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.

For cheaters, iPods are playing their song

Students use devices to save answers, data for exam day, state report says

By Emily Richmond

Las Vegas Sun

Move over, cell phones and calculators. There's a new device joining the list of banned items for Nevada's test-taking students - the iPod.

The usual suspects - cell phones, passed notes and the good ol' peek over the shoulder - still lead the list of cheating techniques.

But the state education department's annual report on testing improprieties for the first time includes incidents of students sneaking iPods into exams. In some cases teachers allowed the devices to be used, apparently unaware they could help student s cheat.

"Kids are getting clever, aren't they?" said Sue Daellenbach, testing director for the Clark County School District.

Keith Rheault, Nevada's superintendent of instruction, said iPods may not seem like an obvious choice for cheaters. But "you can put anything on those things," Rheault said, including audio recordings of class lectures, recitations of mathematical formulas or other content that could help a student answer questions on an exam.

The report itemizes all testing mishaps and cheating reported by schools on the high school proficiency exams and standardized tests given in grades three through eight. The tests are used in part to measure student progress under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Students must pass the high school proficiency exam to graduate.

For the 2006-07 academic year, more than 300,000 students were tested at more than 600 locations. There were 130 reported irregularities, such as missing answer sheets, a 10 percent drop from the prior year.

The total includes 47 incidents of students cheating, a slight increase over the prior academic year but more than double the 23 incidents reported in 2004-05. Educators say the cheating figures for the past two years can be considered a trend, even though the raw numbers are low in the context of the number of tests taken.

Rheault said he wants schools to tackle the largest source s of problems - cheating with electronic devices, and teachers misunderstanding what kinds of extra help they are allowed to give students with special needs.

"We're still getting a lot of teachers who either didn't provide accommodations when they could have, or provided them when they shouldn't have," Rheault said.

Part of the problem is that Clark County, which accounts for about 70 percent of the state's K-12 students, has to train more than 2,000 new teachers annually in proper testing procedures and policy.

"There's a constant learning curve," Daellenbach said. "Even with the best training , there are going to be schools that have someone doing something for the first time, and there are going to be human errors."

Among the reported incidents:

• At an alternative high school in Carson City, a teacher's cell phone rang during the math proficiency test . He left the room to take the call. When later questioned, 15 students admitted either cheating or using their cell phones during his absence. The tests were invalidated.

• At Churchill County High School, two students turned in identical answer sheets on the math proficiency test after helping each other with the answers. They were also permitted to listen to their iPods during the exam.

• At the Clark County School District's Community College West High School, a student was observed using his cell phone during the 11th grade writing proficiency test. The student later admitted using the phone to look up a vocabulary word.

• Testing at four schools was interrupted by fire alarms. Three may have been caused by pranksters, but at Mt. Charleston Elementary School in Nye County, there actually was a fire.

House Education Leaders Issue Draft NCLB Renewal Plan

By David J. Hoff and Alyson Klein

Education Week

The leaders of the House education committee today released a draft of a plan for reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act, outlining proposals that would revise how adequate yearly progress is calculated and overhaul the interventions for schools failing to meet achievement goals.

In releasing the long-awaited plan, Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., and Rep. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif., said that they were inviting comments from educators so that they can incorporate their ideas into the bill they hope to introduce shortly after Labor Day.

You can read the rest of this Education Week article by clicking here.

Teaching Secrets: Establishing Your Professional Identity

By David Cohen

Teacher Magazine

By changing jobs several times earlier in my teaching career, I had a chance to work in schools large and small, public and private, in various regions, and even in another country. Here’s a paradox I’ve observed: Schools are like people—unique and yet predictable.

For all the factors that make a given school different from others, there are certain types of people and situations you can expect to encounter. But, as a new staff member, you will learn not only about teaching in this new setting, but also about fitting into the school culture, and working with new colleagues. And although the students and the classroom are your top priorities, it’s never too early to think carefully about how early experiences in your career can help you establish a professional identity—about how you can collaborate with others and engage in the profession. Here are some hints to help you think about and establish a professional identity.

First, find your allies. Whether they are teachers, custodians, secretaries, parents, librarians, aides, coaches, or counselors, these are the people who want to help you succeed with students. You’ll hear this advice from others who quite rightly want you to recognize how these people contribute to your effectiveness in the classroom. But, besides helping you in your teaching, true allies will start motivating you and validating your efforts, even beyond what you might think you deserve. Consider what a vote of confidence does for your students, and give yourself permission to actively seek out the same for yourself.

I worked in one school where a custodian, adopting a parental tone, said, “I always look out for my teachers,” and often told me how great I was, though she never saw me teach. Thinking back several more years, I recall another ally, Jean, who became an early mentor to me because of her sincere curiosity. She would always ask me, a student teacher at the time, how she, a thirty-year veteran, could improve a lesson I observed. She was a model of inclusive, reflective, and collaborative professionalism.

New teachers have intelligence, energy, and a fresh perspective, so you should maximize the time you spend with people who recognize your brilliance while still pushing you to question and reflect. Find allies who are modeling a professional community and who support their colleagues to ensure that the school is committed to sustained professional development.

Avoid the Ax Grinders
My advice may seem unorthodox, but I’m merely suggesting that you need to be yourself, be authentic, and be principled—and don’t wait.

Here's another piece of advice: Look out for the complainer. Someone in your school doesn’t like being there anymore, or doesn’t like someone else in the school. Needing validation, the complainer will want to present evidence to you so that you will join his or her ranks. Often, this person has a permanent spot in the office or lounge. In that case, make yours a coffee-to-go. You have nothing to gain from listening to gossip, slander, or the repetitive spinning of an ax-grinder, and even less to gain by trying to match stories, if you’re so tempted. It's a trap easily fallen into.

Moods are contagious, so spend your time with people who love what they do. I don’t mean to suggest teachers shouldn’t vent frustration sometimes, or that criticisms lack value. The important distinction is that complainers consistently tell negative stories to impress you with their suffering, while allies might sometimes tell a negative story to check their thinking or to illustrate how they learned something valuable and applicable to future situations.

Speak Your Mind
Finally, learn from my own mistake: Don't keep too quiet early on at a new school. Staff members play roles in the drama (or comedy) of school cultures, so choose your early roles well to avoid typecasting. My problem is that it’s my nature to lay low and observe carefully before fully engaging in a group. Many people take a similar approach in schools, I think, and might even tell you “don’t make waves, keep quiet until you’re tenured.”

But my good friend and colleague Adam showed me the importance of speaking your mind from the start. When we taught together in Chicago, we found each other quite compatible in our values and priorities, and we sometimes found ourselves trying to express the same dissenting view on a decision or policy within our school. The key difference is that Adam was more effective at this than I was, because his professional identity was already well established. Everyone knew what he stood for and knew that he would express respectful disagreement when necessary. That was Adam’s role, and his voice could put an end to thoughtless groupthink and encourage people to reconsider an idea.

I, on the other hand, sat back when I first came to the job, letting others guide debates and decisions. With time I gained the confidence to speak up, but either because I waited too long or spoke too equivocally, I was not heard the same way that Adam was. My advice may seem unorthodox, but I’m merely suggesting that you need to be yourself, be authentic, and be principled—and don’t wait.

Within a school community, your professional identity forms early, and can contribute greatly to your job satisfaction and effectiveness. With the support of a collaborative, appreciative community, and by steering clear of negativity, you can find your voice early and grow into the roles you’re hoping to play as an educator.

David Cohen is a 13-year teaching veteran, a National Board-certified teacher, and a graduate of Stanford University’s Teacher Education Program. He currently teaches English and serves as a reading-teacher advisor at Palo Alto High School in California.

