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.”

School advocates worry that inaction may extend current law for 3 years.

By David J. Hoff

Education Week

Published in Print: November 7, 2007

For all the discord over the No Child Left Behind Act, supporters and critics agree on one thing: It should be fixed, and quickly.

Now it’s looking increasingly likely that Congress won’t make much progress in addressing the law’s flaws this year, endangering the prospects that the task will be completed before President Bush leaves office.

Efforts to revise the law are mired in backroom negotiations in both the House and the Senate and show no signs of gaining the momentum necessary to ensure completion of the reauthorization in 2008.

With Congress’ agenda filled with other tasks, including a potentially protracted fight with President Bush over spending on education and other domestic programs, it will be difficult for lawmakers to meet their self-imposed goals of ensuring passage of NCLB bills in both the House and the Senate this year, followed by a compromise version the two chambers can approve in early 2008.

“It is unlikely that we will be able to get a bill off the House floor this year,” Tom Kiley, a spokesman for Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, said in an e-mail. “However, we continue to work hard on the legislation, and we continue to meet with Republicans and education organizations.”

In the Senate, there is more optimism about passing an NCLB bill in 2007.

“We’re negotiating [and] still hopeful it can get done this year,” said Melissa Wagoner, the spokeswoman for Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.

Deadline Looms

Despite wide agreement that the NCLB needs revision, negotiating which changes to make will not be easy.

Lawmakers are “trying to find the center … in a way that preserves what’s meaningful in the law but doesn’t lose what makes it worthwhile,” said Gary M. Huggins, the director of the Commission on No Child Left Behind, a private, bipartisan panel organized by the Aspen Institute that proposed a long list of changes to the law in February. “That’s a heavy political lift.”

But, Mr. Huggins added, it’s important that Congress make progress on the reauthorization soon. He and other supporters of the law acknowledge that its accountability rules need to be tweaked, such as by using students’ academic growth over time, rather than comparisons of different cohorts of students passing through a given grade, to gauge schools’ and districts’ progress.

Renewal Efforts in 2007

Significant events this year for reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act:
• Jan. 8: President Bush marks the fifth anniversary of signing the law by meeting with the chairmen of Congress’ education committees and urging them to produce a bill to renew the law this year.

• Jan. 24: The day after the president’s State of the Union address, the Department of Education releases its “blueprint” for NCLB reauthorization, proposing to give vouchers to students in persistently low-performing schools.

• March 13: The Senate and House education committees hold a rare joint hearing on general issues facing the NCLB law. Throughout the spring and summer, both panels individually hold hearings on specific issues such as accountability, teacher quality, and supplemental educational services.

• July 30: In a speech at the National Press Club, Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., the chairman of the House education committee, says the law “is not fair, not flexible, and is not funded.” He says he wants his committee to approve a reauthorization bill by the end of September.

• Aug. 28: Rep. Miller and his Republican counterpart release the first installment of a draft bill to reauthorize the measure, covering Title I of the law. A draft bill covering other sections is released Sept. 6.

• Oct. 15: President Bush says he would veto any NCLB bill that would “weaken” the law’s accountability requirements.

• Nov. 1: The month begins with no formal committee action on the next version of NCLB and little time left on the congressional calendar in 2007. Political experts say it would be difficult for Congress to complete reauthorization while the political world is focused on the presidential nominating process.

SOURCE: Education Week

If such changes aren’t made soon, he and others predict, too many schools may be unfairly tagged under the federal law as needing improvement.

Schools that fail to make adequate yearly progress in raising achievement in reading and mathematics, whether for students overall or certain subgroups, face increasingly tougher sanctions under the law.

Many school officials at the local level and their representatives on Capitol Hill want more significant changes to NCLB than Mr. Huggins does, and they too want Congress to act soon to amend some of the law’s rules and align them with states’ accountability systems.

“At times, it’s very frustrating operating under the dual system that’s been established” under the federal law and Texas’ own legislation, said Randy Mohundro, the superintendent of the 700-student DeLeon Independent School District, about 80 miles west of Fort Worth.

What’s more, Mr. Mohundro said, the law’s requirements for assessing students with disabilities and English-language learners virtually ensure those students’ failure. “We’re causing kids to fail tests that they’re not ready to take,” he said.

At the beginning of the year, President Bush discussed the future of the law with the chairmen and Republican leaders of the House and Senate education committees. They all agreed that they would work toward reauthorizing the law.

