Friday, February 12, 2010

Budget Games Playing To Appearances, Not to Reality As Cuts Deal Moves Forward | California Progress Report

Democratic state senators pushed the first budget cuts of 2010 through a key committee Wednesday, slicing government payroll costs by 5% and cutting $811 million from the prisons' healthcare budget.

The votes were the first on budget matters since Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called a special session last month to address California's roughly $20-billion deficit. Lawmakers deferred decisions on how much to cut from California schools and social services -- the state's costliest programs -- until summer budget talks. (LA Times)

The easy part apparently involves going to the federal prison receiver and begging for help, because if they haven't done that already, they better start doing it now. As the healthcare system has been the center of the prison receivership, you don't just cut money from under a federal court's nose.

Meanwhile, the Assembly spent their time hamming it up "for appearances," don't you know? Like the waste of having safe airports, and the waste of having serviceable state vehicles. The airports one is my favorite.

The Department of Transportation was asked about a single-engine plane it bought for nearly $1 million. Mike Miles, operations director, said the plane is needed for inspections of public airports and other required aerial duties. It will replace one that is more than 40 years old, and, because of the fiscal crisis, delivery is not planned until 2010-11.

Oh, did the Assembly Panel nail them or what?! Can you believe they want to replace their 40-year-old single engine plane? Why, they don't make them like they used to back in 1970. It is clear that the DOT is just "tone-deaf" to the people!

"We've got to answer to our constituents - and they're screaming at us," Assemblyman Tom Berryhill, R-Modesto, said of state spending.

"They need to realize that to the general public and to us, the Legislature, they sound a little tone deaf," Assemblyman Hector De La Torre, a South Gate Democrat who chairs the committee, said of the millions spent for seemingly routine items. (SacBee).

So, as I have it, the public is "screaming" for unsafe airports and dangerous state

We Need Finland’s School System - Get In The Fracas

We Need Finland’s School System

Finland has an education system with its priorities in the right places and the results to match. It’s time for our leadership to take a look over there and say, “Yes! I’ll have what they’re having.”

Linda Darling-Hammond’s indispensable new book The Flat World and Education profiles three countries-Finland, Korea, and Singapore— that had struggling education systems in the 1970s but have aggressively revamped them into superior national systems. I plan to blog more on Darling-Hammond’s opus, but for now, I want to focus on Finland.

Eduflack Teacher Quality Showdown in Houston's Corral

Eduflack

Teacher Quality Showdown in Houston's Corral

Looking at the headlines coming out of Houston last night, it was a regular showdown at the school improvement corral. Teachers versus parents. Reformers versus status quo. Process versus outcomes. And in the words of far too many Simpsons episodes, we can't possibly forget about the children!

For those late to the rodeo, last evening the Houston Independent School District School Board voted (unanimously, 7-0) to approve HISD Superintendent Terry Grier's teacher quality efforts. The plan allows the school district to terminate (as a last resort) teachers whose students are unable to make the grade on standardized tests. According to the numbers being circulated, about 3 percent of the HISD teacher force, or 400 teachers, could be effected by this new initiative. For those who want more on this, the full story can be found here in the Houston Chronicle.

Most see Grier's efforts as a direct response to the current calls for teacher quality and accountability coming from Arne Duncan and the folks at the US Department of Education. Student performance remains the king. Effective teachers are the path to student performance. Ergo, students whose test scores don't improve have ineffective teachers who may not be suited for the classroom. Or so the SAT logic goes. Grier is moving a real, tangible plan aligned with Duncan's teacher quality pillar.

This vote has been brewing for weeks. As part of his negotiations with the teachers union, Grier tried to use AFT President Randi Weingarten's speech from nearly a month ago (Eduflack's analysis here) as grounds for the union to support his efforts. His argument was straightforward. If Weingarten was serious about rhetoric to fix a broken system and focus on effective teachers and student achievement, she should side with him on his teacher quality efforts. Why should 97 percent of HISD teachers be tarred by the student test scores of just 3 percent? And don't forget, Weingarten embraced the idea of using student test scores as part of teacher

Parents praise, teachers protest firing plan | Houston & Texas News | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

At a contentious meeting pitting parents against teachers, the Houston school board gave final approval on Thursday to a policy allowing the firing of instructors whose students fall short on standardized tests.

Dozens of parents spoke in favor of the decision, while more than 750 teachers packed the school district's headquarters to protest the policy, considered among the most aggressive efforts in the nation to improve teacher quality.

Starting next year, the Houston Independent School District will include a measure of student progress, called value-added, in teachers' job evaluations. Those teachers whose students fall far below expectations for multiple years could be at risk of losing their jobs.

