By Scott J. Cech

Education Week

Published Online: November 5, 2007

Despite dramatic growth in the number of high school students taking Advanced Placement courses, most of those classes teach material worthy of the name, according to the first-ever audit of AP-course quality.

The New York City-based College Board, the nonprofit organization that owns the Advanced Placement brand, said more than two-thirds of the 134,000 ostensible AP-course syllabuses submitted for review by teachers from 14,383 secondary schools around the world were immediately approved. College Board officials also said that approximately 17,000 teachers did not meet the initial criteria to submit a syllabus for the audit, which Trevor Packer, the vice president of the Advanced Placement program, described as “the largest curricular review that’s ever been undertaken in American history.”

However, College Board officials did not immediately provide a total number of courses that have been approved for posting on a new, searchable registry of AP classes, known as the “AP Course Ledger,” which was announced to the public today. Officials also said that, at this point, they could not provide a percentage of courses that had been rejected.

“As a result of this work, college-admissions officials, students, parents, and educators can have continued confidence that the AP designation on students’ transcripts is only allowed for syllabi that have been approved by college faculty,” Mr. Packer said.

The review, paid for by the College Board, analyzed AP-course documents that teachers submitted between January and June 1 of this year. The deadline for submitting syllabuses has been extended until this coming Jan. 31 for teachers of two new AP classes—Chinese and Japanese—and for some block-schedule teachers.

The course syllabuses were reviewed by 839 college and university professors in the 37 subject areas taught in AP classes, which are designed to teach college-level material and prepare students to pass end-of-course AP exams that can qualify them for college credit.

Teachers could consult a syllabus checklist the College Board posted on its Web site showing what ingredients their course outlines should have.

Guidance Offered

The College Board also posted evaluation guidelines for teachers, as well as several sample syllabuses for the 52-year-old AP program. About 67 percent of AP teachers’ course outlines were approved immediately. Teachers whose outlines were rejected on the first try were given two more chances to rejigger the documents, with feedback from the professors about how to improve their chances.

In at least one state, College Board officials went so far as to conduct in-person workshops to help teachers.

“It was about, ‘Here are the things we’re going to be looking for,’ ” said W. Tad Johnston, a mathematics specialist and regional representative for the Maine Department of Education, which invited the officials.

But the process was far from a cakewalk for some teachers, Mr. Johnston said—even those who have been teaching AP for years.

“We have an [AP] U.S. History teacher with a strong track record—a lot of her students score four or five [out of five possible points on their AP exams], and it’s rare she has a student score less than three, but her syllabus took several resubmissions,” he noted.

While some teachers only had to put in as few as three hours into preparing their syllabuses, Mr. Johnston added, some took up to 40 hours on the task.

“I’m not really surprised that AP courses are AP-level,” said Dan Fuller, the director of public policy for the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, an Alexandria, Va.-based nonprofit organization of about 180,000 administrators and teachers. “It’s sort of circular logic, but schools and educators know what they’re doing—they know what things are up to snuff and what aren’t.”

No ‘AP Study Hall’

The College Board has said it plans to follow up its reviews during the 2008-09 school year with a few in-person visits by professors to schools with especially low AP-exam scores. Mr. Packer said in an interview, however, that those observations of how syllabuses are being followed will only be conducted with advance notice.

While Mr. Packer conceded that prearranged visits would allow schools with subpar teaching to put a good face on potentially lackluster pedagogy, he said the audits were “not a policing mechanism. … [W]e are not a police force.”

Thomas Matts, the College Board’s director of the AP-course audit, said college-admissions offices have historically looked favorably on AP courses on students’ transcripts. Yet with the number of students taking AP classes jumping 150 percent in the past 10 years, “the admissions offices came to us asking us to provide them with some evidence that teachers … hadn’t watered down their standards to accommodate this fantastic growth.”

Barmak Nassirian, the associate executive director of the Washington-based American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, said colleges’ view of AP coursework’s rigor has dimmed over the years.

Over time, he said, “it became a tool solely for admission purposes, not as a [mark of an AP course’s] college equivalence, but even that began to suffer a little bit when course designation got a little loosey-goosey.”

Mr. Packer said the audit, which higher education officials asked in 2004 that the College Board conduct, was launched because, among other reasons, “[college-] admissions officers wanted assurance that ‘AP’ wasn’t being attached to courses that weren’t AP, and that any course labeled ‘AP’ had been examined by college faculty.” He said he had heard from admissions officials who were examining college applicants’ high school transcripts and wanted to know, for example, if there was really such a class as “AP Study Hall.”

October 30, 2007

Why They Called It the Manhattan Project

By WILLIAM J. BROAD

By nature, code names and cover stories are meant to give no indication of the secrets concealed. “Magic” was the name for intelligence gleaned from Japanese ciphers in World War II, and “Overlord” stood for the Allied plan to invade Europe.

Many people assume that the same holds true for the Manhattan Project, in which thousands of experts gathered in the mountains of New Mexico to make the world’s first atom bomb.
Robert S. Norris, a historian of the atomic age, wants to shatter that myth.

In “The Manhattan Project” (Black Dog & Leventhal), published last month, Dr. Norris writes about the Manhattan Project’s Manhattan locations. He says the borough had at least 10 sites, all but one still standing. They include warehouses that held uranium, laboratories that split the atom, and the project’s first headquarters — a skyscraper hidden in plain sight right across from City Hall.

“It was supersecret,” Dr. Norris said in an interview. “At least 5,000 people were coming and going to work, knowing only enough to get the job done.”

Manhattan was central, according to Dr. Norris, because it had everything: lots of military units, piers for the import of precious ores, top physicists who had fled Europe and ranks of workers eager to aid the war effort. It even had spies who managed to steal some of the project’s top secrets.

“The story is so rich,” Dr. Norris enthused. “There’s layer upon layer of good stuff, interesting characters.”

Still, more than six decades after the project’s start, the Manhattan side of the atom bomb story seems to be a well-preserved secret.

Dr. Norris recently visited Manhattan at the request of The New York Times for a daylong tour of the Manhattan Project’s roots. Only one site he visited displayed a public sign noting its role in the epochal events. And most people who encountered his entourage, which included a photographer and videographer, knew little or nothing of the atomic labors in Manhattan.

“That’s amazing,” Alexandra Ghitelman said after learning that the buildings she had just passed on inline skates once held tons of uranium destined for atomic weapons. “That’s unbelievable.”

While shock tended to be the main reaction, some people hinted at feelings of pride. More than one person said they knew someone who had worked on the secret project, which formally got under way in August 1942 and three years later culminated in the atomic bombing of Japan. In all, it employed more than 130,000 people.

Dr. Norris is also the author of “Racing for the Bomb” (Steerforth, 2002), a biography of Gen. Leslie R. Groves, the project’s military leader. As his protagonist had done during the war, Dr. Norris works in Washington. At the Natural Resources Defense Council, he studies and writes about the nation’s atomic facilities.