Although funding authority for the law technically expired Sept. 30, the law includes a clause that automatically renewed it for the 2008 fiscal year, which began Oct. 1.

“We’ve all agreed to work together to address some of the major concerns that some people have on this piece of legislation, without weakening the essence of the bill, and get a piece of legislation done,” President Bush said after the Jan. 8 meeting. That occasion marked the fifth anniversary of Mr. Bush’s signing of the law, which he considers one of his top domestic accomplishments.

While the president and congressional leaders at the meeting didn’t announce a timetable for reauthorization, most Washington policy experts said it would be best to finish an NCLB bill in 2007. The presidential-nominating process will begin in earnest with the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary in early January, and will dominate the political world, making it hard for Congress to pass large, difficult bills such as the NCLB renewal.

If Congress doesn’t act soon, the current version of the law could stay in place for another three years.

Just as it’s difficult for Congress to enact major bills during a campaign season, particularly with a president nearing the end of his second term, the arrival of a new president can also delay the schedule. With a change in the White House, it often takes a year or more to finish detailed bills such as the NCLB law that have been left hanging since the previous administration.

Now ... or 2010?

President Bush signed the NCLB law two weeks before the first anniversary of his inauguration. It took almost two years of President Clinton’s first term for Congress to produce a bill to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The NCLB law is the latest version of the 42-year-old ESEA.

State and local officials don’t like the prospect of waiting until 2010 to make significant changes to the law.

“State officials and others would be disappointed if Congress failed to act on the issue,” said Ronald R. Cowell, the president of the Education Policy and Leadership Center, a Harrisburg, Pa.-based group that works with Pennsylvania schools.

In addition to the headaches of implementing a law they consider flawed, local officials fear that large numbers of schools would be declared in need of improvement under the current NCLB accountability system. Many of them wouldn’t deserve that label, argued Reginald M. Felton, the director of federal relations for the National School Boards Association, in Alexandria, Va.
“What does that do to the public buy-in for public education?” he said.

By Cynthia G. Brown, Robin Chait

Center for American Progress

October 1, 2007

Recent research has demonstrated what we all know—great teachers are critical to high levels of student achievement, particularly for low-income and minority students. Yet today poor and minority children are least likely to get our best teachers.

Congress is considering proposals for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that would provide federal incentives to reform the teacher compensation systems in high poverty schools.

House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller has spent his career fighting to improve the quality of America’s teaching force—and, at the same time, to protect the rights of American workers to join a union. As part of his plan to fix Title II of the No Child Left Behind Act, he and Ranking Committee Member Howard McKeon have proposed a grant program for school districts that pay more to the highest-performing teachers who commit to stay in the highest-need schools for at least four years.

This is an important initiative that deserves support on both sides of the aisle—especially from progressives who believe in strengthening public education for low-income students.
Unfortunately, critics of the proposal have been spreading misleading information that has obscured the facts. Let’s take a look at some of their claims.

CLAIM: The federal government, through this proposal, would mandate the use of test scores to evaluate teachers.

FACT: The new proposal for Title II, Part A does not mandate the use of test scores to evaluate teachers. It is a voluntary grant program in which states and districts can choose whether or not to participate. If they choose to participate, growth in student achievement, rather than absolute student achievement, is used as one measure for evaluating teachers. Consequently, teachers aren’t penalized for teaching low-performing students. And test scores are not the sole measure used to evaluate teachers—classroom evaluations conducted by multiple professional educators must be used as well.

CLAIM: Teacher compensation is a matter of collective bargaining subject to state and local law and not federal law.

FACT: The proposed Title II provides protections for collective bargaining—it does not override it. Employment contracts are negotiated and agreed to at the local level and are subject to state law.

CLAIM: Decisions about how to evaluate teachers should be made at the local, not federal level.

FACT: The Title II proposal requires districts to design their own evaluation programs working in collaboration with teachers. While the programs are subject to some general guidelines, most of the decisions about how teachers are evaluated will be made at the local level.

Moreover, the federal role in education is and should be about addressing issues of educational equity and ensuring that students in high-poverty schools receive a high-quality education. Performance pay is one tool districts can use to attract outstanding teachers to high-poverty schools. Many districts will welcome this federal support.

CLAIM: Performance pay programs are premature because methods to determine the value that individual teachers add to student learning haven’t been thoroughly researched and evaluated.