HISD Superintendent Terry Grier and the school board, which passed the policy on a 7-0 vote, have promised to provide training and mentoring to struggling teachers and to use termination as a last resort. Trustees Carol Mims Galloway and Manuel Rodriguez Jr. were absent.

District data show that more than 400 teachers — about 3 percent of the teaching corps — could be at risk if they don't improve. The policy affects only teachers of core academic subjects in grades three through eight.

New Analysis Suggests Teachers' Voices Do Not Have A Strong Influence On The Policy Agenda | Public Agenda

WASHINGTON, D.C. (January 26, 2010) — Educational reformers of all stripes have focused tremendous energy on thinking of ways to identify effective teachers and in turn recruit, retain, compensate and support them. But what do teachers think of their ideas? The Retaining Teacher Talent study, a nationwide study conducted by Learning Point Associates and Public Agenda suggests that what teachers think are good indicators of effectiveness—and what they think will make them more effective—are not always aligned with current priorities in education policy.

This third release of data from the Retaining Teacher Talent study, Convergence and Contradictions in Teachers' Perceptions of Policy Reform Ideas, seeks to draw teachers into the debate, to bring nuance and experience to the conversation. This report describes the implications of the results of the nationwide survey for policymakers and teachers who want to influence policy.

“As we enter this new decade, teachers stand at the center of this policy vortex,” said Sabrina Laine, Ph.D., chief program officer for educator effectiveness at Learning Point Associates. "Democratizing the national policy conversation by getting teachers involved provides a bridge between policy and practice. Ultimately, grounding this debate with the voices of experience and evidence is of critical importance. The success of these reforms rests in large part on the support of those who will be most directly affected—teachers.”

“There’s a conventional wisdom that teachers uniformly resist the idea of measuring teacher effectiveness, but in fact, teachers are open to a number of different ways of doing it, including looking at how much their own students learn compared to other students. And most teachers agree that making it easier to take ineffective teachers out of the classroom would improve education,” said Jean Johnson, director of Education Insights at Public Agenda. “It’s way past time to get teachers themselves involved in these crucial discussions about how to judge teacher effectiveness.”

Although education policy reform has focused on dramatic changes to teacher evaluation and compensation, this report suggests that these reform ideas are not the most popular among teachers. This study explores the attitudes of all teachers toward how they would measure effectiveness, examines how they perceive themselves to be effective relative to their teaching conditions and indicates what they believe will improve overall teacher effectiveness.

Top findings include the following:

1. The majority of teachers agree on four possible ways to judge teacher performance: Nearly all teachers (92 percent) rated the level of student interest and engagement as an excellent or good indicator of teacher effectiveness. Teachers also gave excellent or good ratings to: how much their own students learn compared with other students (72 percent); feedback from principals and administrators (70 percent) and how well students

All the scholar ladies, all the scholar ladies | The Education Report

All the scholar ladies, all the scholar ladies | The Education Report:

All the scholar ladies, all the scholar ladies

"A little diversion for your Friday. Warning: The following song might get stuck in your head for much longer than you’d like to admit."

This Week In Education: Video: "To Be Or Not To Be...That Is The Question... Yeah."

This Week In Education: Video: "To Be Or Not To Be...That Is The Question... Yeah.":

"Video: 'To Be Or Not To Be...That Is The Question... Yeah.'

This video of Brian Cox teaching a cute little boy some Shakespeare has been going around the Internetz not just because the kid learns the soliloquy but also because he interjects some of his own delightful meaning into the process."

It's been a long day, you deserve a little break.

Local Students Awarded Medals at 30th Annual Sacramento County Academic Decathlon — The Rancho Cordova Post

Local Students Awarded Medals at 30th Annual Sacramento County Academic Decathlon

by MICHELLE VENTRESS on FEBRUARY 11, 2010 · 0 COMMENTS

in VIEWPOINTS

Individual and team winners of the 30th Annual Sacramento County Academic Decathlon, held February 6 at Inderkum High School, have been announced by Sacramento County Superintendent of Schools David W. Gordon. Modeling their efforts after the Olympic Decathlon, close to 300 local students competed for awards in ten demanding academic events: Mathematics, Art, Music, Language/Literature, Economics, Science, Essay, Speech, Interview and Super Quiz. Contestants represented 25 schools in Sacramento County. Only one high school will advance to state finals.
The top scorers were honored February 9 at the Academic Decathlon Awards Banquet presented by the Sacramento County Office of Education (SCOE) at the Sacramento State College University Ballroom. KCRA Channel 3 Anchor and Political Reporter Kevin Riggs served as emcee of the awards banquet. Students received gold, silver or bronze medals for their efforts.
SAFE Credit Union provided $10,000 in scholarships to be distributed among top-scoring students. The top three school teams are as follows:
1st Place – Folsom High School (Folsom Cordova Unified School District)
2nd Place – Bella Vista High School (San Juan Unified School District)
3rd Place – Franklin High School (Elk Grove Unified School District)
Folsom High School is now eligible to

Elk Grove Citizen :What Super Bowl?