View of Merit Pay Shifting

By The Associated Press
Washington

While the words "merit pay" drew hisses and boos at a recent teachers' union convention, educators are endorsing contracts that pay bonuses for boosting students' test scores.
The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers oppose linking a teacher's paycheck to how well their students do on tests. But that is not stopping Rob Weil, the AFT's deputy director of educational issues, from helping local unions hammer out contracts that include new merit-pay plans.

"We don't have a message on a board that says, 'Hey, thinking about this?'" he said. But he said the AFT feels obliged to assist chapters that have decided to go that route.

Teachers usually are paid according to a century-old career ladder that rewards seniority and levels of education. The system was designed to ensure fair compensation for women and minorities. The average starting salary today is about $31,000.

"They don't make enough money, especially the good ones—especially the great ones," said Louis Malfaro, the teachers' union president in Austin, Texas, where nine schools are part of a pilot program to overhaul how teachers are paid.

In North Dakota, North Dakota Education Association President Dakota Draper said a merit pay system would be tough to set up, though the association would be willing to look at the idea.

"If you go into any school, the difference in the classrooms can be remarkable," Draper said. "It would be very unfair to base a merit system on test scores."

Jon Martinson, executive director of the North Dakota School Boards Association, said all teacher salaries in the state should be higher because it is becoming more difficult to attract people to the profession. Martinson also said he is frustrated with the traditional pay scale and would like to see more incentives.

"If everybody's on the same pay scale after X number of hours, what's the incentive to be outstanding teachers?" Martinson said. "I support the concept of looking at student test scores as a way to incentivize. When you get into details, that's difficult."

Malfaro said Austin's approach is modeled partly on Denver's, which links salaries to students' test scores and other measures. Malfaro says the Austin effort will expand slowly and be evaluated methodically to avoid the kinds of mistakes made elsewhere.

"Our approach has been a slow, deliberate and steady one," Malfaro said. "This is a highway with wrecked cars all over it."

Florida recently had to retool a merit-pay plan after a large number of districts opted out, citing teacher concerns. A plan in Houston came under criticism because it was put in place over teachers' objections.

Vanderbilt University education professor Jim Guthrie said the involvement of teachers is essential.

"I just put myself in their shoes. All of a sudden you are going to change all the rules and you're not going to talk to me?" said Guthrie, who is assisting districts that got federal grants to implement merit pay.

Weil, the AFT official, said teacher compensation has to be bargained locally. He also said the new plans should make good professional development available to increase the chances that teachers will raise students' achievement.

Union opposition to merit pay stems partly from failed efforts of the 1980s. In those cases, principals generally were given the power to decide who would get the additional dollars.
"They often had no basis of any objective measure of performance," said Susan Moore Johnson, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. "So what sometimes happened is there would be different awards made to different individuals and they would become public, and people would be appalled at the individuals who were given the awards or not given the awards."

The 2002 No Child Left Behind law has placed a greater emphasis on using objective data in schools.

The law requires annual math and reading tests. The scores of students in certain grades are compared year to year. Lawmakers want to change the law, which is up for renewal, to encourage schools to measure individual student progress over time instead of using snapshot comparisons of certain grade levels.

Once schools track that, they could look at which teachers consistently are moving students along, say children's advocates. Some places, including Tennessee, already are doing this.

But teachers say many factors affect test scores, including some that are beyond their control; for example, family income and level of parental involvement.

While individual student scores already are tied to teachers' pay in Denver and elsewhere, Austin's program relies on test scores to reward all teachers for school-wide gains.

Johnson, the Harvard professor, said that is fair. "It's becoming clear to do math well, you have to read well. So if students do well in math, do you give that math teacher the bonus? Or do you give that bonus to the reading teacher two years before?"

Malfaro said Austin's approach will encourage teachers to collaborate instead of competing. To further encourage that, some teachers will serve as mentors. As in Denver, principals and teachers will work together to set goals at the start of the year.

"If this is just about making money a different way and isn't about forcing systemwide change, then I think it fails to live up to its potential," Malfaro said. "Then I think it's just going to be one more education fad that kind of came up, got kicked around for a few years, and then faded out. And that would be a shame."

The Austin school board approved more than $4 million annually to fund the pilot program. A districtwide plan would cost at least $30 million annually, which voters would have to approve, Malfaro says.

A study of the pilot program in Denver, before it was expanded, showed that the changes improved student achievement. That probably helped persuade voters to support a $25 million-a-year tax increase to pay for expanding it to the entire school system.

The federal government, foundations and states also are helping finance new teacher-pay programs.

The chairman of the House education committee, Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., says he wants the revised No Child Left Behind law to include money for a new merit-pay effort. Among states, Minnesota is out front on the issue. The Minnesota Legislature passed a law two years ago encouraging districts and teachers to develop new pay plans, partly linked to student test scores.

There is excitement about the change in the three dozen or so districts that have undertaken it, says Randi Kirchner, professional pay systems coordinator for Education Minnesota, a union that operates at the state level.

Kirchner acknowledges some national union leaders do not support pay plans linked to student scores. But she says the Minnesota system is more acceptable than some others because student scores are just one of many measures used and teachers have a strong say in whether the new plans are put in place and what they look like.

"We didn't just sit on the sidelines," she said. "We chose to be actively involved, so Minnesota would have a workable system that focuses on the best ways to improve teaching and learning."

Unwrapping the Gifted

By Tamara Fisher

Tamara Fisher is a K-12 gifted education specialist for a school district located on an Indian reservation in northwestern Montana and president-elect of the Montana Association of Gifted and Talented Education. With Karen Isaacson, she is also co-author of Intelligent Life in the Classroom: Smart Kids and Their Teachers. Her hobbies include drawing, hiking, fourwheeling, and building houses. (She lives in a house she built herself.) In this blog, Fisher discusses news and developments in the gifted education community and offers advice for teachers on working with gifted students.

August 14, 2007
My Yard is Gifted

Rather than begin my blog here at Teacher with the necessaries of who I am and what I'm all about (there's plenty of time for that later), I'd like instead to kick it off with a hopefully-thought-provoking analogy. Given that the anticipation of a new school year is energizing the coming weeks, my aim with this post is simply to generate some timely thought, reflection, discussion, and questions.

Teachers are among the most amazing people I know, and as responses to Jessica's recent "Why do teachers stay" post showed, we all teach for some rather inspiring, optimistic, and altruistic reasons. Teachers are talented, curious, hard working, and very caring. Because of that, I know you are up to the challenge I offer today.

Take a moment and ponder which of your current or former students come to mind as you read the next few paragraphs:

In March of each year, I marvel at my lawn. Unlike most other yards, it remains relatively green throughout the winter (when it is not snow-covered). When spring arrives, and without any prompting from me, it rapidly grows into a lush carpet. I don’t water it. I don’t weed it. I barely manage to mow it (we all know how hectic spring is for teachers!) Yet even lacking my help, my yard is amazingly gorgeous and healthy in springtime. As others struggle to green up their lawns in spring, mine (seemingly) needs no attention.

My yard is gifted. It’s the soil… My neighborhood used to be a dairy farm and my particular lot was a holding pen. The soil beneath my yard is pretty much well-aged manure. No wonder I don’t even have to try and yet still end up with a gorgeous lawn when the snow melts!

I take it for granted, though. As the summer heat comes and I jaunt off around the country to various conferences or to visit relatives, my yard still doesn’t get watered. It still doesn’t get weeded. It still barely gets mowed. And despite the fact that its soil is second-generation manure, the neglect now clearly shows. My lawn isn’t anywhere near what it could be. It DOES need attention; it does need the nurturing I often neglect to give it because I am otherwise occupied or because I think it will be okay without my help.