FACT: Performance pay is still a new idea, but the record from recent research and experiments around the country is encouraging. Recent summaries of research on performance pay programs demonstrate that these programs have positive effects on student achievement.[i] An evaluation of 130 schools participating in the Teacher Advancement Project, a comprehensive professional pay system that includes pay for successful performance, found that these schools are now getting better results than similar schools.[ii] Programs developed in consultation with teachers in Denver and Minnesota are also proving effective and popular among teachers.

Until we find a better way to attract and retain great teachers in our highest-poverty schools, we need to keep trying promising reforms, including performance pay.

CLAIM: Attention and resources are better spent on reforming the whole school, improving working conditions for teachers, and providing professional development.

FACT The proposed Title II does provide funding for professional development. Part B is a large formula grant program for states that support professional development activities in the neediest schools. Moreover, districts that participate in the Part A performance pay program are also required to improve working conditions for teachers. Title I of NCLB provides significant funding for whole school improvement.

CLAIM: Performance pay programs will spark unhelpful competition among teachers and create a disincentive for them to collaborate and share information.

FACT: Research has found that performance pay programs do not create negative, competitive environments if the programs are designed appropriately and with teacher input. Moreover, nothing in the performance pay provisions in the Title II proposal stops districts from providing awards to all teachers at schools that show gains, not just to individual teachers. As we know from endeavors ranging from military service to athletics, commitment to the team and recognition of individual excellence are perfectly compatible.

Democrats, Republicans and teachers see flaws in Calif.'s Rep. Miller's proposal to renew the 2001 education law. He's not giving up.

By Nicole Gaouette

Los Angeles Times

October 30, 2007

WASHINGTON -- Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez) has never been one to back away from a brawl -- he once warned an adversary that if he wanted to fight, it was going to take a while, so he'd better bring lunch. But as Miller pushes to renew the landmark education law known as No Child Left Behind, he faces so many fights that the fate of the bill is increasingly in doubt.

As chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, Miller is sparring with Republicans who see his proposed changes as an unacceptable watering down of the law's core standards.

Teachers object to his proposal to link pay to performance.

Even his fellow Democrats -- particularly freshmen who campaigned against it and members of the Congressional Black Caucus -- are giving him a hard time, largely for not doing enough to soften the law's most rigid requirements.

Some critics of the law say the emphasis on math and English testing has squeezed teaching time for history, science and other subjects. Others say that the law is too strict and punishes schools that are doing a fairly good job.

"People have a very strong sense that the No Child Left Behind Act is not fair, that it is not flexible and that it is not funded," Miller said in a recent speech. "And they are not wrong. The question is what we are going to do next."

The 2001 law, President Bush's hallmark domestic achievement, is supposed to be renewed every five years, although it remains in effect even if lawmakers fail to do that.

Democrats pledged to rewrite it this year, but time is short and political tensions are high. Congress plans to adjourn for the year in a few weeks. And some Democrats are loath to give Bush a victory on No Child Left Behind when he refused to compromise on the Iraq war.

The administration has also made clear it wants just minimal changes.

No Child Left Behind was designed to end what the president called the "soft bigotry of low expectations" by forcing schools to track data on low-income and minority students and holding the schools accountable if those pupils did not do well. Schools also have to show that all students are making adequate yearly progress in math and English, or face tough sanctions.

Miller drafted 1,036 pages of proposed changes with the committee's lead Republican, Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon of Santa Clarita. But as Miller has tweaked that proposal to appeal to Democrats and teachers, he has lost Republicans.

The balance he seeks is between those who think the law's standards are too rigid and those who want them as tightly defined as possible.

A 33-year veteran of the House, Miller is known for his pragmatism, his ability to make a deal and his close ties to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), all of which may help him find an answer in the few weeks he has left.

"We're certainly not in full agreement," Miller said, mentioning talks with committee Republicans. "Not between my caucus and their caucus, not between Mr. McKeon and myself. Whether we can reach an agreement remains to be seen. We're pushing as hard as we can."

McKeon said he was hopeful that he and Miller could reach a compromise, but he expressed concern "that some provisions in the draft would weaken accountability, allowing schools to mask a lack of achievement in the fundamentals of reading and math and obscure the information provided to schools and communities."

For Miller, who has made children a focus of his career and has long advocated greater teacher accountability, working on the first No Child Left Behind bill was a natural cause. A staunch liberal, he was an odd partner for Bush, but they worked closely enough for the president to dub the burly former football player "Big George."