Elk Grove Citizen :

What Super Bowl?

Local high school students show off smarts in annual academic decathlon, “Super Quiz”

By Cameron Macdonald - Citizen News Editor

Published: Thursday, February 11, 2010 4:06 PM PST

The French Revolution was a cause of exuberance, nail-biting distress, relief, triumph, and countless hours of memorizing flashcards – for students from six local high schools that competed in the 30th Sacramento County Academic Decathlon on Feb. 6.

They competed against teams from 25 schools from across the county at Sacramento’s Inderkum High School during a day of delivering speeches and taking numerous written exams that mainly challenged them to show their knowledge of nearly every nut and bolt of the French Revolution.

They were given thick study materials and were assigned to read the Charles Dickens classic A Tale of Two Cities.

Monterey Trail High Coach Kevin Williams said that his team enjoyed trying to follow how political power moved during the revolution. He noted the infamous Guillotine.

“I think they enjoyed trying to track where all the power went back and forth, and who started popping heads off and who started getting other

Alameda Education Board Expected to Renew FAME School’s Charter - Bay Area Blog - NYTimes.com

The FAME charter school in Fremont appears to be heading toward a five-year renewal of its charter in March, after the Alameda County Board of Education voted unanimously at a meeting on Tuesday to continue offering its provisional support.

The school has been the subject of controversy since a critical state audituncovered questionable financial practices and the Fremont Unified School District voiced its opposition to the renewal of the school charter. The audit findings were the subject of an article in The New York Times on Sunday.

A vocal opponent of FAME on the county’s Board of Education, Yvonne Cerrato, was not present for the Tuesday vote. The board appeared to move past some of the concerns voiced by Fremont officials, as several board members and officials — including the Alameda County official in charge of the FAME investigation, Carlene Naylor, an associate superintendent — sounded firmly in support of the school.

The school must meet several conditions by March 1 to have its charter renewed. The conditions include discontinuing the practice of taking high-fee, high-interest short-term loans from either relatives of the director or the school’s board members.

During the meeting, Milt Werner, superintendent of the Fremont Unified

Houston Approves Use of Test Scores in Teacher Dismissals - Teacher Beat - Education Week

We've officially entered the brave new world of teacher accountability based largely on student test-score growth: Under protest from some teachers, the Houston board of education last night approved a policy to permit the nonrenewal of contracts for teachers whose students make insufficient academic growth on the state test.

There are a couple of reasons why this is an important story to follow. First, as Ericka Mellon has reported, the district has already identified over 400 teachers whose students have scored far below expectations for several years. Assuming some are ultimately removed, this would become one of the first widespreadhigh-stakes uses of teacher "value added" or "effect" data. Currently, such data are used mainly to determine eligibility for performance-based bonuses (pick any number of cities' programs) or for a career-ladder program (as in Springfield, Mass.), but not for a formal accountability purpose.

Aside from Houston, I can think of only two other large-scale examples. The District of Columbia's IMPACT evaluation system, which just debuted in the fall of 2009, uses student-achievement data for anywhere from 5 percent to 50 percent of a teacher's evaluation.

California still an AP leader, for now The Educated Guess

The Educated Guess

California still an AP leader, for now

Posted in Achievement Gap

While California schools have lagged behind the nation by some performance measures, it has been a leader in one significant area: the percentage of high school students who take Advanced Placement courses and then pass the AP exams. This has been true in every subject, from AP physics to AP psychology.
During the past decade, the numbers of students taking and succeeding in AP courses – an indicator of readiness for rigorous college work — have continued to rise, though not as dramatically as in states that have pushed AP, particularly among minority students.
And now the budget crisis facing California schools, compounded perhaps by sanctions of the No Child Left Behind law, could further erode AP participation, to the detriment of students competing for admission to the University of California and other top colleges. (Read more and comment on this post)

Schools Matter: NY Times publishes 5 letters attacking NCLB

Letters
‘No Child Left Behind,’ Revisited
To the Editor:
“Making ‘No Child’ Better” (editorial, Feb. 5) misses the point that the No Child Left Behind law is founded on faulty assumptions of top-down mandates, zero tolerance, narrow forms of assessment, and privatization. These are all popular nowadays, but have been shown to be ineffective in other sectors (health, corrections, welfare and so on) and have a dismal track record so far in education.
“Tightening up” the law will only prolong the agony.
President Obama’s appointment of Arne Duncan as education secretary instead of the education scholar Linda Darling-Hammond has set authentic reform in education back by at least a decade. Educators aren’t the villains; we might actually know something about education and how to reform it. Consult us. Gary L. Anderson
New York, Feb. 5, 2010
The writer is a professor at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development at New York University.

