From: Education Week
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/07/16/43ell.h27.html?tmp=1291107869
Vol. 27, Issue 43, Page 12
By Mary Ann Zehr
Nearly all states continue to struggle in meeting the No Child Left Behind Act’s academic targets for English-language learners in mathematics and reading, according to the latest analysis released by the U.S. Department of Education.
Just one state—which is not named in the report but which an Education Department spokesman identified as Louisiana—is credited with hitting the mark for adequate yearly progress, or AYP, in math in the 2005-06 school year, the most recent year for which data was evaluated, while none met AYP in reading.
But while the biennial report sent to Congress on June 26 paints a gloomy picture on the two subjects for the nation’s estimated 5 million ELLs, it also shows the states doing somewhat better in the area of English-language proficiency.
Overall, 24 states—including California, Pennsylvania, and Texas—reported that ELLs were making progress in English. And 28 states, including Arizona, California, and Illinois, met the tougher standard for ELLs to attain proficiency in the language.
The report, based on data from the 2004-05 and 2005-06 school years, contains some conspicuous holes. That’s because much of the data submitted by states were incomplete, Jim Bradshaw, a spokesman for the Education Department, said in an e-mail message.
“The variation in how states implement [objectives required under NCLB] has made it difficult to report and interpret the state-reported data,” he said.
Mr. Bradshaw also said that federal education officials hope the interpretation of Title III, the section of NCLB governing programs for ELLs, that is expected to be finalized this summer will clarify questions that states have about carrying out learning goals and will lead to more consistent reporting of data across states.
Officials in some states have submitted comments to the department criticizing various aspects of the proposed interpretation published May 2 in the Federal Register, saying it will take flexibility away from people at the school district level in making decisions about English-learners.
Progress Reported
The report to Congress also draws on ELLs’ test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress from 2000 to 2007 to argue that such students have made some academic progress under the federal education law.
It says that over that period, the performance gap narrowed in 4th grade math as well as 4th and 8th grade reading between English-learners and other students who scored at “basic” proficiency or above.
But the report fails to note that the proportion of English-learners scoring as “proficient” in reading or math on NAEP—the bar that the federal education law says all students must reach on state tests by 2014—is very low. In 4th grade reading, for example, only 7.5 percent of English-learners scored at least “proficient” in 2007, while 35.5 percent of students who weren’t English-learners did.
New York—which has a large number of English-learners—didn’t submit most of the required data for the report about student progress. Mr. Bradshaw said that because of New York’s reporting problems, “conditions were placed” on some of the state’s Title III funding for 2007, and the state was required to submit a plan on how it would correct its reporting problems, which it did.
The report doesn’t say how many states made AYP in math or reading for the first of the two school years being evaluated. And it doesn’t give information about the different targets set by each state for making AYP or indicate how close states have come to meeting them.
Overall, the report says that 85 percent of the nation’s English-learners are participating in programs paid for with funds under Title III of the NCLB law. The department gave $580 million in state grants under Title III in the 2005-06 school year.
The failure of most states to make AYP for English-learners means that “the language-proficiency standards developed in most states are not developed to a high enough level where they can provide access to academic content achievement,” said Kathleen Leos, who resigned as the director of the Education Department’s office of English-language acquisition in fall 2007 and oversaw the production of early drafts of the report.
Data from states such as California show a standards gap for English-learners, she said. “Language acquisition doesn’t get them to the content achievement that is necessary. Those worlds have to come together.”
Progress Varies
The authors of the report point out that ELL achievement in math is slightly higher on average than achievement in reading.
Even so, fewer than half of such students tested proficient or above in math during the 2005-06 school year in 30 states. The proportion of ELLs testing at least proficient in math ranged from 4.7 percent in Missouri to 82.2 percent in Wyoming during the 2005-06 school year.
The report also notes that achievement in both math and reading drops as the grade level of students increases. “With each grade level,” the report says, “fewer states met their targets.”
The name of the report is “The Biennial Report to Congress on the Implementation of the Title III State Formula Grant Program: School Years 2004-2006.” The Education Department’s first two-year evaluation of Title III was released in March 2005. ("Federal Data Show Gains on Language," March 23, 2005.)
Friday, July 11, 2008
Empathy Comes Naturally to Children: Study
Small Study Shows That Children Who Witness Painful Experiences
CHICAGO (Reuters) - When children see others in pain, their brains respond as if it were happening to them, U.S. researchers said on Friday.This response, which also has been shown in adults, suggests that normal school-age children may be naturally prone to empathy, they said.
"What it shows us is that we have this inborn capacity to resonate with the pain of others. That's probably a very important step toward empathy," said Jean Decety of the University of Chicago, whose study appears in the journal Neuropsychologia.