In the five years since Miller and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) helped write and pass No Child Left Behind, they complain, the administration has never fully funded the law in a way that would help schools meet their additional burdens. Republicans counter that few laws are fully funded.

The law has frustrated some parents and teachers who dislike its effect in local schools.

Rep. Albert R. Wynn (D-Md.), a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, has told Miller that his draft continues to overemphasize standardized tests.

The cost, Wynn says, includes "extraordinary pressure placed on students and the loss of important instruction in music, art and other elements of a well-rounded education."

Some critics say that too many schools are sanctioned under the law. Schools that fail to meet goals for three years must offer students free tutoring or the chance to switch schools. After five years of failure, the law mandates, a school must be restructured with a new staff or new leadership or be converted to a charter school.

Miller's draft bill would broaden measurements of students and schools -- for instance, letting states measure how much students improve over a year and not just whether they meet the bar set by No Child Left Behind.

Miller also wants to expand the standards by which schools are judged beyond math and English scores -- a shift McKeon strongly opposes. Under Miller's proposal, up to 15% of an elementary school's evaluation could be based on assessments of history, science, and civics and government classes. For high schools, rates for graduation, dropouts, attendance and college enrollment could be considered too.

Some of the strictest sanctions would be relaxed under Miller's bill. For example, it would loosen a rule that puts an otherwise successful school on probation if a small group within it -- such as learning-disabled children -- fails to meet the standards.

The draft would also change the way English-language learners are evaluated, allowing them to be tested in their native language for up to five years instead of the current three years, and permitting a two-year extension for some. Republicans say this would mean a child who spoke no English could enter the public school system in fifth grade and graduate from high school without ever being evaluated in English.

Teachers unions have objected to Miller's proposal to allow high-needs school districts to give $10,000 bonuses to outstanding teachers and up to $12,500 for teachers of math, science, special education and other subjects that are short of instructors. Criteria for the awards would be developed with input from the unions.

Critics of the unions say teachers are trying to avoid accountability. The unions say Miller's plan -- which McKeon backs -- is not workable.

"You can be a better teacher than I am, but based on conditions that you have to work in, it makes it much more difficult for you to do the same job," said National Education Assn. President Reginald Weaver. "Plus, paying teachers based on student performance hasn't really made a difference in how students achieve."

In the Senate, Democrats and Republicans are in talks about the bill, and Kennedy hopes to begin formal discussions in the education committee in the next few weeks.

Miller, meanwhile, continues to search for a compromise that can win enough support to pass the House.

"We would be wrong to waver when it comes to the existing goals and standards of the No Child Left Behind law," he said. "We would also be wrong if we failed to respond to the serious concerns with the law raised by people who sincerely care about America's educational future."

Bridging Differences

Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch have found themselves at odds on policy over the years, but they share a passion for improving schools. Bridging Differences will offer their insights on what matters most in education.

October 30, 2007

This Is Not Good Education

Dear Deb,

There are times when I feel that we are on the same wavelength, and times when I know we are not. Right now, my frustration is multiplied because in the course of your last mini-essay, I found myself alternately agreeing and disagreeing with your assertions.

I said that many people who have spoken out about the recent round of NAEP scores seem not to have read the report in which the scores were embedded. I expressed the wish that the commentators would take the trouble to read the report before characterizing what they read in the newspapers, which is third-hand at best. This observation sent you into musing about how the original sources themselves are “an interpretation of data,” and how we all rely on the writers that we trust—or happen to agree with.

But that was not my point. The NAEP data are an original source for those who wish to discuss the latest round of national tests. They are not an “interpretation of data.” They are the data. I assume that you mean to say that you are unimpressed by NAEP, that you do not like the content of the NAEP frameworks or the methodology of the NAEP assessments. That is fair enough. But that is a different discussion from the one I raised.

Policymakers in Washington and the state capitols are influenced by the every-other-year reports from NAEP about state and national progress. It is your right to dismiss NAEP out of hand, but the people making important decisions about education policy are on a different trajectory. They look at the numbers and they see a reality that you dismiss as trivial and unimportant. Maybe you are right and they are wrong.

My point is that if public policy is going to be affected by NAEP—and I believe it is (and should be)—then at least the people who write about the NAEP scores should read the data and not rely on second-hand or third-hand accounts. Like the tests or hate them, they are the best measure we have right now. As the recent report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (“The Proficiency Illusion”) showed, the state tests vary widely and randomly in terms of their expectations and standards.