Dr. Norris began his day of exploration by taking the train to New York from Washington, coming into Pennsylvania Station just as General Groves had done dozens of times during the war to visit project sites.

“Groves didn’t want the job,” Dr. Norris remarked outside the station. “But his foot hit the accelerator and he didn’t let up for 1,000 days.”

For tour assistance, Dr. Norris brought along his own books as well as printouts from “The Traveler’s Guide to Nuclear Weapons,” a CD by James M. Maroncelli and Timothy L. Karpin that features little-known history of the nation’s atom endeavors.

We headed north to the childhood home of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the eccentric genius whom General Groves hired to run the project’s scientific side as well as its sprawling New Mexico laboratory. Last year, a biography of Oppenheimer, “American Prometheus” (Knopf, 2005), won the Pulitzer Prize.

“One of the most famous scientists of the 20th century,” Dr. Norris noted, got his start “walking these streets” and attending the nearby Ethical Culture School.

Oppenheimer and his parents lived at 155 Riverside Drive, an elegant apartment building at West 88th Street. The superintendent, Joe Gugulski, said the family lived on the 11th floor, overlooking the Hudson River.

“One of my tenants read the book,” Mr. Gugulski told us. “So I looked it up.” To his knowledge, Mr. Gugulski added, no other atomic tourists had visited the building.

The Oppenheimers decorated their apartment with original artwork by Picasso, Rembrandt, Renoir, Van Gogh and Cézanne, according to “American Prometheus.” His mother encouraged young Robert to paint.

By the late 1930s and early 1940s, blocks away at Columbia University, scientists were laboring to split the atom and release its titanic energies. We made our way across campus — with difficulty because of protests over the visit of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, which is widely suspected of harboring its own bomb program.

Dr. Norris noted that the Manhattan Project led to “many of our problems today.”

The Pupin Physics Laboratories housed the early atom experiments, Dr. Norris said. But the tall building, topped by observatory domes, has no plaque in its foyer describing its nuclear ties.

Passing students and pedestrians answered “no” and “kind of” when asked if they knew of the atom breakthroughs at Pupin Hall. Dr. Norris said the Manhattan Project, at its peak, employed 700 people at Columbia. At one point, the football team was recruited to move tons of uranium. That work, he said, eventually led to the world’s first nuclear reactor.

After lunch, we headed to West 20th Street just off the West Side Highway. The block, on the fringe of Chelsea, bristled with new galleries, and Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses. On its north side, three tall buildings once made up the Baker and Williams Warehouses, which held tons of uranium.

Two women taking a cigarette break said they had no idea of their building’s atomic past. “It’s horrible,” said one.

Dr. Norris’s “Traveler’s Guide” fact sheet said the federal government in the late 1980s and early 1990s cleaned the buildings of residual uranium. Workers removed more than a dozen drums of radioactive waste, according to the Department of Energy in Washington. “Radiological surveys show that the site now meets applicable requirements for unrestricted use,” a federal document said in 1995.

We moved to Manhattan’s southern tip and worked our way up Broadway along the route known as the Canyon of Heroes, the scene of many ticker-tape parades amid the skyscrapers.
At 25 Broadway, we visited a minor but important site — the Cunard Building. Edgar Sengier, a Belgian with an office here, had his company mine about 1,200 tons of high-grade uranium ore and store it on Staten Island in the shadow of the Bayonne Bridge. Though a civilian, he knew of the atomic possibilities and feared the invading Germans might confiscate his mines.

Dr. Norris said General Groves, on his first day in charge, sent an assistant to buy all that uranium for a dollar a pound — or $2.5 million. “The Manhattan Project was off to a flying start,” he said, adding that the Belgian entrepreneur in time supplied two-thirds of all the project’s uranium.

We walked past St. Paul’s Chapel and proceeded to the soaring grandeur of the Woolworth Building, once the world’s tallest, at 233 Broadway.

A major site, it housed a front company that devised one of the project’s main ways of concentrating uranium’s rare isotope — a secret of bomb making. On the 11th, 12th and 14th floors, the company drew on the nation’s scientific best and brightest, including teams from Columbia.

Dr. Norris said the front company’s 3,700 employees included Klaus Fuchs, a Soviet spy. “He was a substantial physicist in his own right,” Dr. Norris said. “He contributed to the American atom bomb, the Soviet atom bomb and the British atom bomb.”

So how did the Manhattan Project get its name, and why was Manhattan chosen as its first headquarters?

Dr. Norris said the answer lay at our next stop, 270 Broadway. There, at Chambers Street, on the southwest corner, we found a nondescript building overlooking City Hall Park.

It was here, Dr. Norris said, that the Army Corps of Engineers had its North Atlantic Division, which built ports and airfields. When the Corps got the responsibility of making the atom bomb, it put the headquarters in the same building, on the 18th floor.

“That way he didn’t need to reinvent the wheel,” Dr. Norris said of General Groves. “He used what he had at his fingertips — the entire Corps of Engineers infrastructure.”

Dr. Norris added that the Corps at that time included “extraordinary people, the best and brightest of West Point.”

In time, the office at 270 Broadway ran not only atom research and materials acquisition but also the building of whole nuclear cities in Tennessee, New Mexico and Washington State.
The first proposed name for the project, Dr. Norris said, was the Laboratory for the Development of Substitute Materials. But General Groves feared that would draw undo attention.
Instead, General Groves called for the bureaucratically dull approach of adopting the standard Corps procedure for naming new regional organizations. That method simply noted the unit’s geographical area, as in the Pittsburgh Engineer District.

So the top-secret endeavor to build the atom bomb got the most boring of cover names: the Manhattan Engineer District, in time shortened to the Manhattan Project. Unlike other Corps districts, however, it had no territorial limits. “He was nuts about not attracting attention,” Dr. Norris said.

Manhattan’s role shrank as secretive outposts for the endeavor sprouted across the country and quickly grew into major enterprises. By the late summer of 1943, little more than a year after its establishment, the headquarters of the Manhattan Project moved to Oak Ridge, Tenn.

Despite this dispersal, Dr. Norris said, scientists and businesses in Manhattan, including The New York Times, continued to aid the atomic project.

In April 1945, General Groves traveled to the newspaper’s offices on West 43rd Street. He asked that a science writer, William L. Laurence, be allowed to go on leave to report on a major wartime story involving science.

As early as 1940, before wartime secrecy, Mr. Laurence had reported on the atomic breakthroughs at Pupin Hall.

Now, Dr. Norris said, Mr. Laurence went to work for the Manhattan Project and became the only reporter to witness the Trinity test in the New Mexican desert in July 1945, and, shortly thereafter, the nuclear bombing of Japan.

The atomic age, Mr. Laurence wrote in the first article of a series, began in the New Mexico desert before dawn in a burst of flame that illuminated “earth and sky for a brief span that seemed eternal.”

In Manhattan, the one location that has memorialized its atomic connection had nothing to do with making or witnessing the bomb, but rather with managing to survive its fury.