It is inevitable that we teachers, at one point or another, will have students in our classrooms who somehow ended up with great soil. Academically and intellectually, they often seem to blossom all on their own. They are “where they need to be” (or, more often than not, are well beyond) according to state standards for children their age. With – let’s admit it – sometimes very little effort on the teacher’s part, they learn everything they’re supposed to learn that year, or they already knew it before the year began. They are easily overlooked because it’s a safe bet that they will test as “Proficient,” while so many others are in the danger zone.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t put forth every effort to help our struggling students. Of course we should! Part of the beauty of America is that we believe in the possibilities within everyone.
And I’m not saying that there are no teachers out there who do their best by the gifted students in their classrooms. There are many, many amazing teachers who do everything they can to challenge the highly capable kids in their charge. And there are many others who want to do what’s right by them, but are at a loss as to where to begin, or are overwhelmed by all of the need in their classrooms and the requirements of their jobs.

But, to generate thought and discussion, I ask: Generally speaking, do we (as a nation, as a profession) put forth every effort to stretch the students who are already “there”? Do we take for granted the fact that some students, without much assistance from us, will be (supposedly) “just fine” academically on their own? Are they really “just fine” or “where they need to be” if we haven’t truly challenged them to stretch and grow academically and intellectually? Do they not deserve to be s t r e t c h e d also? Do they not deserve to learn and grow academically as much as possible, too? Are they really reaching their potential if we haven’t even tried to find how far their potential reaches?

Perhaps I can predict what some of you are wondering: “But where am I going to find the time to challenge those kids when I’m already swamped getting everyone else up to speed?” “But if I move that child ahead in the curriculum, then what will his teacher next year do with him?” “Isn’t it elitist to target only certain students for special learning opportunities?” “If I let her do something ‘special,’ then won’t I have to let all of the other kids do it, too?” “If they are already learning [or already know] what they’re ‘supposed’ to be learning, then why do I have to worry about them?”

This is just one post, and the topics of gifted students and gifted education are too big to cover all at once. We shall get to those concerns, those questions, those issues, too. For now, I only hope to prompt some thinking about the students with great soil, the ones whose lawns are green in winter, the ones whom we believe to be “already where they need to be.” What thoughts, questions, worries, ideas, epiphanies, and concerns do you have in regards to them?

Thank you for joining me and I look forward to interacting with everyone over the course of this year!

Las Vegas Review-Journal

LETTERS: We're losing students in high school

To the editor:

As a high school teacher in the Clark County School District, I read Friday's Review-Journal ("Rulffes hails gains posted by schools") with a mixture of pride and disappointment. It seems that everyone in the school district is so busy patting themselves on the back for meeting the No Child Left Behind Act standards that they've failed to notice an alarming statistic.

Although the elementary schools, and to a lesser degree the middle schools, are doing amazingly well in producing positive results, people have ignored the lackluster progress made by the valley's high schools.

If you discount the magnet high schools -- Vo Tech, Las Vegas Academy, etc. -- and the ones with relatively small populations -- Moapa Valley, Virgin Valley, etc. -- 29 high schools with "normal" populations remain. Of these 29 high schools, only three made adequate yearly progress: Coronado, Liberty and Silverado.

The school district needs to take a hard look to determine why we are losing students as they march through the grades.

One could certainly make the case that smaller schools are better. After all, each one of the small high schools made the grade. That is an interesting statistic.

William Cuff

HENDERSON

Empowerment teachers get little something extra

By Emily Richmond

Las Vegas Sun
Pay bonuses - the kind of incentives that typically go to salespeople and chief exeutives - are now also going to about 250 Clark County School District teachers for jobs well done.
The bonuses will range from $250 to $1,200, and will go to teachers who worked at the district's four empowerment schools. The district hopes to include the bonuses in teachers' Aug. 25 paychecks.

By awarding fatter checks to some teachers, the district is dipping its toe into the pay-for-performance waters. The district is considering an expanded version of the program that might qualify for state funding.

The bonus for each teacher will range from 0.5 percent to 2 percent of his annual salary, depending on how well his school performed on criteria such as gains in student achievement, parental feedback, evaluations of the campus management and whether the school served large populations of at-risk children.

The scorecards that establish how each school measures up in the bonus column are calculated by officials in the School District's central office. The first-round bonus money will come out of the district's empowerment schools budget. Next year, the district will be eligible for state funds for teacher incentive pay in at-risk schools, which could potentially be used for staff at both empowerment schools and traditional campuses.

"Student achievement has to be the important thing and that is not negotiable," said Karlene McCormick-Lee, an associate superintendent who oversees the empowerment schools pilot program. "However, this was an opportunity to demonstrate the other things the district values - climate and working conditions, parent satisfaction and the quality of the campus management."

The empowerment schools pilot program, launched last year, gives principals greater autonomy in staffing, budget and instructional decisions, in exchange for greater accountability. Additionally, Superintendent Walt Rulffes pledged licensed personnel at those schools would be eligible for incentive pay of up to 2 percent of their salaries, based on a formula the teachers helped devise.

Although state law requires Nevada teachers receive a 5 percent pay increase if they complete national board certification, this is the first time the School District has attempted its own version of "pay for performance" on this scale.

Teacher bonuses have been awarded in various forms across the country for decades, with varying degrees of success.

Supporters of the model say the standard pay scale for teachers doesn't offer enough incentives for individuals to excel, or to stay in a profession where they are already undervalued. Opponents of pay-for-performance say the formulas rely too heavily on a principal's subjective assessment of teacher performance, and often force colleagues to compete against one another for a limited pot of funds.

"I don't see how it can be anything other than favoritism," said one Clark County teacher with more than 20 years ' classroom experience, who asked not to be identified. "Merit pay takes away your personality in teaching. You're going to do what the principal wants, even if it's not best for the kids. If you have a principal you don't get along with, you're done."

The teacher, who works at one of the district's empowerment schools, said the district's formula is reasonable. But she worries that the public's perception of school performance will be unduly influenced.

"If a school doesn't get the bonus, or another school gets more, the public perception will be that we didn't do our jobs," the teacher said. "The truth is there are wonderful things going on that can't be easily quantified for the purposes of the bonus pay equation."

Teachers at Antonello and Culley elementary schools will each receive 2 percent bonus es , the largest allowed as part of the empowerment model. Adams Elementary teachers will receive 1.5 percent and Warren Elementary teachers will receive 0.5 percent.

Instead of awarding different amounts to individual classroom teachers, the school's overall performance determined the bonus percentage given to everyone.

Schools were able to earn as many as 200 points in various categories. Student test scores accounted for 100 points, and schools that made "adequate yearly progress" under the federal No Child Left Behind Act received as many as 50 points.

Parent and student satisfaction surveys counted for 15 points, as did a working conditions survey completed by the staff.

Adams and Antonello each received full marks from parents and students, while Warren received six points and Culley , five.

Antonello's teachers were satisfied enough to earn the school the full 15 points, while Adams and Culley were just a step behind at 14 points. Warren , where a new principal began the year with only two returning teachers, received no points for the survey.

Warren also received the fewest points for student test score improvement - 11, compared with 100 for Culley, 63 for Antonello and 42 for Adams.

Mary Ella Holloway, president of the Clark County Education Association, said it's appropriate for all licensed personnel at the campus to share in the reward.

"The art teacher doesn't have a test to show they're accomplishing something in the classroom," Holloway said. "But everybody at the school, whether they're the art teacher or the librarian, has an impact on student performance."

That blitz campaign doesn't appear to have paid off.