For the study, the researchers showed 17 children aged 7 to 12 animated images of people experiencing pain while they were undergoing a type of imaging known as functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI.
The series of images depicted accidents, such as a heavy bowl falling on a pair of hands, and situations in which pain was inflicted on purpose, such as someone slamming a car door on a person's hand. They also were shown images without painful encounters.
The study showed that when pain was accidental, brain circuits involved in the processing pain first-hand came into play.
Decety said these same areas have been shown to become active in studies in adults and are thought to be part of the empathy response.
"We can say children are like adults when they see people in pain," Decety said in a telephone interview.
But when the pain was intentionally inflicted, areas involved in social functioning and moral behavior also came into play.
These areas are involved in assessing threats, he said.
"The children were looking for a reason," Decety said. "If you watch someone being hurt, you want to know why."
Decety said many of the children asked whether the situation had been fair.
"If you think about looking for a reason, this is more like caring for others," he said.
Decety said he hopes to use these results to better understand brain function in children who are aggressive or engage in anti-social behavior, such as bullying.
States Struggle to Meet Achievement Standards for ELLs
From: Education Week
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/07/16/43ell.h27.html?tmp=552675028
By Mary Ann Zehr
Nearly all states continue to struggle in meeting the No Child Left Behind Act’s academic targets for English-language learners in mathematics and reading, according to the latest analysis released by the U.S. Department of Education.
Just one state—which is not named in the report but which an Education Department spokesman identified as Louisiana—is credited with hitting the mark for adequate yearly progress, or AYP, in math in the 2005-06 school year, the most recent year for which data was evaluated, while none met AYP in reading.
But while the biennial report sent to Congress on June 26 paints a gloomy picture on the two subjects for the nation’s estimated 5 million ELLs, it also shows the states doing somewhat better in the area of English-language proficiency.
Overall, 24 states—including California, Pennsylvania, and Texas—reported that ELLs were making progress in English. And 28 states, including Arizona, California, and Illinois, met the tougher standard for ELLs to attain proficiency in the language.
The report, based on data from the 2004-05 and 2005-06 school years, contains some conspicuous holes. That’s because much of the data submitted by states were incomplete, Jim Bradshaw, a spokesman for the Education Department, said in an e-mail message.
“The variation in how states implement [objectives required under NCLB] has made it difficult to report and interpret the state-reported data,” he said.
Mr. Bradshaw also said that federal education officials hope the interpretation of Title III, the section of NCLB governing programs for ELLs, that is expected to be finalized this summer will clarify questions that states have about carrying out learning goals and will lead to more consistent reporting of data across states.
Officials in some states have submitted comments to the department criticizing various aspects of the proposed interpretation published May 2 in the Federal Register, saying it will take flexibility away from people at the school district level in making decisions about English-learners.
Progress Reported
The report to Congress also draws on ELLs’ test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress from 2000 to 2007 to argue that such students have made some academic progress under the federal education law.
It says that over that period, the performance gap narrowed in 4th grade math as well as 4th and 8th grade reading between English-learners and other students who scored at “basic” proficiency or above.
But the report fails to note that the proportion of English-learners scoring as “proficient” in reading or math on NAEP—the bar that the federal education law says all students must reach on state tests by 2014—is very low. In 4th grade reading, for example, only 7.5 percent of English-learners scored at least “proficient” in 2007, while 35.5 percent of students who weren’t English-learners did.
New York—which has a large number of English-learners—didn’t submit most of the required data for the report about student progress. Mr. Bradshaw said that because of New York’s reporting problems, “conditions were placed” on some of the state’s Title III funding for 2007, and the state was required to submit a plan on how it would correct its reporting problems, which it did.
The report doesn’t say how many states made AYP in math or reading for the first of the two school years being evaluated. And it doesn’t give information about the different targets set by each state for making AYP or indicate how close states have come to meeting them.
Overall, the report says that 85 percent of the nation’s English-learners are participating in programs paid for with funds under Title III of the NCLB law. The department gave $580 million in state grants under Title III in the 2005-06 school year.
The failure of most states to make AYP for English-learners means that “the language-proficiency standards developed in most states are not developed to a high enough level where they can provide access to academic content achievement,” said Kathleen Leos, who resigned as the director of the Education Department’s office of English-language acquisition in fall 2007 and oversaw the production of early drafts of the report.
Data from states such as California show a standards gap for English-learners, she said. “Language acquisition doesn’t get them to the content achievement that is necessary. Those worlds have to come together.”
Progress Varies
The authors of the report point out that ELL achievement in math is slightly higher on average than achievement in reading.