The spot is on Riverside Drive between 105th and 106th Streets. There, in a residential neighborhood, in front of the New York Buddhist Church, is a tall statue of a Japanese Buddhist monk, Shinran Shonin, who lived in the 12th and 13th centuries. In peasant hat and sandals, holding a wooden staff, the saint peers down on the sidewalk.

The statue survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, standing a little more than a mile from ground zero. It was brought to New York in 1955. The plaque calls the statue “a testimonial to the atomic bomb devastation and a symbol of lasting hope for world peace.”

The statue stands a few blocks from Columbia University, where much of the bomb program began.

“I wonder how many New Yorkers know about it,” Dr. Norris said of the statue, “and know the history.”

Teacher Magazine

Grammar Interrupted

By Cindi Rigsbee

I worry about the English language. Thanks to new advances in technology, the impact of pop culture, and the increasing focus on tested areas of our curriculum, the Queen’s English is in more trouble than ever before. Until someone develops a high-stakes test on the use of the past participle, will anyone really be interested in how well our students are writing and speaking?

First, let's talk about technology. Spellcheck has clearly made the world lazy. Students think they don’t need to learn the rules of spelling and grammar because one click will do it for them.

These same students (and my own children) are addicted to Instant Messaging. My son, who in high school struggled with attention issues in the classroom, could sit at his computer desk at night and carry on 16 simultaneous conversations. Those conversations did not include correctly spelled words or any attempt at punctuation; in fact, IM-speak is actually meant to be incorrect, just so long as it’s fast! For an example, check out this excerpt from a MySpace page that belongs to a student at my school:

"wut it do i ain't talked 2 u n a minute ever since da last day of skool fo christmas break wut been ^ 2 me nuttin jus sittin @ home ain't gone nuttin 2 do........well i wuz jus stoppin by 2 sho ur page sum luvin get baq @ me when u can"

Enough said on that subject.

Pop culture plays a part in the slow, painful torture of correct English in another way, too. Songs on the radio reinforce incorrect usage of grammar (and have for years). Take this oldie from the 80's:

"I feel the magic between you and I" (from Eric Carmen's "Hungry Eyes" on the Dirty Dancing soundtrack).

I ask you, would the songwriter say, "Give it to I, baby!"?

In "Brick House," The Commodores sang, “Ain’t nothing wrong with dat.” This usage of non-standard English for emphasis is actually less offensive. Eric Carmen's use of “I” as an object of the preposition is an ill-fated attempt to sound formal, which adds pretentiousness to the list of crimes committed here.

And don’t get me started on Pink Floyd’s “We Don’t Need No Education.” Ugh. Who says?

Nostalgia for Diagramming

In addition, there has been an enormous shift in our schools in the way they teach—or don’t teach—grammar. We feel those tests looming, hanging in the air over us, gray clouds of reality waiting to descend in mid-May. My students have heard the morning announcements: “There are 165 days left until the end-of-grade test.” (Would the students tell on me if I attacked the intercom speaker with my yardstick?) Focusing on tested areas of the curriculum has often resulted in teachers being forced to give up instruction they love, including the fine points of English grammar.

I remember teaching diagramming. Sentence diagrams were the granddaddy of graphic organizers. I took pride in drawing those precise lines and knowing exactly where to place the indirect object. They were like perfect puzzles, and those of us who mastered them felt like we had just figured out how to do calculus to the third derivative (I don’t even know what I just said).

Not only did I teach diagramming, I taught parts of speech and had students do random, isolated sentences. I did realize that those exercises never seemed to transfer to a student's casual writing and speaking. Just because students could identify pronouns in a sentence didn’t mean they stopped saying, “Me and her need to go to the bathroom.” But we had to start somewhere! Nowadays, however, there is little room in the curriculum for such time-intensive instruction.

The Art of the Mini-Lesson

So what do we do? Sit back and watch our language continue to deteriorate? I, for one, refuse to go down without a fight. Here’s how I’ve changed my teaching:

First of all, I teach short mini-lessons on grammar. Nancie Atwell (In the Middle), Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell (Guiding Readers and Writers), and Lucy Calkins (The Art of Teaching Writing) have touted the mini-lesson for years. It's a short lesson focused on a specific principle or procedure. And for me, it works wonders for those irritating grammatical problems.

So, I'll play a bit of "Hungry Eyes," then say, “Class, why is it improper to say, ‘between you and I?’ How do we usually use the pronoun ‘I’?” I have the students provide a couple of sentences for the overhead, and we have a grand musically enhanced discussion!

On another day, I might ask the students to explain the different ways we speak to one another. I hope they’ll tell me that we speak more informally with our friends—the mode Ruby Payne (in A Framework for Understanding Poverty) calls “casual register.” I explain that we write that way, too, on our MySpace pages and in our text messages. However, formal writing calls for adhering to the conventions—“Remember that discussion we had about pronouns?”

And last, I hit ‘em where they live. I pull out examples of those MySpace pages and ask students to write them over in standard English. I tell them, “This is not art. No symbols – I want words!” Most of the time, they rise to the expectations that are placed on them.

Oh, and one more thing: I challenge them to represent themselves as being intelligent writers and speakers. With luck, one of them will grow up to write the songs. And I won't have to struggle to keep my car on the road when I listen to the radio.

Cindi Rigsbee is a National Board-certified middle grades teacher in Durham, N.C., and a former North Carolina regional teacher of the year. She was a finalist for the Terry Sanford Award for Creativity and Innovation in Teaching.

Plagiarism

Lauren McCabe writes:

As I sat at the airport last weekend, grading my students’ summer reading essays and waiting to take off, I was angry. Not because of the tardiness of my flight, but because I was looking at 15 plagiarized essays from my seniors, seniors who knew better. They had all summer to read a book and write this five-paragraph essay on any topic they wanted. After I read over two essays and saw the exact same words, sentences and paragraphs, it wasn't hard to figure out that these papers had been copied.

After talking with some of my colleagues over the weekend, I learned that plagiarism wasn’t a new concept at my school, Environmental Charter High School, and that most of the students on my list had turned in plagiarized work in the past. I began to wonder why students plagiarize. Could it really be that they were just too lazy to write their own papers? And the essay they turned in and tried to pass as their own was of very low quality. Didn’t they have respect for themselves and their abilities?

While I was venting my frustration to an administrator at my school, he offered a bit of insight into the community I teach in and he grew up in. He explained that the major battle these students are fighting every day does not necessarily come from an external source, but from within. The inferiority complex is a constant war within our students. They “dumbed down” their essays to a level so far below their actual writing abilities because they thought it would be more believable to me that way. They ran away from this challenge because they didn’t believe they could achieve on their own.

This is not to say “poor babies” or to give excuses for blatant plagiarism, but I think it is important to understand the mindsets with which our students walk into the classroom every day and ways by which we can expand those views. Pure laziness is only one possibility of many for explaining why students plagiarize, as is the inferiority complex. But until we consider all of the possibilities and stop labeling students, we will never solve the issue. Malleable intelligence, the concept of intelligence not being fixed, will be the first topic of discussion that I start off with in my next class.