July 29, 2007
Ten of Clark County's comprehensive high schools failed to meet the all-important participation rate on the state's proficiency exam, one of the requirements for "adequate yearly progress" under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

At Indian Springs High School, the shortfall in participation is the sole reason why the school is now on the state's "watch list."

Students have their first chance to take the proficiency test as sophomores. Those who pass on the first try are added to their classmates who take the test again in the spring of their junior year. The total must equal 95 percent.

Billboards, radio spots and campus banners urged students not to skip school on March 27. Schools that don't meet the 95 percent participation requirement also don't make "adequate yearly progress" under No Child Left Behind .

Part of the problem is that juniors know they'll have other chances to pass the test in their senior year. That makes it difficult to motivate them to show up for the spring test day.
Three schools, Basic, Del Sol and Palo Verde, missed the participation mark on the math test. For Chaparral, Legacy and Western it was the reading and writing tests.

And Bonanza, Canyon Springs and Clark didn't have enough students show up for either section of the test.

• • •

Clark County Schools Superintendent Walt Rulffes gave reporters two reasons why he didn't want to hear the media refer to the district as failing.

First , that would be inaccurate, he said at a news conference to unveil the annual list of campus test results .

Graduation rates are up. Dropout rates are down. And more schools made "adequate progress" on standardized tests, as state and federal law requires.

And the second reason?

"My feelings will be hurt," Rulffes said.

Survey: Subjects Trimmed To Boost Math and Science

By Alyson Klein

Education Week
Nearly half the nation’s school districts are spending less instructional time on subjects such as science, history, and art in order to prepare their students for the mathematics and reading tests mandated under the 5½-year-old No Child Left Behind Act, says a report released last week by the Center on Education Policy.

In a nationally representative survey of 349 districts, the Washington-based group found that 44 percent reported cutting time from other subjects to focus on math and reading. The decreases were relatively substantial, according to the report, totaling about 141 minutes per week across all subjects, or almost 30 minutes per day.

The July 24 report lends credibility to critics’ contention that the NCLB law’s emphasis on reading and math has squeezed out other subjects. It also bolsters arguments that the law should be expanded to include tests in science, social studies, and other subjects.

“This report matches everything we’ve seen,” said Gerald F. Wheeler, the executive director of the National Science Teachers Association, based in Arlington, Va. “We need to be more intelligent about what it means to educate the whole child.”

Mr. Wheeler said the federal government should add science to the NCLB accountability system so that schools will set aside time for it. Beginning with the new school year, under NCLB, states must test students in science three times before high school graduation. States may count those scores for accountability purposes, but they’re not required to do so.

Exposure to subjects such as history can help students master higher-order thinking skills in math and reading, said Theodore K. Rabb, a professor emeritus at Princeton University and the board chairman of the National Council for History Education, based in Westlake, Okla.

But others say schools are right to focus on reading and math, particularly in the early grades.

“If you can’t read, what can you do?” said Sandra Stotsky, who, starting next month, will be an education professor at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. “If you can’t do math, you can’t ultimately do science.”

The CEP reported similar findings in a March 2006 report, which found that many districts had increased instructional time in math and reading at the elementary level, sometimes by giving short shrift to other subjects. ("Study: NCLB Leads to Cuts for Some Subjects," April 5, 2006.)

Making the Write Choice

By John Norton

TeacherMagazine

Last October, The Washington Post published a story, "The Handwriting on the Wall," about the decline of handwriting instruction in elementary schools and the likelihood that future generations will not learn cursive.

The story cited research suggesting that writing by hand may be important to cognitive development, and that messages written in long hand create a greater sense of personal authenticity. But a growing number of educators just shrug. They are busy with other priorities in an increasingly digital world.

As part of a new partnership, teachermagazine.org is publishing this regular column by members of the Teacher Leaders Network, a professional community of accomplished educators dedicated to sharing ideas and expanding the influence of teachers.

The Post story stirred a surprising amount of lively, even passionate, conversation among members of the Teacher Leaders Network who participate in our daily online discussion.
Here's what some of them had to say:

Gayle: I started teaching 40 years ago in a 3rd grade classroom. In those days, cursive writing was mandatory in the curriculum, and it was the 3rd grade teacher's job to teach it. In a recent issue of Edutopia, the editor describes today's students who listen to iPods, text message, and watch TV all at the same time. Multi-tasking is the norm. Imagine me standing in front of a 3rd grade class today, saying: "Now, class, everyone sit down and slant your letters as we write in cursive." There is a disconnect.

Gregg: I teach 3rd grade in South Carolina. The current state standards require me to "begin cursive writing." When the new and revised standards are released next school year, they will state: "Begin using proper letter formation, print OR cursive." Handwriting will no longer be apart of the 4th and 5th grade standards.

If my students can sign their names in cursive, then I am a happy teacher. I am so glad that cursive is becoming a passing fancy. In today's world, students really don't need cursive writing. Everything they read, from e-mails to textbooks, is in print.

Cathy: An ingrained memory springs forth from very long ago, of a 3rd grade teacher loudly berating me in front of the entire class for the messiness of my cursive writing, which resulted in my inability to get the required "stating of the math problem" in the allotted space. I was mortified. My cursive is no better today, many years later, and I'm delighted to use it as little as possible since that memory never really faded.

Susan B: When I told my mom I was going to switch careers to become an elementary teacher, she said, "You can't! You have TERRIBLE cursive!" Mom acquired beautiful "Palmer Method" script in one-room schoolhouses, and bemoaned the inadequate cursive instruction my siblings and I received way back when. I never could turn in acceptable cursive papers without painstakingly copying them over at least once.

When I was 12, I bought myself a typewriter with babysitting money, taught myself to type, and never looked back. Over the years, what little cursive I had virtually vanished. Recently, I discovered my state's leadership exam requires handwritten essays and responses. Even though I believe cursive is more professional and likely to positively influence scores, I printed on the exam, and I did pass.

Susan G: I continually surprise myself with my rather romantic connection to cursive writing, diagrammed sentences, and geometric proofs. I remember 5th grade, when we got our first writing pens. In the back of the room, by the sink, there was a bottle of ink with a blown-glass well on the side of the interior. It was an impressive ritual to take your pen, lift the lever that depressed the ink bladder, dip your pen into the well, and release the lever, filling the pen with ink.

The power to create words is pretty amazing—it connects us to the past and the future. I would still recognize the elegant hand that filled a book of poetry from an old boyfriend. My maternal grandmother died before I was born, but I got to know her through her handwritten journals. It occurs to me that my grandchildren may not feel as intimately connected to my email archives.
Is there something to be gained in learning to actually form those words without a keyboard?

Yes, and there is legitimate learning theory that says writing by hand helps us imbed and retain what we write.

Rick: I hope I'm pretty progressive when it comes to education ideas, but I'm going to register an "old fogey" opinion on the handwriting topic. Let me make my case for why teaching the next generation cursive handwriting is still wise in a high-technology world.

First, cursive handwriting helps numerous students with fine-motor skills that are not otherwise developed by pushing keys on a keyboard.

Second, handwriting is still useful. What do we do when the electricity goes out, or there's no easily accessible electricity source or machine to do our writing and printing for us? Do we really want to be so reliant on having to type and print everything electronically?

Third, a personally written, cursive note of thanks, encouragement, or explanation has a lot of currency in today's e-mail and text-messaging world. That someone would take the time to select paper or a card, write the note in cursive, then send it or drop it by your office, classroom, or mailbox carries a lot of weight.

Fourth, that personal note, written in cursive, creates a connection that printing our letters and words usually doesn't produce. My own kids go to camp each year, and I take time each summer to hand write, in cursive, long letters to each of them. It's a quiet, reflective process, a little slower than typing, but contemplative and personal. It's one way I give something of myself to them.

