, 2011.
http://www.fendermusicfoundation.org/grants/index.cfm?sec=info

The right results, obtained the 'wrong' way
The Montgomery County, Maryland school system enrolls 145,000 students, a third
from low-income families. Eighty-four percent of its students go on to college,
and 63 percent earn college degrees. Of all black children in America passing
an Advanced Placement test, 2.5 percent live in the county, more than five
times the its share of the national black population. The district's teacher
evaluation system, known as Peer Assistance Review (PAR), has "worked
beautifully for 11 years," according to The New York Times. Yet Montgomery
County will not be accepting the $12 million to which it is entitled under Race
to the Top. Montgomery Superintendent Jerry Weast -- who says his good friend
Arne Duncan told him the district is "going where the country needs to go" --
will not take the grant money because it requires inclusion of students' state
test results as a measure of teacher quality. "We don't believe the tests are
reliable," Weast explained. "You don't want to turn your system into a test
factory." Asked if the state could make an exception for Montgomery because of
the PAR program's history of success, the U.S. Department of Education told
Gov. Martin O'Malley that no modifications were allowed.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/education/06oneducation.html
Related:
http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/DC-Nations-Best-Graduation-Rate-in-Montgomery-County-123397728.html

CONGRATULATIONS TO THE FEDERAL DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION
http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/k12.html

The Federal Department of Education Needs to be Redesigned - Starting at the
Top!
http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/K12-Dept-of-Education.html

The state of the rate
The 2011 edition of Education Week's Diplomas Count finds that the national
high school graduation rate stands at 71.7 percent for the class of 2008, the
most recent data available. This is the highest rate since the 1980s, and an
increase after two consecutive years of decline. However, the report also
projects 1.2 million students from this year's high school class will fail to
graduate -- 6,400 students lost each day of the year, or one student every 27
seconds. While the graduation-rate recovery occurred across all demographic
groups, rates for those historically underserved remain a concern. Among
Latinos, 58 percent finished high school with a diploma, while 57 percent of
African-Americans and 54 percent of Native Americans graduated. On average, 68
percent of male students earned a diploma compared with 75 percent of female
students, a gender gap virtually unchanged for years. High school-completion
rates for minority males consistently fall near or below 50 percent. Suburban
students graduate in considerably higher numbers than urban ones, 76 percent
versus 64 percent. Regardless of location, graduation rates in districts
characterized by poverty or racial or socioeconomic segregation are well below
the national average, typically 58 to 63 percent. The 2011 edition also found a
44 percentage-point gap between the highest-performing states -- New Jersey,
North Dakota, Vermont, and Wisconsin -- and the lowest: the District of
Columbia, Georgia, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, and South Carolina.
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/06/09/34analysis.h30.html
Related:
http://toped.svefoundation.org/2011/06/08/graduation-rates-trending-up-or-maybe-down/

A lot to learn
What if the United States is doing teaching reform all wrong? asks Dana
Goldstein, in a guest column under Ezra Klein's byline in The Washington Post.
A new report from the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE)
examines how high-performing countries recruit, prepare, and evaluate teachers,
and finds policies vastly different from our own, Goldstein says. Prospective
educators spend a long time preparing for the classroom, and are then given
significant autonomy in how to teach, with many fewer incentives and
punishments tied to standardized tests. Finland, for example, requires all
teachers to hold a master's degree in education and at least an undergraduate
major in a subject such as math, science, or literature. Shanghai's teacher
candidates take 90 percent of their college courses in the subject they will
teach. As in Finland, a new teacher in Shanghai spends the first year of
employment under the supervision of a mentor teacher, who is relieved of some
classroom duties to spend more time training the novice. Goldstein writes that
the NCEE report makes a persuasive case that the standards-and-accountability
reform movement has teaching policy "exactly backward." To increase the
prestige of teaching, don't make it easier for elites to do the job for a few
years and then burn out, Goldstein says. Make it more challenging to earn a
teaching credential in the first place.
Read more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/is-the-us-doing-teacher-reform-all-wrong/2011/05/31/AGAErRFH_blog.html?wprss=ezra-klein
Related: http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/05/building-better-teachers

From their mouth's to the Board of Ed's ears
In its newsletter, eSchool News recently asked its readers: "If you could
recommend only one idea for school reform, what would it be, and why?" The
website then published what it felt were the best ideas. In descending order,
these were: 10) Get disruptive student behavior under control through better
training for teachers and administrators. 9) Find a better balance between
flexibility and accountability, so states and districts can adhere to rigorous
standards without fear of losing funding. 8) End age grading. 7) Teaching
certificates should not be issued to anyone who cannot score at least 19 on all
four sections (English, math, reading, science) of the ACT (or similarly on a
comparable test). 6) Create computer centers, staffed by trained, paid teachers
in community centers and churches in the poorest neighborhoods. 5) Upgrade or
place in every school a library media center that functions as a Learning
Commons, and staff it with a teacher librarian or library media specialist who
can take learning into the 21st century. 4) Move from "seat time" to learning
competency as the basis for student promotion. 3) Get every student in America
online access at school and at home. 2) Let teachers teach; test scores are not
the goal of education. 1) Require all legislators to teach for one day in an
elementary classroom.
Read more:
http://www.eschoolnews.com/2011/06/06/ten-of-the-best-school-reform-ideas-from-readers

This is what we do know is bad design
http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/K12-Dept-of-Education-Redesign.html