As I said in my last post, the progress on NAEP in most areas has been slight or insignificant from 2003-2007. I take this to mean that NCLB has had trivial effects on student achievement in reading and math, the subjects tested every other year. Now that the president and the U.S. Department of Education have made it their business to show that federal legislation can and will raise test scores, every release of NAEP data is accompanied by a press statement from the U.S. Secretary of Education that magnifies slight gains as huge achievements.

This is troublesome. It is troublesome because the federal government’s role as the honest, impartial collector and distributor of information gets corrupted when it acts as a cheerleader. And it is troublesome because it is unrealistic to expect test scores to make major leaps in a few years. When they do, one should suspect chicanery of some kind.

NAEP shines a light on state testing practices, as the Fordham report shows. Many states are reporting unrealistic leaps in achievement and high levels of proficiency to satisfy the absurd demand of NCLB for a trajectory that will bring every child to "proficiency" by the year 2014. NAEP shows how unlikely it is that any state will meet that goal and how inflated most of the states' claims of achievement are.

You make a transition from national testing to the dangers of a national curriculum. We have discussed this often. Like you, I would like to see schools where children have time to build, to create, to explore, to experiment, to play. I would like to see kids in the primary grades building castles and fortresses and stores with blocks. But unlike you, I don’t think this kind of playful learning is at odds with a national curriculum.

What is really frightening today—due in large measure to NCLB—is that we have a national testing mania without any curriculum at all. So now our schools are obsessed with preparing to take tests, getting good scores on tests, and then starting the test prep all over again. Out the window goes any thoughtful or playful engagement with history, literature, or the arts, as well as time for physical education (in many New York City schools, children are lucky to have one period a week for physical education). This is outrageous. This is not good education.

So here is where we find our differences and we find our agreements. Unlike you, I am not frightened by a national curriculum and national testing; I believe we already have both, supplied by commercial publishers of textbooks and tests. And what we have is low-level and antithetical to good education. Where we agree is that we have a vision of what good education is and should be. Even if we don’t agree on every detail, we do agree that what we have now is far from good education.

Diane

October 25, 2007

What Frightens Me About a National Curriculum

Dear Diane,

Your frustration about folks avoiding original sources is reasonable. Especially when it's actually easily available. But, of course, the "original source" itself is an interpretation of data. In short, we fall back on easier, less time-consuming ways. ("We" being me. See the back-and-forth comments about—presumably—the same data between Erin Johnson and myself.)

In fields that I don't feel deeply connected to, I mostly look for the experts I "trust". There's no way to be an expert in all the subjects I need to have an opinion about! So I go along with the consensus in some cases (like climate) and rely on "my" experts (generally via the magazines I read) on foreign policy and economics—e.g. Richard Rothstein, or Paul Krugman. So why should I expect folks to do otherwise about schooling?

But it's why it is so easy to get myths out there into the public sphere as though they were facts. In our field, there's the myth about the good old days. It rests in part on how often opinion leaders of all political stripes refer casually to the "decline" of public education; ditto for the assumption that most other nations are doing better at something called "schooling" or "education" without our having stopped to define what either means. We fall back on test scores whose contents and assumptions few question, whose methodology even education reporters know little if anything about, not to mention the narrowness of the measures—or the way scores are set. We use a language that assumes that being well-educated is a zero-sum game, in which the progress of others has to injure us.

We trust these assumptions because to think otherwise would require going against the grain and becoming an expert oneself. Rothstein's piece in American Prospect is not the first masterly complicating of the economic/schooling myths, but precisely by complicating it he loses part of his audience. For example, he reminds us that we "forget" that there's a 20-30-year gap between when the tests are administered and when that age group has an impact on the economy. In the information age, resources are also not evenly distributed. While, for example, FairTest—the only national organization that is in the business of being skeptical about test data, has a budget of less than half a million, the three or four leading testing agencies each spend many millions on promoting the idea that tests are the one true measure. (Disclosure: I'm on the board of FairTest.)

It leads me to wish we had a very different way of spending those 13-20 schooling years—preparing people to assess the events that surround them, independently sorting out pros and cons. I'm for the "liberal arts"—but not at the expense of "making sense" of the world around us, those "habits of mind" we build our curriculum around at schools associated with the Coalition of Essential Schools. The traditional liberal arts might even support such habits, if we designed them with this in mind. It would, for example, take a very different definition of advanced mathematics. The public's much-criticized lack of interest in advanced math may, in fact, betray their good sense, not their bad. Calculus-driven math may be foolish-driven math, that mis-prepares us, leaving us disarmed before the realities of our world. Perhaps a "statistics-driven" math would be equally tough and "advanced" but more suitable for a democratic citizenry?