Fifth, cursive handwriting has prestige and allows us to check authenticity. Claims can be made on all sides about anything stored electronically. Why are personal signatures still required on all important documents—contracts, major purchases, diplomas, doctor's prescriptions, etc.? Our written hand is our personal testimony and record of authenticity.

A year after my grandfather died, I wore a coat of his that my grandmother passed along to me. He was a wise and compassionate man, and I missed him terribly. I put my hand into one of the coat's pockets and felt something. It was a note he had written in cursive. My grandfather had touched this paper and formed these letters. As silly as it may sound, I felt like he was there, and I was connecting to him.

John Norton is the co-founder and moderator of the Teacher Leaders Network. Other excerpts from the Network's 24/7/365 professional conversations can be found on the TLN website.

Little Rock

A one-year moratorium on new teaching guidelines set to take effect this fall is being sought by historians upset with what they say will be a watering down of the teaching of Arkansas history in the public schools.

Tom Dillard, president of the Arkansas History Education Coalition, suggested Saturday that the new guidelines for social studies, approved by the state Education Board this year, violate a 1997 state law on teaching Arkansas history and effectively reverse the group's effort of at least the last 20 years to incorporate the subject into school curricula.

"We now face the prospect of Arkansas history being removed from the curriculum in the schools of our state—at least effectively removed, if not completely so," Dillard said at a news conference at the main library in Little Rock.

Last year, the Arkansas Education Department led a committee of educators to study revising the guidelines, as the agency routinely does for the various subjects. The board then approved the guidelines, combining social studies and Arkansas history into one subject for kindergartners through sixth graders and requiring the teaching of world history in seventh and eight grades, typically when Arkansas history is taught. Dillard noted that the 10-year-old state law, adopted he said after the state Education Department failed to follow through on a promise to beef up Arkansas history instruction in the schools, requires that schools teach a unit of Arkansas history as a social studies subject at each elementary grade "with greater emphasis at the fourth and fifth grade levels."

In addition, he said, the schools must teach a full semester of Arkansas history to students between the seventh and 12th grades.

Dillard said the new guidelines could effectively reduce Arkansas history to a mere mention to young students and could eliminate the subject altogether from a high school student's coursework. He said the world history requirement in the new guidelines most likely would bump Arkansas history into the higher grades, where teachers have no textbooks and few materials on the subject and when students can elect to take other social studies courses to graduate.

"We contend that the new social studies frameworks are in violation of Act 787 of 1997 and we believe it's in violation probably in a variety of ways," Dillard said.

Coalition members will meet with state Education Commissioner Ken James on Thursday, when they plan to ask for the moratorium. Also, Dillard said, the group will ask that Gov. Mike Beebe appoint a blue-ribbon panel to study the guidelines and arrive at changes that preserve the teaching of Arkansas history.

Last week, two new textbooks on Arkansas history were published but they are geared for middle school classes. Dillard said the two decades since Arkansas' 150th sesquicentennial have been a building process with the mission to change the poor condition of Arkansas history education in the schools. He, other historians, and teachers stressed the importance of continuing with that progress.

"What this latest action by the Department of Education has done is to cut the legs out from under the people who have spent time, effort and money in creating these materials," said Tom DeBlack, president of the Arkansas Historical Association and professor of Arkansas History at Arkansas Tech University.

DeBlack stressed the importance of teaching children "where they came from."
"We need to give our students a real awareness of who they are, of how they came to be as a people and what their possibilities are in the future as part of the great American scheme," Dillard said.

Dillard and others expressed disappointment with what they said appeared to be an almost secretive process used by the Education Department to arrive at the new guidelines.
But Julie Thompson, a spokeswoman for the Education Department, said in a telephone interview Saturday that the agency went to great lengths to involve historians and educators in making the revisions.

She acknowledged that committee members were asked not to discuss preliminary changes. But the agency used this "security feature," she said, to prevent a problem that occurred in 1992. In that year, preliminary guidelines for math were released and some schools ended up teaching to the wrong guide, she said.

Thompson said the new guidelines on Arkansas history do not violate state law, and they maintain an emphasis on state history at the lower levels. The guidelines for elementary schools provide more detail and, therefore, create a greater likelihood that students will get more instruction in Arkansas history, she said.

Thompson acknowledged that it was "unfortunate" that the textbook review occurred the same year as the standards were revised, and said the agency might have to take a closer look at what materials are available for teaching Arkansas history in the high schools.

EducationWeek
Washington

A new study of Chicago students suggests that the federal No Child Left Behind Act may indeed be leaving behind students at the far ends of the academic ability spectrum—the least able students and those who are gifted.

The study by University of Chicago economists Derek A. Neal and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach lends some empirical support to the common perception that schools are focusing on students in the middle—the so-called “bubble kids”—in order to boost scores on the state exams used to determine whether schools are meeting their proficiency targets.

“The whole point is that the details of how you calculate `adequate yearly progress’ matter for how teachers will allocate their effort across students,” said Mr. Neal, who presented his paper today at a conference hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank based here. “Anytime you keep score by looking at the number of kids who pass some proficiency standard, that will shape whom teachers teach.”

But Doug Mesecar, the acting assistant secretary in the Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development at the U.S. Department of Education, said it’s too soon to conclude that the law’s accountability mechanisms aren’t working as they were intended.

“I don’t think it tells enough of the whole story to support the generalizations that were made,” said Mr. Mesecar, who was part of a panel formed by the AEI to discuss the report. “We need to know more, to continue to study, and have more data to do these kinds of analyses, and then, if we do find it is a problem, we need to go in and rectify it.”

‘The Irony’
For their study, the Chicago researchers zeroed in on two time periods during which the 421,000-student school system was changing its testing-and-accountability system. The most recent period was 2002, when the school system, seeing that passage of the NCLB law was imminent, made the Illinois Standards Achievement Test a high-stakes exam and set proficiency cutoffs that students would be expected to meet.

The earlier period was 1998, after city school officials tried much the same approach with the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. While the ITBS cutoff points were considered lower, the 1998 accountability system also upped the stakes in a slightly different way by requiring 8th graders who did not pass the tests to attend summer school.

To measure the impact of the new systems, the researchers compared reading and mathematics scores for students in 5th, 6th, or 8th grades in the year, or years, after the changes had taken place with those made by similar cohorts of students a few years earlier. The idea was to determine whether the changes in students’ tests scores were larger or smaller than what might have been expected had the school system conducted business as usual.

The post-reform pattern, in all cases, was consistent: Students in the middle of the pack made the largest test-score gains, compared with students in previous years. The bottom 20 percent of students made the least progress and, in some cases, even lost ground. The top 10 percent of students made either no academic gains or improvements that were smaller than those of students in the middle, depending on the subject matter.

For the least-able students, the situation was only slightly better in the post-1998 reform period. Those students’ scores improved more then, the researchers believe, because the standards had been set at lower levels. They speculated that teachers may be more likely to write off low-achieving students when the likelihood that they will ever meet the achievement target is more distant.

Also, while the federal law mandates that schools ensure that all students reach proficiency levels by the 2013-14 school year, “there’s no evidence to show that schools are taking that seriously,” Mr. Neal said.

"This is the irony of the `soft bigotry of low expectations,`” he added, quoting a line from President Bush. “Having lower standards is actually beneficial to low-advantage children."

Teaching to the Middle
Another panelist, Charles Murray, AEI’s W.H. Brady scholar, said he found Mr. Neal’s finding “persuasive.”