Even so, fewer than half of such students tested proficient or above in math during the 2005-06 school year in 30 states. The proportion of ELLs testing at least proficient in math ranged from 4.7 percent in Missouri to 82.2 percent in Wyoming during the 2005-06 school year.
The report also notes that achievement in both math and reading drops as the grade level of students increases. “With each grade level,” the report says, “fewer states met their targets.”
The name of the report is “The Biennial Report to Congress on the Implementation of the Title III State Formula Grant Program: School Years 2004-2006.” The Education Department’s first two-year evaluation of Title III was released in March 2005. ("Federal Data Show Gains on Language," March 23, 2005.)
Vol. 27, Issue 43, Page 12
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/07/16/43ell.h27.html?tmp=552675028
By Mary Ann Zehr
Nearly all states continue to struggle in meeting the No Child Left Behind Act’s academic targets for English-language learners in mathematics and reading, according to the latest analysis released by the U.S. Department of Education.
Just one state—which is not named in the report but which an Education Department spokesman identified as Louisiana—is credited with hitting the mark for adequate yearly progress, or AYP, in math in the 2005-06 school year, the most recent year for which data was evaluated, while none met AYP in reading.
But while the biennial report sent to Congress on June 26 paints a gloomy picture on the two subjects for the nation’s estimated 5 million ELLs, it also shows the states doing somewhat better in the area of English-language proficiency.
Overall, 24 states—including California, Pennsylvania, and Texas—reported that ELLs were making progress in English. And 28 states, including Arizona, California, and Illinois, met the tougher standard for ELLs to attain proficiency in the language.
The report, based on data from the 2004-05 and 2005-06 school years, contains some conspicuous holes. That’s because much of the data submitted by states were incomplete, Jim Bradshaw, a spokesman for the Education Department, said in an e-mail message.
“The variation in how states implement [objectives required under NCLB] has made it difficult to report and interpret the state-reported data,” he said.
Mr. Bradshaw also said that federal education officials hope the interpretation of Title III, the section of NCLB governing programs for ELLs, that is expected to be finalized this summer will clarify questions that states have about carrying out learning goals and will lead to more consistent reporting of data across states.
Officials in some states have submitted comments to the department criticizing various aspects of the proposed interpretation published May 2 in the Federal Register, saying it will take flexibility away from people at the school district level in making decisions about English-learners.
Progress Reported
The report to Congress also draws on ELLs’ test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress from 2000 to 2007 to argue that such students have made some academic progress under the federal education law.
It says that over that period, the performance gap narrowed in 4th grade math as well as 4th and 8th grade reading between English-learners and other students who scored at “basic” proficiency or above.
But the report fails to note that the proportion of English-learners scoring as “proficient” in reading or math on NAEP—the bar that the federal education law says all students must reach on state tests by 2014—is very low. In 4th grade reading, for example, only 7.5 percent of English-learners scored at least “proficient” in 2007, while 35.5 percent of students who weren’t English-learners did.
New York—which has a large number of English-learners—didn’t submit most of the required data for the report about student progress. Mr. Bradshaw said that because of New York’s reporting problems, “conditions were placed” on some of the state’s Title III funding for 2007, and the state was required to submit a plan on how it would correct its reporting problems, which it did.
The report doesn’t say how many states made AYP in math or reading for the first of the two school years being evaluated. And it doesn’t give information about the different targets set by each state for making AYP or indicate how close states have come to meeting them.
Overall, the report says that 85 percent of the nation’s English-learners are participating in programs paid for with funds under Title III of the NCLB law. The department gave $580 million in state grants under Title III in the 2005-06 school year.
The failure of most states to make AYP for English-learners means that “the language-proficiency standards developed in most states are not developed to a high enough level where they can provide access to academic content achievement,” said Kathleen Leos, who resigned as the director of the Education Department’s office of English-language acquisition in fall 2007 and oversaw the production of early drafts of the report.
Data from states such as California show a standards gap for English-learners, she said. “Language acquisition doesn’t get them to the content achievement that is necessary. Those worlds have to come together.”
Progress Varies
The authors of the report point out that ELL achievement in math is slightly higher on average than achievement in reading.
Even so, fewer than half of such students tested proficient or above in math during the 2005-06 school year in 30 states. The proportion of ELLs testing at least proficient in math ranged from 4.7 percent in Missouri to 82.2 percent in Wyoming during the 2005-06 school year.
The report also notes that achievement in both math and reading drops as the grade level of students increases. “With each grade level,” the report says, “fewer states met their targets.”