Teach for America's federal funds threatened by grant competition proposal - washingtonpost.com

Teach for America's federal funds threatened by grant competition proposal - washingtonpost.com:

"Teach for America, which enlists recent college graduates for two-year stints in some of the nation's most troubled public schools, would lose its uncontested claim on $18 million in federal funding under an Obama administration proposal to launch a grant competition for teacher training programs."

At first blush, the proposal to end Teach for America's noncompetitive grant seems a surprising setback for a program viewed favorably by federal officials, lawmakers and philanthropists with influence in public education.
But Education Secretary Arne Duncan said the proposal to merge that funding with other programs, if approved by Congress, would make $235 million available for initiatives to recruit and prepare teachers for high-need schools.
"We think there's a chance for programs that are doing a great job to actually increase their funding," Duncan told reporters last week when asked about Teach for America. "It's an expanded pool of resources and we want the best to rise to the top. . . . There's a big, big opportunity out there for high performers."
But leaders of the 20-year-old nonprofit organization, based in New York, have expressed concerns about the budget proposal because they are counting on federal funding to help finance an expansion. So a dedicated grant could be more valuable to the organization than the chance to win more money.

"We're really hopeful that Congress will put us in the budget," said Teach for America spokeswoman Kerci Marcello Stroud, "so we can take advantage of this tremendous opportunity for us to grow and reach more kids."
Stroud said the proposed grant competition could raise difficulties for the organization. "It's hard to plan," she said. "We have to plan so far in advance."

Education - Everything you need to know about the world of education.

Education- Everything you need to know about the world of education.

Va. is for virtual, not charter, schools

Charter school advocates like me are going to make a big deal out of Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell's plan to expand those publicly funded, independently run educational alternatives. But I predict the most important part of his Wednesday education announcement will not turn out to be about charter schools. It will be what he said about virtual schools, the growing segment of programs in which students learn online.

McDonnell's virtual education proposals are in sync with a new report from the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution. Brookings, often described as liberal-leaning, might seem an odd fit with Virginia's new conservative Republican governor. But the report reveals that some school choice advocates on McDonnell's side of the issue are ready to accept the reality that some of their favorite reforms don't have as much potential for growth as they would like.

That is certainly true of charters in Virginia. As McDonnell pointed out, his state has only three of the independent public schools (a fourth is scheduled to open this year) while the nation has more than 4,600. He wants to stimulate their growth in Virginia, as President Obama is trying to do nationally, by giving the state Board of Education the power to approve charters denied by local school boards that are reluctant to create independent schools that would compete with their own.

Continue reading this post »

Private schools to make up some snow days

There is a joke among families who spend $30,000 or so send their kids to private schools that the more they pay in tuition, the fewer days their kids are in class.

There is no ratio of dollars to school days, but at least some private schools don’t have to stay open as long as public schools do each year.

State legislatures mandate how many days public schools must be open, and state officials have to grant permission for a reduction in that number if an emergency has forced schools to close for an extended period.

Continue reading this post »

Washington Teachers' Union president George Parker, responding toMonday's story about corporal punishment allegations, said the actual number of substantiated cases is much lower than the 220 incidents reported to D.C. police by Hawk One security.

How much lower? Like other key players in this issue, Parker doesn't say. Here's his statement:

The Washington Teachers' Union (WTU) takes the well-being of D.C.'s students very seriously. To that end, we have worked closely with the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) to establish clearly defined procedures for the investigation of corporal punishment and other teacher misconduct. Our procedures outline the process for bringing official charges, conducting investigations and--if the charges are substantiated--swiftly removing the guilty party from the classroom.

To be clear: Allegationsof corporal punishment are not official charges. Still, because the safety of our children is involved, we must be

Gorman: CMS approves when staff translates for parents - CharlotteObserver.com

Gorman: CMS approves when staff translates for parents - CharlotteObserver.com:

"Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools encourages bilingual employees to translate for parents who don't speak English, Superintendent Peter Gorman said in the wake of a lawsuit alleging that a secretary was forced to quit after speaking Spanish to parents at Devonshire Elementary.