This is simply immaturity, laziness and seeing if they could get away with it....
Here is what I do...I don't make a big deal about it. I just put a 0 on their papers and write, " Same as Julie's paper; 0 same as David's paper" I don't moralize, I don't lecture, I don't call their parents. It takes me 10 seconds to write it on the paper. I usually never have a plagiarism issue again.

I'm sure you gave your students the option to contact you should they run into difficulty and provided an email or phone number, so there really are no excuses for the plagiarism.

Again, in high school ,students must pass a class to move on to the next grade level , not like in middle school, which is another reason they are turning in poor quality work.

One practical thing you can do and you may already be doing this for students who have trouble structuring an essay is to write out five to seven sample topic sentences for each essay: The background sentence, thesis sentence and 3 to 5 supporting topic sentences and a concluding sentences and have them "build" the essay. This way they have a template to begin using. Santa Monica High School has a website with a paper called the "Sweet Sixteens of Good Writing" It is a helpful handout with sixteen boxes that offer tips on good writing.

Another hint, don't leave the topic wide open but give them five or six options. They still have choice but also have something concrete about which to write. Did you connect the essay to the book they were reading? This way they have to read the book to write about it in the essay.

Great job giving a summer assigment as you are way ahead of the game in knowing a little about each student and their work ethic. It also gives you information that allows you to adjust and correct what you want in your upcoming reading and essay assignments which puts you way ahead of the game. Keep it up!

Posted by: evelyn

Posted by: Anonymous

This is not your fault. It is a break down in the system. This is learned behavior that has most likely happened in the past without consequence.

In any serious academic institution, plagiarism is a serious offense. I hear you saying that the administrator, in sentiment, excused the behavior. Why didn't the administrator offer to come to your class and deal with this problem so you can focus your mind and energy on curricular and instructional issues?

I don't want to be too cynical, but I can guess at the answer. First, the system emphasizes attendance and seat time. Any serious discipline must have the possibility of suspension as its ultimate consequence. Administrators hate suspensions because it takes away from attendance and makes the school's discipline statistics look bad.

I like the advice of evelyn. Don't moralize on the issue, but absolutely don't accept plagiarism. The students will figure it out for themselves. You can focus on being the best English teacher you can be, and model professionalism to the students. Too many teachers stray the academic path in an attempt to be life coaches.

Posted by: David

The pattern of plagiarism that I've heard about is that in this internet age, the kids often have really bad process for their writing. So, you'll see a lone plagiarized sentence in a single paragraph, or you'll find that the student's work is a strange hybrid of original and plagiarized work, even when hunting down the material to plagiarize and weaving it into a coherent text must actually have been more work. They need extremely explicit instruction in how to write and how to include citations. You might want to explain to them that using citations impresses the teacher, because it demonstrates that you've done a lot of research.

Posted by: Amy P

Education Week

Reading Aid Seen to Lag in ELL Focus

By Mary Ann Zehr

Educators and experts across the country who work with English-language learners are moving toward a consensus that the federal Reading First program needs to be refined to become more effective for children acquiring English.

Administrators in several big-city districts with large numbers of such students are stepping up their training of teachers on how best to teach second-language learners to read under the No Child Left Behind Act’s flagship reading program, which serves grades K-3.

Last school year, the 410,000-student Chicago public school system established a new position at the district level for a bilingual specialist to coach teachers at the city’s 17 Reading First schools with large numbers of ELLs on how to tailor reading instruction to such students.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, where 38 percent of the 708,000 students are ELLs, started an institute for Reading First teachers this school year on reading strategies for ELLs.
And since last school year the 1.1 million-student New York City school system has been providing workshops and coaching to Reading First teachers and administrators on the same topic.

The U.S. Department of Education’s 11-member Reading First Advisory Committee has enough concerns about whether ELLs are getting what they need under the $1 billion-a-year program that it set up a subcommittee to look into the issue last week, according to Kris D. Gutiérrez, a committee member and a professor of social-research methodology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“My opinion is we have a long ways to go to meet the needs of English-language learners under the current policies and practices of Reading First,” Ms. Gutiérrez said. Among the program’s problems, she said, are that students’ reading skills are tested before they learn English, the literacy curriculum is too narrow, and teachers are not prepared to work with ELLs.

Education Department officials, asked last week if Reading First is working for ELLs, said “state-reported annual performance data show that many Reading First sites are showing improvements in reading fluency and comprehension for their English-language-learner students,” according to an e-mail message from Elaine Quesinberry, a spokeswoman for the department.

New Language

Concern about how to refine reading instruction for English-language learners also has spread to Capitol Hill.

A draft bill to reauthorize the NCLB law, put forth by the House Education and Labor Committee, calls for Reading First programs to be “linguistically appropriate”—a term not included in the current federal education law.

Rep. Rubén Hinojosa, a Texas Democrat and a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, was one of the lawmakers who helped get the phrase into the draft, according to Elizabeth Esfahani, his press secretary. The phrase is mentioned 11 times in the draft.

A number of reading experts and educators said that even though “linguistically appropriate” is a vague phrase, its addition to the law would likely be beneficial for English-learners.

“The advantage of the new [legislative] language is it’s going to nudge states and districts, as they submit their plans, to stress more how teacher training and coaching will lead to teaching English-language development better,” said Russell Gersten, the executive director of the Instructional Research Group, an educational research institute in Long Beach, Calif.
Mr. Gersten headed a panel for the Education Department to write a“practice guide” for education of English-language learners, released in July, and has been a consultant for Houghton Mifflin Company’s reading textbooks.

Margarita Calderón, a professor and research scientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, agrees with others who say Reading First has not worked well for ELLs. The additional language “would be an improvement,” she said, “because schools will have to be accountable and show they are doing this in a linguistically appropriate way.”

But, aside from agreeing on the need for more teacher training, educators’ views of how Reading First needs to be improved sometimes contradict each other, particularly on whether students’ native languages should be used to teach reading.

Mr. Gersten said teachers should teach English structures, such as “compare and contrast” or “cause and effect,” and help students practice them. It’s also helpful for teachers to preview reading lessons with students to ensure that they know what a story is about, he said. Pictures or Web sites can be useful for previewing, Mr. Gersten noted.

But he said it would be a mistake for the words “linguistically appropriate” to steer schools to use students’ native languages for reading instruction. He hasn’t found studies concluding that bilingual education is more effective than English-only methods to be persuasive.

On the other hand, Miriam Calderón, who is not related to Margarita Calderón and is a policy analyst at the Washington-based National Council of La Raza, said her group lobbied members of Congress to add linguistically appropriate to Reading First particularly for that purpose.

And Johns Hopkins’ Margarita Calderón believes that including the term “linguistically appropriate” in the law could encourage the teaching of reading to ELLs through their native languages at the same time they are learning English.

Varying State Policies

While reading experts favored the proposed changes in Reading First for ELLs, state education officials in several states with large populations of English-learners were indifferent. Officials in Arizona, California, and New Jersey all said they already are implementing Reading First in a linguistically appropriate way.