In short, what frightens me about a national curriculum is not merely that I think it's more exciting to teach based on the particular interests and events that swirl around the young but because I think I can even "cover" more stuff of importance if I begin with what grabs our interest—from dinosaurs, mummies, castles, to modern Iraq or climate claims. I can better engage kids with the world they live in—including its history—if I make that the central aim of my work. Diane, it seems unlikely we can get a national consensus around the kind of experimentation that many of us think needs to take place. Nor should we! But suppose I'm right, that more "coverage" of the traditional fare won't make us either scientifically more sophisticated or mathematically more at home in this world? I'm not interested in banning traditionalism, but I'm also not interested in prohibiting us from the kind of exploration that needs to take place. Nor do I want to leave it all to private schools to experiment with the age-old conundrums. I think there are responsible ways to engage in this work, not just in private but also in public schools.

Our scientific future depends, I believe, on our remaining a nation that appreciates "play"—the non-utilitarian (or at least not immediately so) mindset that we're born with. We are systematically cutting ourselves off from the roots of human intellectual inventiveness. We need to find the equivalent of a generation-old practice of taking cars and radios apart to see how they work and building fortresses out of whatever is on hand. Computer-programmed games can't replace the old chemistry sets. Finding the modern equivalents requires us to experiment, not to return to the 1896 Ivy League consensus, great as it was. Some of us were lucky to have had both, but too many kids today have neither. They thus develop an acquiescent mindset or else a merely rebellious one, but an insufficiently curious and self-disciplined one.

As I meet with teachers and principals and parents I hear a lot of anguish and fear. Of course my sample is biased, but…. Read Dan Brown's book, "The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle" for a moving account of why we may be entering an era of temp teachers.

Deb

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.”

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.”

Teachers union gets wiggle room against rival

By Michael J. Mishak

Las Vegas Sun

The Nevada State Education Association's push to boost taxes on gaming offers the union an advantage on another front. The tax plan provides leverage as the association tries to fend off a rival union.

The education association is locked in a struggle with Teamsters Local 14, which is campaigning to represent Clark County teachers. To win, the Teamsters must persuade more than half of those teachers to oust the education association as their representative.

But the association has painted the Teamsters into something of a corner by asking voters to boost the gaming tax so the state could grant teachers a raise.

The Teamsters local and two of its sister locals have workers spread throughout the gaming industry. The union is likely to oppose the higher taxes, which would leave it working to defeat a statewide ballot initiative whose purpose is to help teachers.

The Teamsters said Wednesday they will continue their organizing campaign and predicted the education association would fail to raise gaming taxes.

The association needs to secure nearly 60,000 signatures to place an initiative on the statewide ballot in 2008. If it's approved, voters would need to pass it again in 2010. The association seeks to bump the tax on gaming revenue from 6.75 percent to 9.75 percent.

The association's proposal is the latest in a series of hurdles facing the Teamsters local. From the outset, the union faced the challenge of organizing a largely apathetic and transient membership. Fifty percent of Clark County's teachers typically leave within five years. Also working against the Teamsters is the absence of a record of ever representing public educators.

The Teamsters originally expected their organizing drive would last through most of 2008. But the education association and Teamsters recently agreed to shrink the timeline. The campaign is now expected to conclude by the end of next month.

To be sure, the teachers union has weaknesses, and the Teamsters clearly see an opening. Members are frustrated by years of small raises and saw their union as largely ineffectual in this year's legislative session.

Education lobbyists made the mistake of going around Assembly Democrats to cut a deal with Senate Republicans on education funding. The move irritated the teachers' natural allies and could mean less clout with Assembly Democrats in future Legislatures - not a comforting thought.

The Teamsters say the education association's leadership is now lashing out at the most powerful interest in Nevada - the gaming industry - to deflect attention from its failures.

Ron Taylor, a district teacher who launched a grass-roots effort to decertify the education association and now works for Teamsters Local 14, said the tax proposal was a direct response to the Teamsters organizing effort, which he said is picking up steam.

"It's obvious this action was done because of us," Taylor said. "The NSEA is trying to protect their cash cow - the Clark County Education Association. They have no shot, but this is a way to tell teachers, 'We're fighting for you.' It's transparent."

The state education association represents more than 18,000 teachers across Nevada, including about 13,000 in Clark County.

