Thursday, March 11, 2010

Democratic Leaders Want to Twin Student Loan Bill With Health Care - Politics K-12 - Education Week

Democratic Leaders Want to Twin Student Loan Bill With Health Care

By Alyson Klein on March 11, 2010 2:16 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

Remember we told you that the student-loan bill might hitch a ride with the health-care bill through that wonky procedural mechanism known as budget reconciliation?

Well, it looks like the administration and the chairmen of both the House and Senate education committees officially want that happen. But it's unclear whether the rest of Congress will go along with that plan or what the final loans package will look like, including whether some new education programs that would be created under the House version of the bill will be in the mix.

Some background: Last year, the Congressional Budget Office (Congress' resident, non-partisan numbers crunchers) estimated that the administration's proposed change to the student lending system would save $87 billion over ten years. The House passed legislation implementing the change. The bill would call for students to borrow right from the U.S. Treasury (through a program called Direct Lending) rather than relying on subsidized lenders to do the job (essentially scrapping the Federal Family Education Loan Program).

With the savings, House lawmakers would create a bunch of new programs, including grants to help states improve early childhood, bolster community colleges (including dual enrollment and early-college high school programs) and money for school facilities. Read all about it in this story.

And, in an important move for college access, the bill also sought to shift Pell Grants, which help low-income students pay for college, from the discretionary side of the ledger to the mandatory side, where it wouldn't be subject to the whims of the appropriations process (becoming mandatory is the best thing that could happen to a federal program). It would also index them to the Consumer Price Index, plus 1 percent, to keep up with rapidly-rising college costs.

NEA Co-Opts AFT's "Collaboration" Mantra - Teacher Beat - Education Week

NEA Co-Opts AFT's "Collaboration" Mantra

By Stephen Sawchuk on March 11, 2010 1:28 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

So is it just me, or has the National Education Association been banging the labor-management "collaboration" drum a lot these days? After all, that's Randi Weingarten's line! Or at least, it's been one of the AFT president's most consistent themes over the last year and half of her tenure at the helm of the national union.

Now take a look at this recent NEA press release:

"Educators must have a say in what it takes to improve low-performing schools. ... When all education stakeholders are involved in the decisionmaking process, it spells success for students. This combination of collective responsibility and collaborative thinking has a track record for yielding results that are positive for students and their schools."

Or this string from a recent conversation with NEA head Dennis Van Roekel, when he was talking about school improvement:

"In schools that I visit where they're changing what happens to kids, collaboration is the common thread. It works together. Competition destroys it all. It takes a group of people with collective goals, the support of management and the board to do it."

Now I'm sure on the one hand this must be heartening for Weingarten. After all, as the saying goes, imitation + sincerity = flattery. And the NEA, of course, is an important partner when it comes to things like lobbying for education funding (orfacing off with Rep. George Miller, natch), so it no doubt helps to speak the same language.

But I have to wonder if an eensy-weensy part of Weingarten is a bit peeved. After all, the NEA hasn't exactly followed AFT's lead on other hot-button issues,

The Educated Reporter: A review is not the book.

A review is not the book.

Yes, I am overdue in saying something about Diane Ravitch's book, and I intend to. But in the meantime I will just say this: The reviews of a book are not the book. Especially when I wrote Tested, I was amazed at how people misinterpreted what I wrote; later I would learn they did not read the book but only reviews of it. So an offhand comment by Sandy Kress in National Journal's conversation about how the feds would hold states accountable on RtTT hit a raw nerve for me.

Kress was disappointed with Ravitch's opposition to RtTT. He wrote, "I searched through all the reviews I could find of her new book. My goal was to climb the mountain of all the

Live Theater Returns to Mitchell Middle School — The Rancho Cordova Post

Live Theater Returns to Mitchell Middle School

by SHERYL LONGSWORTH on MARCH 11, 2010 · 0 COMMENTS

in VIEWPOINTS

Mitchell Middle School’s first Drama Club production, “Shakespeare Unshackled,” a musical tribute to the life and works of William Shakespeare, will be held on Friday, March 12th in Mitchell’s gym at 2100 Zinfandel Dr, Rancho Cordova. Mitchell’s outstanding band will provide live musical accompaniment under the direction of band and chorus teacher, Dan McCrossen.