Gorman declined to discuss specifics about that school, citing the pending lawsuit in federal court. But he emphasized the district's support for staff who can communicate with parents who speak other languages: 'We want our folks to translate. Bilingual staff is a beautiful thing for us. It helps moms and dads out, and it helps kids.'"

State details MPS failures - JSOnline

State details MPS failures - JSOnline:

"Milwaukee Public Schools has failed to fulfill multiple elements of its state-ordered educational improvement plan, according to newly released documents from the state Department of Public Instruction that detail why the district is at risk of losing millions of dollars of federal funding.

Though the main standoff between the state and its largest district continues to be a disagreement over how MPS imposes remedies of an ongoing special education lawsuit, the new documents specify where MPS hasn't met other state orders, including literacy instruction, identifying students who need extra help or special services, and tracking newly hired, first-year teachers and teachers hired on emergency licenses.
The district's lack of compliance with what are known formally as 'corrective action requirements' - imposed by the state because MPS repeatedly has missed yearly academic progress targets - is what led Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers last week to initiate the process of withholding up to $175 million in federal dollars.

Legally, the greatest leverage Evers can exert against a poorly performing district under the federal No Child Left Behind law is to withhold federal dollars. To take that action, he said, he first had to"

State exam results to help determine whether 700 teachers win tenure

It's teachers who now have to sweat student test scores.

State exam results will help determine whether 700 teachers win tenure this year, city officials announced yesterday, prompting the teachers union to threaten a lawsuit.

"It is clearly bad educational policy to evaluate teachers through the use of state test scores that the state itself has deemed unreliable," said teachers union president Michael Mulgrew.

City Education officials fired back, defending the plan. "It's hard to imagine how anyone could object to looking at a teacher's impact on student progress as a part of a comprehensive evaluation," said spokesman David Cantor.

Fourth- through eighth-grade teachers who are up for tenure and have two years' worth of state math and English scores under their belts will be stacked up against educators at schools with similar demographics.

They will then be ranked based on how much students improved their test scores, with the top 25% of the teachers considered "tenure likely" and the bottom 25% deemed "tenure in doubt."

In each case, a principal "will be asked for additional rationale" if they overrule the

State meddling hamstrings schools | state, school, education - Opinion - The Orange County Register

State meddling hamstrings schools | state, school, education - Opinion - The Orange County Register:

"SACRAMENTO To show the results of union dominance of the public education system, John Stossel, host of Fox News' 'Stossel,' on a recent show held up a convoluted chart that detailed, in small print, the amazing lengths to which New York school administrators must go to fire an incompetent teacher. The viewer sees a long and detailed chart filled with boxes connected by arrows. Then, Stossel reveals that what he's holding up for the camera is only the beginning, as he lets falls to the floor several more pages that had been hidden, accordion-style, behind the first page of the termination procedures chart.

The joke – actually much sadder than funny – is on us, as we realize that there's no way that even the worst teacher can get sacked and that it's basically impossible to reform the public school system as it is currently structured. Yet local, state and federal officials go on proposing reforms that will surely turn the nations' bureaucratic, government-controlled public school systems into models of efficiency and high-performance learning."

Georgia Schools Inquiry Finds Signs of Cheating - NYTimes.com

Georgia Schools Inquiry Finds Signs of Cheating - NYTimes.com:

"ATLANTA — Georgia education officials ordered investigations on Thursday at 191 schools across the state where they had found evidence of tampering on answer sheets for the state’s standardized achievement test."

The order came after an inquiry on cheating by the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement raised red flags regarding one in five of Georgia’s 1,857 public elementary and middle schools. A large proportion of the schools were in Atlanta.
The inquiry flagged any school that had an abnormal number of erasures on answer sheets where the answers were changed from wrong to right, suggesting deliberate interference by teachers, principals or other administrators.
Experts said it could become one of the largest cheating scandals in the era of widespread standardized testing.
“This is the biggest erasure problem I’ve ever seen,” saidGregory J. Cizek, a testing expert at the University of North Carolina who has studied cheating. “This doesn’t suggest that it was just kids randomly changing their answers, it suggests a pattern of unethical behavior on the part of either kids or educators.”
Professor Cizek praised Georgia for conducting the analysis, saying that many states do not monitor erasure rates to check for potential cheating.
Kathleen B. Mathers, the executive director of the state Office of Student Achievement, which is separate from the State Department of Education and is controlled by Gov.Sonny Perdue, a Republican, said the statewide analysis was done after a smaller one — prompted in part by articles in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution — led to an inquiry that found cheating at four schools.

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