“This strikes, I hope, a major blow to the chest of proficiency counts as a measure of progress in education,” added Mr. Murray, who recently published studies suggesting that achievement gaps between children of different races may be immutable. “To ask children to perform at levels at which they are incapable is one of the cruelest things you could ask a child to do.”

A more pointed critique of the study, however, came from Susan L. Traiman, the director of education and workforce policy at the Washington-based Business Roundtable and a supporter of the NCLB law. Like Mr. Mesecar, she said more years of data are needed to determine if the patterns Mr. Neal found in the early years of testing-and-accountability changes are consistent.

“Teaching to the middle is nothing new,” she added. “It’s what most beginning teachers do.”
While the law requires most states to gauge students’ academic progress by counting the number of students who reach proficiency targets, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings in recent years began to allow some states and districts to experiment with other accountability models. Currently, for example, nine states have waivers to try so-called “growth models,” which typically give schools credit for gains that students make toward proficiency.

A better variant on that model, Mr. Neal said, might be one that takes into account previous achievement differences among students, their peers, and other factors in the same way that golfers are assigned handicaps to account for differences in golf courses or in their ability levels.
“You need some handicapping system that allows you to say that teacher A had a bad year or teacher B had a good year, regardless of whether they taught in New Trier, Ill., or some inner-city school in New Jersey,” he said.

The new study, “Left Behind by Design: Proficiency Counts and Test-Based Accountability,” has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Turning to Teachers

Unhappy with a new curriculum developed by an outside firm, Pittsburgh's school district is diverting money from the company’s contract to hire district teachers and academic coaches as curriculum writers this year. Under the plan, some $2.4 million from the district's $8.4 million contract with Kaplan K12 Learning Services will be divvied up among the teacher-curriculum writers, teachers who provide feedback, and University of Pittsburgh's Institute for Learning, which will provide resources and services to the writers. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, teachers could make $16,000 to $22,000 per course for designing the curriculum—in addition to their regular pay.

Initial installments of the new curriculum introduced by Kaplan last school year triggered a range of complaints from teachers, prompting the district to reconsider the contract. Kaplan Senior Vice President Seppy Basili, however, said it’s normal for school systems to develop more of their own curricula in the second or third years of a contract with Kaplan. "The decision to go in this direction was based on some of the feedback really all through the year from teachers who, I think, wanted a greater voice and greater stake in the process," Basili said.
Posted by Stacey Hollenbeck

Last week I purchased a burger and fries at McDonalds for $3.58.

The counter girl took my $4.00 and I pulled 8 cents from my pocket and gave it to her. She stood there, holding the nickel and 3 pennies. While looking at the screen on her register, I sensed her discomfort and tried to tell her to just give me two quarters, but she hailed the manager for help. While he tried to explain the transaction to her, she stood there and cried. Why do I tell you this?

Because of the evolution in teaching math since the 1960s...

Teaching Math In 1960

A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price. What is his profit?

Teaching Math In 1970

A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of the price, or $80. What is his profit?

Teaching Math In 1980

A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $80. Did he make a profit?

Teaching Math In 1990

A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $80 and his profit is $20 Your assignment: Underline the number 20.

Teaching Math Today

A logger cuts down a beautiful forest because he is selfish and inconsiderate and cares nothing for the habitat of animals or the preservation of our woodlands. He does this so he can make a profit of $20. What do you think of this way of making a living? Topic for class participation after answering the question: How did the birds and squirrels feel as the logger cut down their homes?

(There are no wrong answers.)

Don't Hurry Math

Pennsylvania is learning the hard way that modernizing math instruction does not always further comprehension. The state’s students are faltering in math placement tests, in spite of demonstrating achievement elsewhere. As a result, colleges and universities are having to rewrite textbooks and add remedial courses so their students can catch-up on math concepts and skills.

The college math professors in the state blame the emphasis placed on student testing combined with introducing higher-level math to increasingly younger students. “Many bright students are hurried through algebra and trigonometry courses on their way toward statistics and calculus,” said Marie Wilde, chairwoman of the mathematical and information sciences program at Cedar Crest College in Allentown, Pennsylavania. Wilde agrees that "teaching to the test" has contributed to the gap in student math skills.

Parents in Pennsylvania's upper Bucks County successfully lobbied their school district to add a traditional math program that focuses on the basics this fall.

Posted by Elizabeth Rich

A New Yardstick

As the debate over evaluating test scores continues, many schools across the country are shifting their method of evaluating student progress. More than two dozen states, including Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, and Ohio, are looking to a new way of analyzing test scores, called a “growth model,” which assesses individual student's progress as they advance from grade to grade instead of comparing them to the previous year’s class.

The model has been helpful in both urban areas where the student population includes at-risk children, as well as affluent communities which tend to attract top-performing children. While tests scores traditionally have been used to focus on low performing students, the growth model considers students at all levels, thereby putting pressure on high-performing schools that have yet to answer to test scores.

The growth model, however, does not have a universal appeal. Some teachers and parents feel the approach still places too much emphasis on test scores and they find the data incomprehensible. Said Aimee Bolender, president of the Alliance-AFT, which represents 9,000 teachers and staff from the Dallas school district, “You have to be a Ph.D. in statistics to even comprehend it.” Teachers’ unions like the growth model, but reject its use for performance reviews and merit pay. Said Bolender, “It’s detrimental for education. It’s pulling apart teams of teachers and it doesn’t look at why test scores are low.”

In response to the growing popularity of the growth model, Margaret Spellings, U.S. Secretary of Education, said in a statement, “We are open to new ideas, but when it comes to accountability, we are not taking our eye off the ball.”

Posted by Elizabeth Rich

Nearly 20 years ago, as we were preparing to launch this magazine, we talked to hundreds of teachers across the country about their careers and about their aspirations, concerns, and daily challenges. Our working title for the magazine was Professional Teacher, and we were determined not to treat teachers as tall children, but rather to address them as experts whose work is as important to society as that of doctors, lawyers, and other professionals. We would provide them with articles about teaching and learning, research, ideas, innovations, and the larger issues that shape education.

Essentially, what teachers told us was that they weren’t treated as professionals. They didn’t feel adequately prepared for their challenges. They didn’t have much decisionmaking power outside the classroom, and had little control over their professional lives. Neither their working conditions nor their compensation were conducive to their work. But most relevant for us, they said they probably wouldn’t read our magazine because they had little time or energy for anything but the practical demands of the job.

Despite all that, we launched Teacher Magazine because we believed then, as we believe now, that teachers are the key to successful schools and students. None of the many reforms floated in the past two decades will improve schools without competent, committed teachers who are treated as professionals. There has been general agreement that the teaching career path needs to be radically changed. However, that is a daunting challenge that society seems unable or unwilling to meet.

But what if there were another way to make teaching more of a profession? Suppose teachers were in control of their own destiny, empowered to practice their craft like other professionals. Imagine that they could form partnerships, much as lawyers and doctors do, and make their services available under contract to “clients” (i.e., schools). They would hire an administrator to handle noninstructional matters, but teachers would make the educational decisions and would bring new teachers into the “firm,” evaluate them, decide on compensation, and—when necessary—discharge them.

That “imaginary” situation became a reality with the creation of EdVisions Cooperative 13 years ago, when a small group of teachers in Minnesota concluded that “a new model of ‘educational entrepreneurship’ was not only possible, but necessary.” They believed “that teacher leadership is not about power, but about mobilizing the largely untapped attributes of teachers to strengthen student performance by working collaboratively in a shared capacity.”

The founders’ goal was to empower teachers, but they recognized that teaching is not an end in itself. The ultimate goal is to help youngsters grow and learn. To “stay in business,” teacher partnerships must satisfy their clients. That means they must be at the leading edge of their profession, always looking for new, innovative methods.