The Teamsters say they have collected more than 2,000 signed authorization cards. The union needs 7,500 cards by the end of November to make the case for an election, which, if sanctioned by the state labor board, could take place next spring, said Gary Mauger, secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 14.

As for the teachers union tax plan, Mauger said he would consult with the Teamsters executive board and the Nevada AFL-CIO before rendering judgment. Still, he added, "Going and putting the burden on the hand that feeds you sometimes doesn't make for a good way to go."

Richard Hurd, a labor expert at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, said the gaming tax proposal could galvanize the teachers union, slowing - if not killing - the Teamsters' momentum.

"It could be that what the education association is doing now is attempting to demonstrate that they have the potential to deliver," Hurd said.

Terry Hickman , the education association's executive director, said the union's plan was purely a response to a state that chronically underfunds education. Nevada ranks 49th in the nation in education spending.

"It's not enough to complain," Hickman said. "If you are not solution-based, get out of the way. Any association that opposes funding for our kids, I wonder what their values are."
And yet, the teachers union is going it alone.

Danny Thompson, executive secretary-treasurer of the Nevada AFL-CIO, said the 200,000-strong labor federation would vote on the teachers' tax plan, but he said support was unlikely. The AFL-CIO supports the Teamsters organizing effort.

"We support broadening the tax base away from one industry," Thompson said. "If you raise the gaming tax without raising others' taxes, you increase your dependency even more."

by Chip Mosher

Las Vegas City Life

October 11, 2007

THE TEACHER WAS ON THE PHONE asking a simple question. What happened to his arbitration hearing regarding the issue of a rogue administrator severely punishing him for doing the right thing? On the other end of the line, a Clark County Education Association (teachers' faux union) representative, Steven Horner, confessed confusion as to why, after nearly four years, the arbitration hadn't been held, since the average turnaround time to conduct such an independent hearing was 12 to 18 months. He said he'd find the problem and promised to call the teacher back with his case's status.

The teacher never heard back from Horner. Following multiple failed attempts to contact him again by phone and e-mail, the teacher finally gave up in a despair common to teachers who've had to rely on their faux union for such amateurish support in labor disputes.

Months later, the teacher ran into the evasive Horner at a picnic and, because they'd never met, introduced himself. The conversation went something like this:

"Yes, I know who you are," said Horner.

"Why didn't you call me back, as you promised to, about my arbitration that simply vanished into thin air?" asked the teacher.

"Because my boss told me not to contact you. I was just following orders," he answered.

"Like the Nazis?" the teacher said.

"Hey. Even you teachers have to bend over for your jobs on occasion, too," explained Horner.

"Only because teachers have been stuck with the Clark County Education Association to represent them against the school district," the teacher replied.

With that, Horner turned and walked away. How do I know this? Because I was the teacher.

That was last spring. This past week Horner's name popped up again at a local school. Recently, much to the amazement of many veteran teachers, their faux union is surprisingly showing up on campuses, trying to improve its decade-long image as an absentee, ineffective union. Sadly, though, this is not to fix its chronic incompetence, but rather the union is suddenly erecting a false front of concern for teachers -- in order to counter Teamsters Local Union 14, which also is vying for the right to represent the valley's teachers.

As part of the faux union's propaganda push, Horner was scheduled to appear at a school where, for teachers, he was a no-show. Exhausted teachers waited for him long after the school day ended. They had questions. Serious questions. Yet he didn't arrive. In his defense, Horner has said he came to the school's cafeteria, but didn't know exactly where to go for the meeting. After going to the main office, he apparently didn't possess the mental acuity to phone or page his female contact at the school, about where the meeting was. It was in her room, where the tired teachers were waiting, seemingly for Godot. Or, for a union to finally represent their interests.

And Horner's explanation?

"I did arrive at 2:05 and tried to check in no one [sic] was at the front desk however [sic] the AP [assistant principal's] secretary gave me directions, [sic] I will gladly reschedule at your convenience" [sic], Horner wrote to an unhappy teacher.

Note the shaky grammar.

Last year another teacher, being brutally terminated by the district, had been represented by Horner. Although she'd had many years of excellent evaluations in the L.A. Unified School District, this was her probationary year teaching in Clark County. Here, according to her, she'd been railroaded by a mean-spirited, vindictive principal -- a common occurrence in the district. Her contention was supported by several colleagues.