Not encouraging
A new report from MDRC, conducted with the American Institutes of Research,
finds that two years of intensive professional development (PD) in
seventh-grade mathematics produced no evidence of improved teacher knowledge or
student achievement. The PD undertook improvement of teaching skills for
rational number topics such as fractions, decimals, percent, ratio, and
proportion, and included over 100 hours of support in summer institutes,
seminars, and in-school coaching. Schools in 12 participating districts were
randomly assigned intensive PD activities or only the PD activities normally
provided by the district. All seventh-grade teachers teaching at least one
regular seventh-grade mathematics class within the treatment schools were
offered the intensive PD during the first year of implementation. In six of the
districts, the intensive PD was provided to eligible seventh-grade teachers in
the study schools for a second year. Researchers found that the PD was
implemented as intended, but teacher turnover limited the dosage received. The
study found no significant impacts on teachers or scores on a specially
constructed teacher knowledge test. On average, about 75 percent of teachers in
both the treatment and the control groups correctly answered test items of
average difficulty for the test instrument. Students taught by teachers in the
intensive PD group and students taught by teachers in the control group
performed similarly on a rational numbers test.
See the report: http://www.mdrc.org/publications/598/overview.html

Is Congress smarter than a 5th-grader?
"How will our future get better if we educate kids about how to remember random
facts, and how will No Child Left Behind help America's future?" asks Julia
Skinner-Grant, a fifth-grader at Chevy Chase Elementary School in Montgomery
County, Maryland. In a guest piece on the Answer Sheet blog in The Washington
Post, Skinner-Grant, a special ed student, points out that had it been around,
standardized testing would not have provided Benjamin Franklin with the
information to save lives, or to experiment with, predict, and discover things
and concepts we still use today. Moreover, he dropped out of school at 10. "No
Child Left Behind takes the stress of testing and assumes that the more
students are prepared for testing, the less anxious they will be. But what this
actually does is lead students to believe that this test is far more important
to their future than it actually is," Skinner-Grant says. Teachers, principals,
and parents spend huge amounts of time prepping students, with the result that
"the student feels as if they will let all these people down if they don't do
well on the test and eventually this stress for everybody leads to the student
becoming so emotional and anxious that they don't even have the ability to
function properly for the test that they have been worrying about."
Read more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/5th-graders-essay-high-stakes-tests-lead-to-stress-not-learning/2011/06/02/AGQbJIIH_blog.html

Screw Bill Gates and the horse he rode in on
A new report from National Council on Teacher Quality, paid for largely by the
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, offers a roadmap for improving the quality of
teaching in the nation's second-largest school system, The Los Angeles Times
reports. The recommendations, which are strongly backed by Mayor Antonio
Villaraigosa, would revamp teacher hiring, scrapping the guarantee of a job for
so-called must-place teachers. The newspaper states that principals are under
pressure to hire from this group, although district rules and state law do not
always require it. The report recommends that principals be able to hire any
qualified applicant, including those from outside the district, and that
displaced teachers lose their right to district employment after a year. The
report also concluded that teacher evaluations must increase in frequency and
number: Only 40 percent of tenured teachers and 70 percent of non-tenured
teachers are evaluated annually. The report further recommends that earning of
tenure be more demanding and take longer, but that those receiving it get a
significant pay increase. The report surveyed 247 principals (31 percent of the
district total) and 1,317 teachers (4.5 percent), while also reviewing data and
contracts in L.A. Unified and comparison districts. The recommendations include
changes in state laws and in the teachers' contract.
Read more:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lausd-teachers-20110607,0,6964082.story
See the report: http://www.nctq.org/tr3/consulting/losangeles.jsp

Funny how all the newly elected Republican governors in political battleground
states who have pushed sweeping, controversial changes in education policy have
seen their approval ratings slide since taking office because they follow Money
Bags GATES.
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/state_edwatch/2011/06/gauging_new_governors_popularity_following_education_overhauls.html

Ohio senators have nixed wording from the state's upcoming spending plans that
strips public employees of most collective-bargaining rights and mandates merit
pay for teachers, in a move that may make it easier to repeal a bill enacted
with similar goals.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/01/ohio-education-reform_n_869911.html

Citigroup hacked: data for 200,000 or more US Citibank customers breached
Citigroup Inc. says hackers accessed credit card data for some 200,000 US
customers. The online security breach was first discovered in May, and reported
yesterday by the Financial Times (which blocks access via an onerous paywall).
"The bank said it recently discovered during routine monitoring that account
information for about 1 percent of customers was viewed." AP, Reuters. As The
Atlantic notes, the breach may be a lot worse than Citi's letting on. But even
if the damage was limited to 200,000 users, that's a breach of 1% of all North
American customer accounts (21 million). Washington Post item here.
http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/09/citigroup-hacked-dat.html

NASA PROBES SUGGEST MAGNETIC BUBBLES RESIDE AT SOLAR SYSTEM EDGE
WASHINGTON -- Observations from NASA's Voyager spacecraft, humanity's farthest
deep space sentinels, suggest the edge of our solar system may not be smooth,
but filled with a turbulent sea of magnetic bubbles.
While using a new computer model to analyze Voyager data, scientists found the
sun's distant magnetic field is made up of bubbles approximately 100 million
miles wide. The bubbles are created when magnetic field lines reorganize. The
new model suggests the field lines are broken up into self-contained structures
disconnected from
the solar magnetic field. The findings are described in the June 9 edition of
the Astrophysical Journal.
http://www.nasa.gov/sunearth

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