Their approaches, all approved by the Education Department, differ widely, however. State plans vary in how they implement the Reading First program for English-language learners.

Arizona

• Requires instruction and materials to be in English.

• No approved list of materials school districts must choose from.

California

• Requires school districts to select materials from an approved list that includes textbooks in Spanish and English. No separate textbooks designed for English-language learners.

• No separate block of time for English-language development.

New Jersey

• Requires that schools provide reading instruction in Spanish if they have a critical mass of Spanish speakers who are ELLs.

• Requires school districts to select materials from an approved list that includes textbooks in Spanish and English and has separate English-language development textbooks tailored for ELLs.

• In addition to the regular 90-minute reading block, schools must teach English-language development to ELLs for a minimum of 30 minutes each day.

SOURCES: State education departments in Arizona, California, and New Jersey

New Jersey, for instance, requires that Reading First schools provide instruction to ELLs in Spanish, while Arizona requires that all Reading First instruction be in English. California permits schools to use Spanish instruction for Reading First in bilingual classrooms that meet state restrictions for using that educational method.

New Jersey also requires schools to select Reading First materials from an approved list that includes core materials in Spanish or English and has separate materials for teaching English-language development to ELLs.

But California has not adopted separate materials for ELLs, and the state board of education’s refusal to enable such an adoption is controversial. In the state’s next adoption process, however, textbook publishers will have to meet specified criteria to address the needs of ELLs. For example, they will need to provide ideas for teachers to preview reading lessons for ELLs.
Shelly Spiegel-Coleman, the executive director of Californians Tomorrow, a coalition of 17 groups that advocate in behalf of ELLs, said the increasing gap in reading achievement in California between native speakers of English and ELLs demonstrates that the nearly 6-year-old Reading First program isn’t working.

As evidence, she said the achievement gap in reading between native speakers of English and ELLs in Los Angeles schools, the state’s school system with the most ELLs, has stayed the same or widened from last year to this year at every grade level tested. Ms. Spiegel-Coleman, who just retired as director of the multilingual-academic-support unit of the Los Angeles County Office of Education, criticized the Open Court Reading materials used for the program, and also said the instruction gave students little chance to practice English. The core language arts series is published by SRA/McGraw-Hill.

Julie Slayton, the executive director of strategic planning and accountability for the Los Angeles school district, said the Open Court materials are high-quality, but noted that the quality of instruction “varies widely.”

David L. Brewer III, the superintendent for LAUSD, said in an e-mail message that, like any other materials, Open Court “gets results when skillful teachers use it properly.” He said the Open Court program “will need to be modified somewhat to better accommodate ELL students, especially teacher professional development,” which he expects to happen in the next textbook-adoption cycle.

The addition of the phrase “linguistically appropriate” to the federal education law, Ms. Spiegel-Coleman believes, would force California officials and school districts to do more for ELLs.
“California has a reading initiative, and Reading First is just more of the same—more assessments, coaches, more intensity, more monitoring.” She added, “You can’t do the same old thing. If you have kids who don’t speak English in Reading First who aren’t doing well, you have to do something else.”

Maine’s Laptops Found to Aid Writing Scores

By The Associated Press

Maine’s program to give every 7th and 8th grade student a laptop computer is leading to better writing. 4real!

Despite creating a language all their own using e-mail and text messages, students are still learning standard English, and their writing scores improved on the state’s standardized writing test in 2005 compared with 2000, before laptop computers were distributed, according to a new study.

Students’ writing skills were higher whether they took the online or pen-and-paper version of the state test. Yet students who said they use laptops in more phases of the writing process scored significantly higher than students who use them in fewer phases or not at all, the study found.

“If you concentrate on whether laptops are helping kids achieve 21st-century skills, this demonstrates that it’s happening in writing,” said David L. Silvernail, the director of the Maine Education Policy Research Institute at the University of Southern Maine in Gorham.

The study by Mr. Silvernail and Aaron K. Gritter is the first in a series that aims to evaluate the impact on student achievement and learning of Maine’s first-in-the-nation laptop program. Next year, the researchers plan to release a study on the laptops’ impact in math instruction.

The laptop program, which seeks to eliminate the “digital divide” between poor and wealthy students, kicked off with distribution of more than 30,000 computers to 7th and 8th graders in public schools in 2002 and 2003. Their teachers also received laptops, as well as training in how to use them in instruction.

The study focused on 8th graders’ scores on the Maine Educational Assessment to see if the standardized-test results backed up perceptions among students and teachers that laptops have led to better writing skills.

State Commissioner of Education Sue Gendron said it represents the first concrete evidence backing up what most educators already feel: The laptop program, known as the Maine Learning Technology Initiative, is working.

“It’s about enhancing learning opportunities, and the evidence and the data we’ve received in this report substantiates that this is the right approach,” she said.

Honing Language Skills

Maine Education Assessment scores show that 49 percent of 8th graders were proficient in writing in 2005, compared with 29 percent in 2000.

The gain wasn’t just a function of taking the writing portion of the test using a computer and keyboard. Students who used pen and paper and students who used a computer keyboard showed similar improvement on the test, Mr. Silvernail said.

For the same period, math scores were unchanged, and science scores grew by 2 points, while reading scores actually dropped by 3 points, Mr. Silvernail said. Writing showed the biggest improvement—7 points, from 530 to 537, he said.

Mr. Silvernail said it is unrealistic to expect big increases on standardized tests tied to laptops, but writing is the exception.

Laptops make it easier for students to edit their copy and make changes, he said. And it was important, he said, that those skills translated when the test was taken with pen and paper.
Students who, in a survey that accompanied the 2005 test, reported using their laptops in all phases of the writing process were twice as likely to have met proficiency than students who said they did not use their laptops in writing, the study found.

Virginia Rebar, the principal of Piscataquis Community Middle School, was not surprised by the results, because language skills are being developed every time the computers are used, in social studies and other subjects beyond language arts.

“It’s just a lot easier to edit, to self-critique. Our teachers engage students in a lot of peer-editing. Not only are they helping themselves, but they’re helping each other as they get to their final projects,” she said.

Teaching Secrets: Organizing Middle Schoolers

By Laurie Wasserman

Teacher Magazine

What characteristic is most common among brand-new middle school students? It's not a physical trait (they come in an amazing assortment of shapes and sizes) or an emotional state (adolescents are famous for their mood swings). What they most have in common is this: They are disorganized. And why wouldn't they be? In most cases, new 6th graders have spent their first five years of school with a single teacher for the majority of the day. They entered elementary school each morning, hung up their coats, and stowed away their lunch boxes. Their homework, pencils, lunch money, and personal gear were stuffed in a nearby book bag or in their desk. Their textbooks were neatly stacked in a single, familiar classroom. Now, suddenly, they're middle schoolers, and the world's turned upside down.

They are given a combination lock, a hallway locker, a homeroom, and a schedule that often has four or more subject-area teachers whom they will see on any given day. There's more work to do – and more teachers who expect them to do it. This is where the child with significant organizational challenges becomes both overwhelmed and frustrated.