This musical tribute to Shakespeare is approximately 45 minutes long and the setting is 16th Century England. The cast consists of over two-dozen extremely talented students and the production promises to be filled with wit and humor. This will truly be a fun evening for the entire family!

Amy Bergsten, one of Mitchell’s exceptional English teachers and Drama Club co-advisor said, “We are hopeful that by creating this after school club, students will explore the fantastic and creative realm of Performing Arts. Students are given the opportunity to be involved both behind the scenes of a production as well as on stage. I’m especially thrilled that we are going to be able to take students to a professional production. This club has been able to bring the performing arts back into our school and words cannot express my gratitude!”

Admission is free. Doors open at 6pm and the show will start at 6:30pm. Snacks and beverages will be available for $1 each to raise money for next year’s Drama Club. This

Lessons on Teacher Evaluation From Charter Schools - Teacher Beat - Education Week

Lessons on Teacher Evaluation From Charter Schools

By Stephen Sawchuk on March 11, 2010 12:52 PM | No Comments | No TrackBacks

The Center on American Progress released three papers yesterday on different aspects of teacher effectiveness. I'll be writing a bit about them over the course of this week (We Read So You Don't Have To!), but they're all worth checking out.

First up is a fascinating look at charter school evaluation policies, written by Heather Peske, formerly of the Education Trust and now at Teach Plus, a group that works to connect teachers to education policymaking, and Morgaen Donaldson, an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut's Neag School of Education.

Charter schools typically have fewer rules and constraints and stronger "corporate cultures," so they should have more opportunities to innovate on evaluation policies, the theory goes.

So, in interviews with teachers, principals, and CMO staff, the authors took a look at three charter-management organizations, deemed "Northern," "National," and "Western." All three use a set of performance-based standards, and a series of structured observations coupled with detailed feedback, as the basis of teacher evaluations. None of the CMOs uses a "value added" methodology just yet for formal teacher reviews. And only one, the "Western" CMO, had unionized teachers.

Among the researchers' findings:

• The schools rely much more heavily on evaluations as a formative tool for improvement, through observation, coaching, and discussion of practices, rather than assigning a summative year-end rating. (I wrote about this tension in a few earlier items, here and here.)
• In the North and National CMOs, evaluation is directly tied to individual and collective professional development.
• The evaluations generally contributed to a much more collaborative enterprise that encouraged self-reflection, continuous improvement, and more transparent teaching practices.
• In schools in the nonunionized CMOs, unlike in most public schools, observations were not "formal" or "informal," "scheduled" or "unscheduled."

Diane Ravitch: Why I Changed My Mind About School Reform - WSJ.com

I have been a historian of American education since 1975, when I received my doctorate from Columbia. I have written histories, and I've also written extensively about the need to improve students' knowledge of history, literature, geography, science, civics and foreign languages. So in 1991, when Lamar Alexander and David Kearns invited me to become assistant secretary of education in the administration of George H.W. Bush, I jumped at the chance with the hope that I might promote voluntary state and national standards in these subjects.

By the time I left government service in January 1993, I was an advocate not only for standards but for school choice. I had come to believe that standards and choice could co-exist as they do in the private sector. With my friends Chester Finn Jr. and Joseph Viteritti, I wrote and edited books and articles making the case for charter schools and accountability.

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I became a founding board member of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and a founding member of the Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution, both of which are fervent proponents of choice and accountability. The Koret group includes some of the nation's best-known conservative scholars of choice, including John Chubb, Terry Moe, Caroline Hoxby and Paul Peterson.

As No Child Left Behind's (NCLB) accountability regime took over the nation's schools under President George W. Bush and more and more charter schools were launched, I supported these initiatives. But over time, I became disillusioned with the strategies that once seemed so promising. I no longer believe that either approach will produce the quantum improvement in American education that we all hope for.

NCLB received overwhelming bipartisan support when it was signed into law by President Bush in 2002. The law requires that schools test all students every year in grades three through eight, and report their scores separately by race, ethnicity, low-income status, disability status and limited-English proficiency. NCLB mandated that 100% of students would reach proficiency in reading and math by 2014, as measured by tests given in each state.

Although this target was generally recognized as utopian, schools faced draconian penalties—eventually including closure or privatization—if every group in the school did not make adequate yearly progress. By 2008, 35% of the nation's public schools were labeled "failing schools," and that number seems sure to grow each year as the deadline nears.