The name of the report is “The Biennial Report to Congress on the Implementation of the Title III State Formula Grant Program: School Years 2004-2006.” The Education Department’s first two-year evaluation of Title III was released in March 2005. ("Federal Data Show Gains on Language," March 23, 2005.)
Vol. 27, Issue 43, Page 12
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Educators Assess 'Open Content' Movement
From: Education Week
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/07/16/43opencontent_ep.h27.html?tmp=635049872
Vol. 27, Issue 43, Pages 8-9
By Andrew Trotter
Leaving their textbooks to gather dust, Houston middle school teacher Ardith A. Stewart and her students studied science this spring by assembling much of their curriculum on a class “wiki.” The materials included students’ written postings on class topics, and projects, grading rubrics, and discussion questions that Ms. Stewart prepared or obtained from teachers in other parts of Texas and the United States.
The students at the 1,200-student Burbank Middle School were able to pursue the state’s learning goals at least as well as if they had read the decade-old textbook, in which “Pluto is still listed as a planet,” Ms. Stewart said.
The Texas teacher is part of a small but growing movement of K-12 educators that is latching on to educational resources that are “open,” or free for others to use, change, and republish on Web sites that promote sharing. The open-content movement is fueled partly by digital creation tools that make it easy to create “mash-ups,” or digital medleys of content of various types.
Educators and education-oriented groups advocating open content say it saves schools money by spreading the time and expense of developing curricular resources over many contributors.
It also passes on the value that teachers add, when they adapt works originated by others, so other educators can benefit from it. Many adaptions give schools more ways of differentiating instruction, by adding language translations, shifting grade level, and adjusting for reading ability, a special geographic or cultural focus, and other tailorings from the standard curriculum.
Ms. Stewart, who is still new to using open content, told other teachers about her experiences at a poster session at the National Educational Computing Conference, held June 29 to July 2, in San Antonio.
A colleague at her school, an English teacher, had gone even further in using open content, she said, by incorporating short videos on punctuation into a class-created wiki, a Web site that allows users to add, remove, and sometimes edit the content, for student content and peer grading.
“Getting students to [assemble their own educational resources] creates a kind of buy-in,” Ms. Stewart said. “It can’t just be teacher-created, because the kids are going to be bored.”
The Knowledge Base
The process of content creation and sharing is also a way to build professional relationships between teachers, proponents of open content say. And the more that teachers get their hands into content creation, the better they can teach that material.
“We can now really build and harness the knowledge base that already exists [among teachers],” said Lisa A. Petrides, the president and founder of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, which is supporting and doing research on open educational resources. “In doing that, we’ll see there’s new knowledge about teaching that we haven’t understood before.”
The institute, which is based in Half Moon Bay, Calif., operates the Open Educational Resources Commons, a Web site that collects and shares free-to-use educational resources globally. The OER Commons site, which allows users to search across different repositories of curriculum content, also gives teachers a means of tagging, rating, and reviewing open educational resources. Teachers can modify the resources and post their revisions for others to use.
Releasing Open Content
Textbooks, however, remain a constant in nearly all schools, and publishers of traditional textbooks do not appear too worried about the open-content movement, at least not yet.
“There may be a trend, or a trend developing—certainly open-source proponents talk about it that way,” said Jay A. Diskey, the director of the school division of the Washington-based Association of American Publishers Inc.
But Mr. Diskey noted that textbook publishers have a great store of expertise in creating curricular materials that meet state academic standards and that conform to expert pedagogical practices and the findings of research. If digital formats are what teachers want, he added, textbook publishers have, over the past six or seven years, added digital materials to supplement print textbooks.
Content becomes “open” when the author assigns to the work a license that releases it from certain rights of the traditional copyright-holder. Depending on the license chosen, it may allow the material to be used for free, adapted, or shared with others for noncommercial or commercial purposes.
The Creative Commons, a nonprofit group based in San Francisco, has created the most widely used set of open licenses that have gained acceptance worldwide. The same set of licenses is used to produce open-source software, such as the Linux operating system and some content-management systems, which can be freely shared and adapted.
Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia, is perhaps the best known open-content collection. It is created by the “wiki” process, through which anyone can add and edit material, under a set of guidelines. Wikis are one method of creating open educational content, but not the only one.
It’s worth noting that not all open educational resources are the result of many hands. The Math Open Reference, a complete Web-based geometry curriculum, for instance, has a sole author, John D. Page, a retired software engineer.
His Web site offers text explanations and highly interactive tools and animations that students can manipulate on their computers. “It allows students to experiment with math concepts and feel them out themselves,” Mr. Page said. He added that the site conforms to the curriculum guidelines of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, based in Reston, Va.