As educators, what can we do to support these students who often come to our classrooms without their necessary materials and homework assignments? Here are some tips from my special education classroom that can help any student bring order to chaos.

Agenda Books – If a school can provide each child with an agenda or assignment book, this is a terrific, consistent strategy. There are companies that sell them for $5 or less. Teachers can begin their classes by asking students to take out their agenda notebooks, and then write the next homework assignment on the board as students jot it down. In my own classroom, I stroll around the room checking to make sure each of my students has copied the assignment down correctly and written it in the right place (middle schoolers will often write it in the wrong day – or month!). If funds aren't available to purchase agenda books, I’ve run off assignment checklists on the copy machine and distributed them each Monday in stapled sets of five. It’s not as ideal, but still quite feasible.

Schoolnotes.com – This is a free Internet tool that allows educators to post our assignments online. All a parent or student needs to do is go to the site (from home or a public library) and type in their zip code. Any teacher who uses the service will be listed in alphabetical order, under the name of the school, and by grade or subject. Teachers can also provide their school email address, in case a parent or student needs homework clarification at night or wants to send a document when there's no printer available. Many parents who have Internet access at their jobs welcome the opportunity to check their child’s next-day assignments before they leave work. Imagine the look on their child’s face the first time mom or dad asks them if they brought home their study guides for tomorrow’s science test!

Preparation Grade – As a strategy to promote organization, I count preparation as part of my students' overall subject grade. I allow them to go to their lockers, if they forget a book or a pencil. But each trip to the locker costs them 1 point from their preparation grade. It sounds harsh (and most of my students have ADD/ADHD), but I find if they know my policy ahead of time, and I’m consistent with it, they learn by trial and error. I also loan them pencils, but ask for a sneaker as collateral. Their missing sneaker helps them to remember to return the pencil as they leave the room.

The Absent-Student Crate – I print assignments out and place them in a 3-ring binder titled "Schoolnotes," which resides in the Absent-Student Crate. This gives the kids a running record of what assignments they have missed while they were out. I also keep a 3-ring binder for each subject I teach, with the various handouts I have distributed, so the students have an archive to reference. I keep track of who's absent by asking the student who is passing out papers to write the names of any absentee on the handout and place it in an accordion folder also kept in the crate. When the absent child returns, I remind him or her to check the crate for any handouts or incomplete assignments. Basically, I'm modeling good organization for my kids.

The I.O.U. Board – I have an I.O.U area on my board with the assignments students owe me (with their names listed below each assignment). If a child is absent during a test, or owes me a project, he or she can immediately see their debt. In my special ed classes, I also use this for students who owe work to their mainstream teachers.

The TEAM Homework Area – I keep a running list of all homework assigned by the teachers on my 6th grade teams. The students can refer to this board if they've forgotten to copy any assignments down in other classes. I also utilize this board for my regular-education homeroom students.

Pocket folders, a cheap way to help kids – An inexpensive way for students to keep track of various written assignments they need to complete is to take a 2-pocket folder, available at any office supply store, and label the left side with “To Do” and the right side with “Completed.” They are ONLY allowed to put works-in-progress in this pocket folder. Once the assignments have been completed, the work can be transferred to the appropriate binders or notebooks that the teacher may require.

A final thought: Kids will be kids. It’s hard sometimes to realize that students don’t deliberately misplace papers, forget pencils, or lose track of assignments. They just don't have our experience or habits of mind. It’s our job to teach them the tools and strategies for getting organized and feeling successful.

Laurie Wasserman is a 6th grade special educator in Medford, Massachusetts. A National Board Certified Teacher, she works with students who have learning disabilities, both in self-contained and mainstream classrooms.

Education Week

By Sterling C. Lloyd

In 2007, an estimated 1.2 million students failed to earn high school diplomas with their graduating class. Given that high school graduates, on average, enjoy higher earnings and require fewer government services than non-graduates, the costs of dropping out are high for both individuals and the nation as a whole. As a result, effective interventions that help keep students in school are likely to pay significant dividends. This is especially true if they successfully target those most at risk of dropping out. This Stat of the Week examines the high school pipeline in order to find the point at which the most students are lost.

The 2007 edition of Education Week's annual Diplomas Count report analyzes the high school graduation process as a series of grade-to-grade promotions using the Cumulative Promotion Index. The CPI allows researchers to pinpoint where, in the high school pipeline, students are lost. The results show that the 9th grade is the leading source of student loss. In fact, more than one-third of non-graduates, in the class of 2003-04, failed to make the transition from 9th to 10th grade. This finding suggests that programs to increase graduation rates may need to help 9th graders get off to a good start in high school.

Where are students lost?

Nationally, more than one-third of the students lost from the high school pipeline failed to move from 9th to 10th grade.

Understanding the causes underlying freshman-year loss could be crucial for improving the prospects of youth at-risk of dropping out. To that end, a July 2007 report from the Consortium on Chicago School Research identified four predictors of whether Chicago public high school students would graduate within four years. The researchers found that 9th graders were more likely to graduate on time if they: (1) remained on-track (by accumulating at least ten semester credits and earning no more than one semester "F" in a core academic course), (2) earned higher GPAs, (3) failed fewer semester course, and (4) had fewer absences.

The report notes that, "for many students, freshman year is like a bottleneck" where sub par academic performance puts them so far behind that they are unable to catch up. This finding about the 9th grade underscores the importance of reform strategies designed to assist students early in high school. The Chicago researchers suggest that interventions such as summer school and tutoring programs would be more effective by targeting students who fail one to four courses in the freshman year.

October 3, 2007

Contact: Heather Reams

Director of Communications

Association of American Educators

1-877-385-6264

heather@aaeteachers.org

Teacher Survey Sheds New Light on Performance Pay Debate

Alexandria, VA—Today the Association of American Educators (AAE), the largest national independent non-union teachers’ association, released its second survey on No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Survey results showed distinct differences in opinion with teacher labor unions, particularly with regard to performance pay and the use of “growth models” for accountability, both of which give teachers credit for student academic gains made during the school year.

The 1,286 respondents, all of whom are active classroom educators, appear to agree with the language that is currently in a draft bill of NCLB in Congress that encourages districts to implement some kind of performance-base pay system for teachers.

“Teachers know better than anyone what parts of NCLB work and what parts need to be improved or removed all together,” said Gary Beckner, AAE Executive Director. “This survey shows, however, that there are thousands of teachers who do not agree with the agenda for NCLB that is being pushed by the teacher unions.”

Some results of the survey are as follows:

70% of respondents say that traditional compensation systems based simply on the highest degree earned and time in the system should be improved upon; 63% say they would accept additional compensation based on the tested academic growth of their students over a school year; 59% say they should receive a bonus if their students achieve higher student achievement gains than other teachers teaching the same type of students; Members stated that student achievement gains and classroom evaluations were the top two measures of their work.

“Clearly educators want to be evaluated and compensated just like other professions,” said Beckner. “If teachers want different pay options to reward them for good work, they should have them.”