Since the law permitted every state to define "proficiency" as it chose, many states announced impressive gains. But the states' claims of startling improvement were contradicted by the federally sponsored National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Eighth grade students improved not at all on the federal test of reading even though they had been tested annually by their states in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007.

Meanwhile the states responded to NCLB by dumbing down their standards so that they could claim to be making progress. Some states declared that between 80%-90% of their students were proficient, but on the federal test only a third or less were. Because the law demanded progress only in reading and math, schools were incentivized to show gains only on those

voiceofsandiego.org | News. Investigation. Analysis. Conversation. Intelligence. - Why Black Students Are So Scarce at UCSD

Classmates at the University of California, San Diego asked Zim Ezumah about her hair. They asked her if she could do the Crip Walk. They asked if she was on a basketball scholarship.

Ezumah, who went to high school in south central Los Angeles, knew there weren't many other black students at her new university. But she was stunned by just how alone she felt.

Black students are a rarity at UCSD. Only 1.6 percent of its undergraduate students are black, a stat that has become a rallying cry after an escalating series of racially offensive events around the university over the past month, starting with an off-campus "Compton Cookout" mocking Black History Month and culminating with a Ku Klux Klan hood on a campus statue. The Black Student Union demanded that the school increase its numbers of black students and faculty, calling them "embarrassingly low."

Bringing in black students has been a problem for all the University of California schools: Ending affirmative action caused a steep drop in black student enrollment across the system 14 years ago, especially at elite schools.

But the problem is especially marked at UCSD: Only 41 black freshmen enrolled out of 3,566 California students this fall, the lowest rate among all UC schools.

Several forces have kept black student numbers low on the leafy La Jolla campus. The San Diego school has trouble convincing black students who are admitted to say yes, partly because it plays second banana to more alluring schools, partly because of a bad reputation in the black community. It also uses an admissions formula that critics believe disadvantages black students because it doesn't adequately weigh their grades and scores against the opportunities they may or may not have.

Only 17 percent of black freshmen who were admitted to UCSD actually decided to go there last year, compared to 44 percent of black students admitted to Berkeley and 54 percent at UCLA. Black students are usually more likely to say yes to UC schools than their white and Asian classmates, but in San Diego, the exact opposite has happened.

"I even had kids choose Riverside over UCSD," said former Lincoln High principal Wendell Bass. "They don't see it as a place where black kids go."

But turning around the numbers won't be simple. It means changing the culture of the school, its reputation, and attracting black students without setting off affirmative action alarm bells.

♦♦♦

All students must take three steps before ending up at the elite San Diego school.

They have to earn the credits and grades to be eligible to apply in the first place. They must beat out other candidates for the selective school. And once they get accepted, they have to choose UCSD over other schools.

UCSD has struggled hardest with winning over accepted black students. UCSD is generally seen as less desirable than UCLA and Berkeley -- for all students. It lacks a vibrant center like Telegraph Avenue. It ranks lower on national

Sacramento arena task force picks Kamilos-Taylor plan for railyard site - Sacramento News - Local and Breaking Sacramento News | Sacramento Bee

The complicated land-swap plan that would put an arena at the downtown railyard is the city's best bet for a facility to replace Arco Arena, a task force appointed by Mayor Kevin Johnson will tell the City Council today.

The citizens panel, appointed by Johnson in November, has spent two months interviewing proponents of seven arena proposals.

Its much-anticipated recommendations were finalized Wednesday and have been closely guarded. The pitch will be delivered to the City Council during a special 11:30 a.m. session at City Hall.

The group will identify three or four of the proposals as worth city study, a source familiar with the findings says.

But task force leaders will say they believe the city's best chance of success appears to be a plan involving privatizing the Cal Expo site, moving the state fairgrounds to the Arco site in Natomas and building an arena on city-owned land next to the I Street train depot in the downtown railyard, the source says.

It's proposed by local developers Gerry Kamilos and David Taylor, and backed by the National Basketball Association and the Sacramento Kings.

The city already plans to build a major transit center at that site for trains, light rail and buses,

Celebrating America’s Confederate Heroes � The Quick and the Ed

The New York Times reports that the Texas school board’s proposed changes to the state’s social studies textbook standards include the following:

References to Ralph Nader and Ross Perot are proposed to be removed, while Stonewall Jackson, the Confederate general, is to be listed as a role model for effective leadership, and the ideas in Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address are to be laid side by side with Abraham Lincoln’s speeches.