EdVisions first offered its professional services to the Minnesota New Country School in 1994 and it has become a nationally recognized model for project-based learning. Today there are more than 30 EdVision schools across the country and nearly 2,500 students who are actively engaged, excited, and performing at high levels.

The EdVisions people are the kind of teachers we had in mind when we started this magazine. America desperately needs teachers like these, and we should do whatever is necessary to produce them.

For more information about EdVisions, including a video on project-based learning that made Ron Wolk want to go back to school, visit EdVisions. Several relevant books are also cited on the Web site, including Teachers as Owners, edited by Edward J. Dirkswager and published by Scarecrow Press.

A Theory X manager makes the following general assumptions:

• Work is inherently distasteful to most people, who will attempt to avoid work whenever possible.

• Most people are not ambitious, have little desire for responsibility, and prefer to be directed.

• Most people have little capacity for creativity in solving organizational problems.

• Motivation occurs only at the physiological and security levels of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

• Most people are self-centered. As a result, they must be closely controlled and often coerced to achieve organizational objectives

• Most people resist change.

• Most people are gullible and not particularly intelligent.

Essentially, Theory X assumes that the primary source of most employee motivation is money, with security as a strong second.

Hard Approach | Soft Approach
Under Theory X, management approaches to motivation can range from a hard approach to a soft approach.

The hard approach to motivation relies on coercion, implicit threats, close supervision, and tight controls -- essentially an environment of command and control. The soft appoach is to be permissive and seek harmony with the hope that in return employees will cooperate when asked to do so. However, neither of these extremes is optimal. The hard approach results in hostility, purposely low-output, and hard-line union demands. The soft approach results in increasing desire for greater reward in exchange for diminishing work output.

It would appear that the optimal approach to human resource management would be lie somewhere between these extremes. However, McGregor asserts that neither approach is appropriate since the fundamental assumptions of Theory X are incorrect.

The Problem with Theory X
Drawing on Maslow's Needs Hierarchy, McGregor argues that a need, once satisfied, no longer motivates. Under Motivation Theory X, the firm relies on money and benefits to satisfy employees' lower needs, and once those needs are satisfied the source of motivation is lost. Theory X management styles, in fact, hinder the satisfaction of higher-level needs.

Consequently, the only way that employees can attempt to satisfy their higher level needs in their work is by seeking more compensation, so it is quite predictable that they will focus on monetary rewards. While money may not be the most effective way to self-fulfillment, in a Theory X environment it may be the only way. Under Theory X, people use work to satisfy their lower needs, and seek to satisfy their higher needs in their leisure time. Unfortunately, employees can be most productive when their work goals and higher level needs are in alignment.

McGregor makes the point that a command and control environment is not effective because it relies on lower needs as levers of motivation, but in modern society those needs already are satisfied and thus no longer motivate. In this situation, one would expect employees to dislike their work, avoid responsibility, have no interest in organizational goals, resist change, etc., thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. From this reasoning, McGregor proposed an alternative: Theory Y.

Motivational Theory Y
The higher-level needs of esteem and self-actualization are continuing needs in that they are never completely satisfied. As such, it is these higher-level needs through which employees can best be motivated.

In strong contrast to Theory X, a Theory Y manager makes the following general assumptions:

• Work can be as natural as play if the conditions are favorable.

• People will be self-directed and creative to meet their work and organizational objectives if they are committed to them.

• People will be committed to their quality and productivity objectives if rewards are in place that address higher needs such as self-fulfillment.

• The capacity for creativity spreads throughout organizations.

• Most people can handle responsibility because creativity and ingenuity are common in the population.

• Under these conditions, people will seek responsibility.

Under these assumptions, there is an opportunity to align personal goals with organizational goals by using the employee's own need for fulfillment as the motivator. McGregor stressed that Theory Y management does not imply a soft approach.

McGregor recognized that some people may not have reached the level of maturity assumed by Theory Y and therefore may need tighter controls that can be relaxed as the employee develops.

Applying Theory Y Management - Business Implications
If Theory Y holds true, an organization can use these principles of scientific management to improve employee motivation:

• Decentralization and Delegation - If firms decentralize control and reduce the number of levels of management, managers will have more subordinates and consequently will be forced to delegate some responsibility and decision making to them.

• Job Enlargement - Broadening the scope of an employee's job adds variety and opportunities to satisfy ego needs.

• Participative Management - Consulting employees in the decision making process taps their creative capacity and provides them with some control over their work environment.

• Performance Appraisals - Having the employee set objectives and participate in the process of evaluating how well they were met.

If properly implemented, such an environment would result in a high level of motivation as employees work to satisfy their higher level personal needs through their jobs.

Teacher Magazine

Ask the Teacher

Policymakers survey educators' work needs.

By Steven Saint

In 2004, a group of teachers at Salem Middle School in Apex, North Carolina, approached then-principal Matthew Wight with a plan to overhaul the school’s grading system. They wanted a measurement that would reflect students’ progress on multiple specific skills.

Bill Ferriter, who teaches 6th graders at Salem, didn’t expect Wight to approve the plan. “We knew he’d be the one who would have to defend it to angry parents,” Ferriter says. Much to his surprise, Wight listened, decided the idea would benefit students, and put it into effect. “That was a defining moment in our school,” says Ferriter, who describes Salem as “a place where teachers are empowered to make critical decisions.”

Ferriter’s satisfaction is shared by other instructors at Salem, which is why the school was recognized this year as a model in North Carolina’s campaign to improve teachers’ working conditions.

Officials in North Carolina began surveying teachers in 2001 to determine the causes of high turnover; they asked about empowerment, leadership, time, facilities and resources, and professional development. The data revealed a trend that really got policymakers’ attention: In schools where teachers were most content, student achievement was also high.

North Carolina teachers have now been surveyed three times, says Eric Hirsch, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Teaching Quality, which the state hired to analyze the survey results. (Ferriter is also a member of the Teacher Leaders Network, a project of CTQ and a partner of Teacher Magazine.) Other states and districts have followed North Carolina’s lead: CTQ has conducted similar surveys in Arizona, Kansas, Ohio, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Clark County, Nevada.

Across these areas, one of the biggest differences between low- and high-performing schools is in the number of teachers who reported that “an atmosphere of trust and mutual respect” exists. “That’s the common denominator,” Hirsch says. School safety, planning time, and teachers’ ability to make decisions about instructional materials and techniques are other important factors.

The data also show that principals’ perceptions of conditions at their schools tend to be much rosier than teachers’. In North Carolina, for example, nearly all principals reported that teachers are central to educational decisions, while only half of teachers felt this to be true.

Meanwhile, teachers were more likely to stay at their schools if they believed principals were trying to improve conditions.

The survey results have just started to spur real change. North Carolina has formed a Teacher Working Conditions Advisory Board to lead the charge for transforming school environments. The state also recently ordered school improvement teams to develop plans to provide duty-free lunch periods and at least five hours of instructional planning per week for every teacher. Clark County, Nevada, has formed a Teaching and Learning Conditions Team of four highly trained teachers who work full time helping schools, and Virginia set aside funds to recruit teachers and improve conditions in hard-to-staff schools.

CTQ is documenting best practices in schools where principals and teachers are working together on reforms. At Salem, Ferriter knows firsthand how important working conditions are for teacher retention. He credits his freedom to make classroom-level decisions and the say he has on professional development and school policies with keeping him in the classroom after 14 years. “It makes the job far more professionally satisfying,” he says. “We probably have the best teaching conditions in the state, and we’re a magnet for accomplished teachers.”

Cheat Sheet

Teacher Magazine

By Amanda Jones

Forget writing on hands or whispering answers. Many students have traded the cheating techniques of yesteryear for more sophisticated methods.