"I have called numerous times and I have not received any response to my inquiries regarding my termination. I am requesting a phone call from my union representative," she e-mailed Horner.

Days later, Horner e-mailed back: "As i told at our last meeting once the letter of non-renewal is issued then I turn over the documents to the lawyers. They will handle the the issues"

Again, note the grammar. This, from a man who represents teachers against district lawyers in disciplinary hearings.

The unlucky teacher, now gone from the district, responded to Horner: "That's the point. There have been no additional meetings, nor have you responded to my phone calls since the notice of my non-renewal."

Unfortunately, the elusive Steven Horner typifies the representation too many teachers get from their faux union, the Clark County Education Association. Sad to say.

Chip Mosher is a simple classroom teacher and faux union member.

by Chip Mosher

Las Vegas City Life

October 4, 2007

DEAR READER, I wanted to avoid the banality of school district issues this week by writing about the passing of French mime Marcel Marceau, and dead Buddhist monks on the streets of Myanmar. By writing about the death of such beautiful silence and, again, about the death of such beautiful silence. But not to be. C'est la vie.

Instead, I made the mistake of viewing local journalist Jon Ralston's gripping TV show Face To Face, which this past week featured leaders of two unions vying to represent teachers' interests in Las Vegas. Mary Ella Holloway, president of the Clark County Education Association -- teachers' current faux union -- verbally squared off against teacher Ron Taylor, a spokesperson for Teamsters Local Union 14.

The program started out predictably enough, each participant rhetorically jabbing and parrying politely, with both scoring minor points. Until halfway through the all-too-short 15-minute debate -- when Holloway, attempting to forensically sucker-punch Taylor, blurted out a doozy.

"We have access to his files," said Holloway, sounding and looking like J. Edgar Hoover in drag, while trying to discredit Taylor, a former member of her union.

Preceding and provoking this incendiary comment, the pit-bull-like host Ralston quoted, from an old news report, the executive director of the teachers' faux union, John Jasonek, who'd disparagingly said that Taylor had worked at five different local schools. But Taylor, a sought-after computer expert, responded -- honestly, it seemed -- that it was really six schools, in 15 years, where he was recruited by principals for his expertise.

On a video news clip, the faux union's Executive Director Jasonek, to trash Taylor, said: "Instead of being some righteous effort to make change from within, his [Taylor's] goal was to land a job with the Teamsters."

It's an odd statement from the top man at the teachers' faux union. Why? Because, according to inside sources, Jasonek led an effort last year to successfully oust Ron Taylor from this union, due to Taylor's efforts to create change inside the union -- the one which provides the bread and butter of Jasonek's documented personal financial affluence.

Following this insightful news clip, the debate took a turn toward the heart of the matter facing local teachers. This was the dialogue:

Ralston: You're just trying to hurt his (Taylor's) credibility, aren't you?

Holloway: We have access to his files -- but we can't talk about it.

Taylor: You have access to my files? You have access to my personnel files?

Holloway: No, no, no. The ones that are-- I-- I-- when CCEA--

Ralston: You see why he's so upset, if you have access to his personnel files? And it's said the school district is in bed with you--

Holloway: Please. Please. Please, Jon. It's not the personnel files. It's the files we have at CCEA when we do business with our-- with our people.

Ralston: That would have nothing to do with whether he's recruited by the principal of one of these schools or not.

Holloway: I think it would tell why he's changed schools so many times.

Whoops. After admitting she had access to Taylor's files and that she "can't talk about it," Holloway actually spoke about Taylor's files. "I think it would tell why he's changed schools so many times," she unethically said to Ralston. Thus, in her floundering, she ignored her own words and, even worse, Taylor's right to privacy.

On top of that, Holloway's weak implication that there was something nefarious about Taylor because of his "files" does little more than make a veteran teacher laugh. To many of those who have been around the school district a while, it is believed that many devious principals have often tried to keep good teachers in their schools by poisoning those teachers' personnel folders with outright lies. It's a pattern of Clark County School District ruthlessness against which the faux union's leadership, Holloway and Jasonek specifically, has consistently failed to protect teachers. Together, Holloway and Jasonek have bungled guarding the salaries and rights of Las Vegas teachers for most of a decade.

And during that time, 5,000 new teachers have disappeared from the district every five years. With the quietude of mimes. Or the silence of dead monks. Each with his own horror story to tell about those in charge, who, apparently, have had access to their files. C'est la vie.

Chip Mosher is a simple classroom teacher and faux union member.

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.