Ideas from Davis’ inaugural address like this?

We are doubly justified by the absence of wrong on our part, and by wanton aggression on the part of others. There can be no cause to doubt that the courage and patriotism of the people of the Confederate States will be found equal to any measure of defence which may be required for their security. Devoted to agricultural pursuits, their chief interest is the export of a commodity required in every manufacturing country. Our policy is peace, and the freest trade our necessities will permit. It is alike our interest, and that of all those to whom we would sell and from whom we would buy, that there should be the fewest practicable restrictions upon interchange of commodities.

The Sacramento Coalition to Save Public Education opposes using Teach For America in SCUSD

The Sacramento Coalition to Save Public Education opposes using Teach For America in SCUSD

Dear Board Members,

The Sacramento Coalition to Save Public Education opposes using Teach For America in SCUSD. Today's editorial in the Bee says that Superintendent Raymond "sees potential for Teach for America at a handful of chronically struggling schools". It would be helpful if Superintendent Raymond would give the public an explanation of why he sees such potential in this program compared to the interns SCUSD currently works with from CSUS. You voted last Thursday to lay off hundreds of teachers. One week later SCUSD is linked to Teach for America. There is something very wrong with this sequence of events. Regardless of the rationale, the message is clear: Superintendent Raymond doesn't value the teachers at our "chronically struggling schools", does not see the connection between the schools and the impoverished communities where the students live, and has not taken into account the choices previous superintendents have made in dealing with those schools. This editorial will undoubtedly undo whatever good will Superintendent Raymond created in his first months on the job. Some of SCUSD's best, most effective teachers will read the editorial and decide to retire.

If Superintendent Raymond did not intend to demoralize the teaching staff who specialize in math, science, engineering and finance (most of which are only taught in high schools), he should ask to do a guest editorial and rebut the implications of the one in today's Bee.

Sincerely,

Heidi McLean, Chairperson

Sacramento Coalition to Save Public Education

What educators REALLY think about Race to the Top: The only survey that counts

March 11, 2:12 AM

Jacksonville Public Education Examiner

Steve DiMattia

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The Race to the Top is on. Will the children win?

www.dshs.state.tx.us/.../ children_running.jpg

Last week it was announced that Florida is one of 16 state finalists for Phase 1 of President Obama’s $4.35 billion Race to the Top (RT³) competition.

That means that Duval County is now one step closer to getting its potentially $21 million share of the estimated $700 million that Florida will collect if it is one of the winners. And money’s always good, right?

But what do educators REALLY think about RT³?

In a recent survey, Jacksonville’s educators came to the firm conclusion that it’s “too early to tell.”

But it turns out that that survey only told part of the story (and not even the interesting part). So now, only after promising that I would tell nothing but the partially fabricated truth, I’m going to let you in on the only survey that REALLY counts.

In a highly scientific poll distributed to millions of educators (which means that I made it up myself and basically only talked to one retired school librarian that I happened to share a crustless PB&J sandwich and a side of tater tots at lunch with in Memorial Park the other day), I’m going to let the cat out of the bag about what educators and other stakeholders are REALLY saying about RT³.

Don’t share this with too many people because it’s pretty classified stuff:

English teachers have read the rough draft and think it needs serious revising while
Art teachers have declared it to be a masterpiece.
Music teachers sang out, “The whole thing is out of tune” but
Special education teachers know it will work with some modifications.
School counselors earnestly asked, “How does it make YOU feel?” but

Philadelphia Public School Notebook

Notes from the news, Mar. 11

Submitted by Erika Owens on Thu, 03/11/2010 - 10:33 Posted in Notes from the news | Permalink

Phila. principal defended; cartoon denounced The Inquirer
An Inquirer political cartoon that showed South Philly Principal LaGreta Brown asleep at her desk caused quite a stir at the SRC meeting.

Opportunity to learn, rush to equity The Notebook blog
In this guest blog post Herbert Kohl laid out things we should think about when considering reauthorizing NCLB.

Teachers’ union endorses Onorato PA2010.com
The PSEA endorsed the Allegheny County Executive in the Democratic primary for governor.

Parent Teacher Conferences A Very Public Education blog
The tightly scheduled conferences don't leave much time to really discuss any issues students may be having.

Make Every School a Charter? Philly School Search blog

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Thursday, March 11, 2010