When teachers were asked about “growth models” for accountability, 81% supported adding a growth model component to NCLB.

A growth model gives credit to teachers and schools for academic gains each student makes from their initial baseline during the school year. This is especially important for teachers working with students who begin the school year several grade levels behind. Most educators agree that this is a more fair and accurate representation of a child's true academic progress.

The majority of teachers – 84% – agree with both the state and federal criteria for Highly Qualified Teacher status.

The responses were not all positive. Teachers believe that it is an unrealistic goal for all students to be on grade level by 2014.

Complete results of the survey, which ended on September 17, can be found at http://www.aaeteachers.org/AAE%20Survey%20October%202007.pdf

Dedicated to the academic and personal growth of every student, the Association of American Educators is the premier educators’ network that advances the teaching profession through teacher advocacy and protection, professional development and promoting excellence in education so that educators receive the respect, recognition and reward they deserve. AAE has members in all 50 states and welcomes professionals from all education entities. www.aaeteachers.org

Las Vegas Review-Journal

EDITORIAL: In the classroom

Compulsory attendance; administrators as teachers

The Clark County School Board last week moved to put in place a couple of changes approved by the Legislature earlier this year -- one that makes eminent sense, and one that doesn't.
First, the good news.

The board voted unanimously to implement a modest proposal to require that administrators actually spend some time in the classroom.

Under the plan, school district bureaucrats -- including Superintendent Walt Rulffes -- will teach or observe in a classroom for at least a half-day each school year.

No, a half-day isn't much, but it's a start toward recognizing complaints from teachers that administrators are out of touch with the day-to-day realities of the district's operations. And if administrators try to slide on this mandate -- for instance, by showing a video instead of actually trying to engage students -- let's hope teachers blow the whistle.

Predictably, Steve Augspurger of the Clark County Association of School Administrators union -- Question for another day: Why do bosses need a union? -- was whining about the requirement.

"If anybody should be observing classrooms, it should be the legislators who passed this law," he said. "We can't find enough qualified teachers. We can't find enough substitutes. So you exacerbate the problem by having administrators teach who may not have taught in a long time."

Forcing district desk jockeys to spend three hours a year in an actual classroom will cause problems? Boo hoo. Sell it to the rank and file.

Mr. Rulffes said he'd do his part, entering a classroom to teach algebra or maybe geometry. Perhaps he can concoct a formula to explain the relationship between school spending and student achievement.

Now, the bad news.

In approving the "administrators in the classroom" plan, the board also OK'd a provision raising the compulsory attendance age to 18 from 17. That means a student who hasn't yet completed his senior year in high school couldn't voluntarily leave until he turned 18.

Now, this isn't as bad as the plan floated earlier this year by the National Education Association to force kids to stay in school until the age of 21 -- really -- but it's certainly moving in that direction.

What exactly is the point? To lower the dropout rate? To encourage more students to attend college? Is there any evidence this will work? None that anybody offered to the board on Thursday evening.

And why do we want to clog up classrooms with 17-year-olds who obviously have no desire to be on campus? Is this good for the students who are truly trying to learn? How?
In fact, such students can cause disruptions that sidetrack teachers and distract other students.

Kids are already held in captivity by the public school system for 11 years. If the district hasn't succeeded by then in equipping a student with the basics he needs to survive in the real world, what good is another year going to do?

If this proposal is about easing the dropout rate or some other policy goal, it's doomed to failure. If it's a way for the district to secure funding by keeping more butts in the seats, it's shameful.

High-Achieving Students From Lower-Income Families Fall Behind, Study Finds

By Catherine Gewertz

Education Week

The educational accountability movement’s keen focus on bringing all students to academic proficiency risks leaving behind a group of particularly promising students: high-achieving children from lower-income families, a report released today contends.

The study analyzes national data to track the school performance of about 3.4 million K-12 children who come from households with incomes below the national median but score in the top quartile on nationally normed tests. It finds that they start school with weaker academic skills and are less likely to flourish over the years in school than their peers from better-off families.

Civic Enterprises LLC, a Washington-based research and public-policy group, and the Lansdowne, Va.-based Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, which co-produced the “Achievement Trap” study, urged researchers and policymakers to better understand the dynamics that allow high-achieving, lower-income children to fall behind, and to focus concerted attention on ways to help them.

“By reversing the downward trajectory of their educational achievement, we will not only improve their lives but strengthen our nation by unleashing the potential of literally millions of young people who could be making great contributions to our communities and country,” the report says.

The report’s release coincided with testimony by one of its authors before the education committee of the U.S. House of Representatives on possible revisions to the No Child Left Behind Act. Joshua S. Wyner, the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation’s executive vice president, urged federal lawmakers to broaden the law’s focus so that schools are held accountable for improving the performance of higher-achieving as well as lower-achieving students.

Hobbled From the Start

Higher-achieving children from lower-income families enter school with a disadvantage that shows up in their national test scores, the report says. More than 70 percent of 1st graders who score in the top quartile are from higher-income families, and fewer than three in 10 are from lower-income families.

In the ensuing years, the higher-achieving lower-income children are more likely to lose ground, according to the study. For instance, 44 percent fall out of the top quartile in reading between the 1st and 5th grades, compared with 31 percent of high achievers whose family income is above the national median, which was $48,200 in 2006, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
They are also more likely to drop out of high school or not graduate on time than those from economically better-off families, the study found. The difference persists through college and graduate school, with lower-income students less likely to attend the most selective colleges or to graduate.

The report does offer some optimistic notes. Of the higher-achieving students, it says, 93 percent of those from lower-income families, and 97 percent of those from higher-income families, graduate from high school in four years. Those rates are much better than the 70 percent of all students on average that researchers estimate get their diplomas on time. But the data still show too many “unrelenting inequities” that harm the prospects of capable children from lower-income families, the authors say.

The data also suggest the distance still to be traveled in understanding and addressing the dynamics in racial achievement gaps.

Among lower-income students, Asians showed a significantly better chance of staying in the top quartile in math during high school than did other students, and African-American students were the least likely group to rise into that top tier in reading or math, according to the report.
Michelle M. Fine, a professor of social psychology and urban education at the City University of New York, said she welcomed the examination of how economic class can affect children’s education. But addressing the needs of all disadvantaged children, she said, entails a more nuanced examination of how race and class intersect to influence their performance.

“Something is clearly working for those lower-income Asian kids that isn’t working for the lower-income black kids,” she said, referring to the racial-performance breakdowns among lower-income students in the report. “A class-only analysis isn’t going to give us the whole picture.”
Solutions must go beyond the policy thrust advocated in the study, she said, to systemic improvements in districtwide school financing, equitable distribution of highly skilled teachers, and access to quality preschool.

House Plan Embraces Subjects Viewed as Neglected

By Kathleen Kennedy Manzo

Education Week

Advocates for broadening the curriculum hope a draft House proposal for reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act will give a boost to history, art, music, and other subjects that they believe have been marginalized in many districts under the 5½-year-old federal law.
The draft of changes to Part A of the Title I program , released by Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., Rep. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon, RCalif., and key colleagues late last month, features potential incentives for states to test students in core subjects other than those now required—mathematics, reading, and, beginning this school year, science.