Below are a few of the more innovative ways students have tried to gain an unfair advantage. You have to wonder what these students would accomplish if they were to apply such creativity and determination to a more constructive endeavor—like studying.

Water bottles: Students write answers on the inside of a bottle’s label, then reattach it, so the writing is visible through the water during the test.

Cell phones: In addition to text-messaging answers to one another, students take pictures of the test, then beam the images to friends. Others photograph their notes ahead of time.

M&M’s: After assigning each candy color a multiple-choice letter, students line up M&M’s on their desks in the order of the answers.

MP3 players: Before the test, students record answers and then listen to them through earphones during exams.

Invisible-ink pens: Kids write notes or formulas on a sheet of paper in invisible ink, then use the pen’s ultraviolet flashlight during the test to reveal what they’ve written.

Personal digital assistants: Students send information to one another through their PDAs and use the devices to store formulas and notes.

Next crop could include middle and high schools

By ANTONIO PLANAS
REVIEW-JOURNAL
April 27, 2007

Principals and teachers of at least four more Clark County School District campuses will get to make more of the decisions regarding their schools in the fall, Superintendent Walt Rulffes said Thursday.

Rulffes is to meet today with regional superintendents and other district administrators to formulate a plan for choosing the school system's next empowerment schools.

Rulffes said that although there hasn't been any scientific evidence of school improvement, anecdotal evidence is strong that the schools will produce higher student achievement.

"We want to continue to expand empowerment schools," Rulffes said. "The early signs are very favorable and we want to at least double the schools."

You can read the entire article here.

CLARK COUNTY CLASSROOMS: Mass-produced ignorance

Grades are going up, but educational standards are sinking like the Titanic

By GREG BARONE
SPECIAL TO THE REVIEW-JOURNAL

Like a giant mythical dragon stomping across the countryside, the Big Day has come and gone, but its echoes are sure to remain for a long time to come. The Nevada High School Proficiency Exam paid us a visit on March 27 -- and in its thunderous wake, I can already sense the ensuing tsunami from the professional opinion-makers: the politicians, the columnists and the school district movers and shakers.

In case anyone is curious about the opinion of an actual high school math teacher, here goes:

Upon arrival at my current port of call within the Clark County School District, I was amazed and delighted to learn that all of my students -- nearly 300 of them -- would be taking geometry. Ah, geometry! The jewel in the crown! The soul of ancient Greece! By far the most profound and challenging of all high school mathematics classes. I might have dared to think civilization itself was not collapsing, after all.

And to tell a secret, I was even a little intimidated. Notwithstanding the fact that I'm a highly qualified calculus teacher according to every local, state and federal law, I still felt a tremor of trepidation at the thought of facing all those scholarly young prodigies. But it was a mountain I was zealously anxious to climb.

And then ... what was it again? I think it was the 67 percent class average on that first test -- the test that was supposed to be a review of basic math. Yes, it was somewhere around then that I started to wonder if the rainbow was just an illusion.

Indeed, that was only the beginning of the downward spiral into oblivion. I doubt any of my subsequent tests have had such a high average. The rest have probably been in the 40s.
That's for multiple choice tests.
Using notes.

It wasn't long before I approached my department chair about all this. I can still remember my exact words. "How? How? How?" I cried like a Dr. Seuss character. "How did these kids ever pass algebra?" At this point, my department chair calmly explained that a lot of them had not. District policy was to move them forward, regardless of whether they had passed the prerequisite course. My response, as I recall, was both eloquent and colorful, and judging from my department chair's reaction, highly entertaining.

I don't really question anyone's good intentions, odd as that might seem. I can appreciate the fatigue the district has experienced while watching massive numbers of students endlessly repeat the same basic math classes under a dozen different titles. Unfortunately, the Titanic went to the floor of the Atlantic on exactly these sorts of good intentions.

Mathematics is a ladder on which no rung can be skipped without inevitable disaster. And disaster is the only word I can find to describe what is going on. Wave upon wave of gargantuan, relentless, catastrophic failure.

Perhaps this is what state Sen. Bob Beers was referring to when he described the district as a bureaucracy that "sucks the enthusiasm from its employees." I echo that sentiment -- though, of course, I mean it in the nicest possible way.

But even this doesn't quite tell the whole story. I have many students who supposedly did well in earlier math classes, though their level of knowledge is grossly inconsistent with their grades.

I don't have to ponder the reasons. This nationwide phenomenon is the result of grading systems that are ... how can I say it? The systems are cluttered? Convoluted? Creative? I'm groping for some nice word to use other than "padded."
Well, OK. Let's say padded.

Consider a class whose grade is based 70 percent on tests and 30 percent on what we euphemistically describe as "homework and participation." The district regards this as acceptable, perhaps even ambitious. With such a system, a student with a 59 percent exam average can turn in a pile of copied homework and get a 71 percent final score for the quarter. An F becomes a C.

In fact, the homework doesn't even need to be copied with any great care. Let's be honest: It is highly unlikely any teacher is meticulously grading hundreds of homework papers every day. I give it a glance, and I see no purpose in pretending otherwise.

I hope the semester exam will help to balance out the giveaways -- maybe, maybe not, depending upon what is on the test, or how much it will count, or what sort of "review" is provided in advance. This does not help students learn. It does not encourage them to learn. It only masks what they have not learned.

This excessive credit for "homework and participation," while well-intentioned, is poisoning our entire educational system -- not to mention the future of the empire -- and I hope to see the day when administrators argue against it, rather than for it.

The years go by. Teachers grow desperate to see even just a few decent grades on their latest test. When that hope is dashed, we reach a point where we cannot listen to the complaints and the hostility from students and parents. "Every other teacher gives points for this and that, why don't you?" English translation: "I demand the right to get a good grade without passing exams." And the teachers wear down. And so go the standards.
Make no mistake, the blame rests squarely on the shoulders of the students -- but the consequences are growing every day.

We reach the epilogue of this drama when a student arrives in high school without the ability to multiply single-digit numbers, or read an analog clock dial, or identify a triangle.

This is today's reality. I am not referring to immigrants. Nor to isolated cases. This is a bottomless pit of inexcusable, home-grown, mass-produced ignorance. Language is not the barrier. Neither is poverty a likely excuse, judging from the ubiquitous cell phones and sneakers and music players, and the new gizmos I don't even know the names of -- unearned rewards that parents are absurdly eager to provide.

I hope my friends and colleagues will accept these words in the spirit intended. I bear no ill will toward those who I believe are truly convinced they are doing the right thing, and I am as guilty as any. But whether it stings or not, my conscience demanded this -- not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.

When I was in second grade, back in the era of the abacus and clay tablets, I vividly remember how my heart sank when I discovered I would be getting that teacher everybody hated. She was a curmudgeonly old prune who didn't care how many kids she had to leave back if they didn't know how to read. Everybody called her nasty names. I probably did too. Miss Baggypants. I remember whining to my mother about it, but she didn't lift a finger.

Today I can read.
I'm awfully sorry I don't remember her name, but God bless Miss Baggypants. And Mom.

Greg Barone is a math teacher at Western High School.

Massachusetts' recent decision to offer charterlike freedom to four of its lowest-performing schools has renewed debate about the role autonomy plays in school improvement: Should it be earned through good performance, or given as a vital tool for improvement? Is it risky to extend it to struggling schools?
Interest in the issue is keen. The New York City and Chicago school districts are engaged in high-profile experiments with giving schools autonomy. Both the governor of Nevada and a coalition of groups in Connecticut are proposing legislation to give principals more authority to decide the pathways to better student achievement.

You can read the complete article here.