“It’s a good start … and encouraging that Congressmen Miller and McKeon are showing sensitivity to the criticism that there has been a narrowing of the curriculum” under No Child Left Behind, said Jack Jennings, the president of the Center on Education Policy, and a former aide to House Democrats. “If school districts can include testing in other subjects [in gauging how well their schools are doing], it allows them to pay more attention to those other areas.”

A report released in July by the CEP, a research and advocacy organization based in Washington, found that most districts have significantly increased instructional time in reading and math in the hope of improving student achievement and helping schools meet goals for adequate yearly progress, or AYP, under the federal law. The law requires testing in those two subjects annually in grades 3-8 and once during high school.

As a result of that emphasis, nearly half the nation’s school districts pared down instructional time in other critical subjects by more than two hours each week, according to the report. ("Survey: Subjects Trimmed To Boost Math and Reading," Aug. 1, 2007.)
Other surveys and reports have confirmed that trend.

Grants and Measures
The preliminary House Education and Labor Committee plan would allow states to include student scores from state tests in history and other subjects as additional measures of how schools were performing. Those test scores would be given a fraction of the weight of math and reading results in determining AYP. The use of multiple measures would give states more information on school performance, said Mr. Miller, the chairman of the committee, whose ranking Republican is Mr. McKeon.

“We address the question that’s been raised, … whether NCLB is driving the narrowing of curriculum by school districts responding [to the law] simply by teaching to the test,” Mr. Miller said in a conference call with reporters last week. “Instead of using one multiple-choice test on one day,” he said, “we ought to allow schools to provide additional information that would give a more comprehensive and accurate picture of how schools are doing.”

The discussion draft also proposes a grant program for districts to strengthen instruction in “music and arts, foreign languages, civics and government, economics, history, geography, and physical education and health as an integral part of the elementary and secondary school curriculum.” It does not specify funding levels or say how many grants would be available.
According to Martin West, a professor of education at Brown University in Providence, R.I., who has studied the impact of the NCLB law and state tests on the school curriculum, the prospective grants would likely be less of an inducement to enhancing state testing programs than the multiple-measures provision.

“The testing proposal is potentially important to states that might want to consider testing in other subjects,” he said, “because doing so under the current NCLB creates a divergence between the state system and federal system.” The Miller-McKeon draft plan “would remove an important disincentive,” Mr.West said.

Some educators said they were encouraged by the plan.
“The notion that only very practical training equips you to deal with life and the world that we live in goes against every educational tradition for thousands of years,” said Theodore K. Rabb, a professor emeritus of world history at Princeton University and board chairman of the National Council for History Education, in Westlake, Ohio. Mr. Rabb asked the council’s membership this past summer to write Congress about their concerns over reductions in history education.
“This proposal is the most encouraging single thing that has happened lately,” he said, “that [lawmakers] are beginning to realize that there is a problem.”

Debate Over Merit Pay Heats Up

By The Associated Press in Teacher Magazine

Washington

The head of the nation's largest teacher's union and a top House Democrat had a testy exchange Monday over the inclusion of merit pay in an updated version of the No Child Left Behind education law.

California Rep. George Miller, chairman of the House education committee, criticized National Education Association President Reg Weaver for rejecting the merit-pay proposal.
The exchange occurred during a hearing into the renewal of the five-year-old education law, which requires annual testing in reading and math and imposes sanctions on schools that fail to hit progress goals.

Miller included the teacher pay plan in draft legislation circulating on Capitol Hill.
The proposal would give bonuses, worth up to $10,000 in most cases, to "outstanding" teachers. The proposal doesn't spell out who would be eligible for the extra money but says raising student test scores must be a factor.

Weaver said that level of detail should be bargained locally, not spelled out by Congress. The NEA has long opposed linking individual student scores to teachers' pay, though many local teachers unions across the country are agreeing to such proposals. Most notable is a popular plan in Denver.

Miller noted that Weaver previously supported teacher-related legislation that included the same merit-pay proposal, but Weaver said the union gave general support for that overall bill, not the pay plan specifically.

That nuance didn't sit well with Miller. Growing visibly angry, he said: "You can dance all around you want. You approved the language."

The union, which has more than 3 million members, is actively lobbying against the draft legislation. The union is influential, particularly with Democrats who often benefit from the NEA's political backing.

"Our members are united and will stand firm in our advocacy for a bill that supports good teaching and learning and takes far greater steps toward creating great public schools for every child," Weaver said during the hearing.

The draft bill also would change the law to allow schools to get credit for tests in subjects other than math and reading. And it would measure the performance of individual students over time rather than comparing the scores of students in a certain grade to students in that grade the year before, a change that is generally popular.

Miller said he hopes the full House will take up the renewal of the law this fall. Senate lawmakers also are in the process of writing legislation.

Help with test may lead to suspensions

Teachers would get five days for reading questions to students

By Emily Richmond

Las Vegas Sun

Apparently believing their students were being set up to fail, two Clark County special education teachers refused to follow testing regulations and instead read aloud the questions on a statewide reading exam.

The state education department has recommended the teachers each be suspended for five days, even though Keith Rheault, Nevada's superintendent of public instruction, originally wanted them suspended for 30 days.

The incident took place March 22 at Doris French Elementary School during a standardized test used to measure student progress, as required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Schools that score poorly face progressively harsher penalties.

The suspensions must be approved by the State Board of Education, which oversees teacher licensing issues. Darrin Purana, assistant director of employee-management relations for the Clark County School District, said he could not discuss the specifics of the incident at French. However, his office conducts its own investigation when this type of situation arise s , and teachers can face penalties at the district level as well, Purana said.

Rheault said he supported the scaled-back sanctions after taking a closer look at the circumstances. He said it's possible the teachers were trying to spare the students from what was perceived as an unreasonable demand for performance, rather than attempting to inflate test scores.

Although the U.S. Education Department has expanded the list of how students with special needs can be accommodated in testing, teachers say the questions are still beyond the grasp of many of their pupils. Students not fluent in English also struggle with the tests.

In cases similar to what happened at French, teachers' actions, although misguided, are often an "act of caring," said Sue Daellenbach, testing director for the Clark County School District.
"Taking these tests can be a stressful thing for students, particularly those who are severely disabled," Daellenbach said. "Teachers are by nature caring people, and it's a tough thing to have to watch your kids struggle. But even if you think you're helping your student, you still have to follow the law."

At French, "the teachers admitted they were aware it is not permissible to read a reading test aloud, but believed they were acting in the best interest of the students," according to a state report summarizing the incident.

In addition to the suspensions, the state recommended a letter of admonition be placed in each teacher's personnel file.

The names of the teachers involved were not released by the district. Three other Nevada teachers were charged with improperly helping students with tests during the 2006-07 school year. Two teachers received 30-day suspensions, and the remaining case is to be heard next week.