He contends that his site is part of “a storm brewing up,” as schools bridle against having to buy costly textbooks that their teachers often don’t find useful.
Even so, Mr. Page is not prepared to give others the right to alter his online materials. “It’s not meant to be a wiki,” he said.
Professional Payoff
A more typical open-content project is the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium, an effort to develop open instructional materials for all levels of science education.
Samuel S. Donovan, the head of the consortium and a biology professor at the University of Pittsburgh, works with undergraduate faculty members at the university, as well as K-12 preservice teachers and in-service teachers who are taking part in professional development. The consortium uses Creative Commons licenses and stores teacher-created and -adapted materials in a database. The project also is a clearinghouse for open-source software tools with applications in the science classroom, such as modeling tools.
“[Teachers] can use that work not just in their own classroom, but repurpose them, organize them, customize them, and share them back to the educational community,” Mr. Donovan said of the open content.
He sees a payoff in teachers’ professional growth. “In science and biology, the areas I work in, if they’re able to share that back with the community, it creates a very different kind of professional status for teachers. They achieve ownership and professionalism,” Mr. Donovan said.
Much of the consortium’s online open-content collection consists of case-based teaching materials that encourage students to engage in research of the local environment. Another section hosts “a problem space,” offering data sets and posing shared problems that different learning communities are working on. It also offers teachers and students free tools for analyzing data.
Using those activities and tools re-creates the scientific process in a way not obtainable from a textbook, Mr. Donovan said. “It’s analogous,” he said, “to a research community.”
Presenting a real-world approach to science is “very difficult to do in the science classroom,” Mr. Donovan said. “These methods are not equated with open educational resources, but [are] facilitated and really only possible with open educational resources.”
Still, he does not go so far as to say that such methods make textbooks obsolete. “The content-authority sorts of issues are never going to go away,” Mr. Donovan said. “We’re always going to need strong editorial leadership from some experts who know how to organize and present in some coherent fashion the background disciplinary knowledge.”
Early-Literacy Collaboration
Early literacy is another active area of development for open educational resources. One initiative, called FreeReading, aims to help educators teach reading by making high-quality, instructional materials for early reading widely available and free.
As in many open-content projects for educators, FreeReading emphasizes the building of a community, or a social network, to generate and improve reading resources. “We’re looking to provide a reliable forum where teachers can openly and freely share their successful and effective methods for teaching reading in grades K-1, and for at-risk students in later grades,” according to the Web site.
“FreeReading is an ongoing, collaborative, teacher-based curriculum-sharing project,” said Karen M. Fasimpauer, an advocate of open content who helps school districts start programs to provide handheld computers to all of their students. The president of K12 Handhelds, based in Long Beach, Calif., she said she became interested in open content as a source of educational material that school districts could adapt for presentation on handheld devices.
She has also co-founded a wiki to promote elementary school literacy, the Kids Open Dictionary Builder, which invites people from around the world to contribute simplified definitions to an online dictionary that will have language levels and readability appropriate for children.
“We’re hoping lots of people will rip it off and do what they want with it—it’s one of the most basic needed resources,” Ms. Fasimpauer said.
Open Educational Resources
•The BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium makes available open educational resources that teachers can use to help high school and college students study biology by posing and solving problems and communicating with their peers, just as real scientists do.
•The Creative Commons is the nonprofit author of Creative Commons licenses, which allow content creators to tell others which rights to their specific works they reserve and which rights they waive for the benefit of other creators.
•FreeReading is an open instructional program to help teach early literacy through a 40-week scope and sequence of concepts and activities.
•The Math Open Reference is a free interactive math textbook, which covers high school geometry and plans to expand to other areas of math.
•The Open Educational Resources Commons is a comprehensive open-learning network where teachers from pre-K to higher education can share course materials and collaborate on educational issues.
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/07/16/43opencontent_ep.h27.html?tmp=635049872
Vol. 27, Issue 43, Pages 8-9
By Andrew Trotter
Leaving their textbooks to gather dust, Houston middle school teacher Ardith A. Stewart and her students studied science this spring by assembling much of their curriculum on a class “wiki.” The materials included students’ written postings on class topics, and projects, grading rubrics, and discussion questions that Ms. Stewart prepared or obtained from teachers in other parts of Texas and the United States.
The students at the 1,200-student Burbank Middle School were able to pursue the state’s learning goals at least as well as if they had read the decade-old textbook, in which “Pluto is still listed as a planet,” Ms. Stewart said.
The Texas teacher is part of a small but growing movement of K-12 educators that is latching on to educational resources that are “open,” or free for others to use, change, and republish on Web sites that promote sharing. The open-content movement is fueled partly by digital creation tools that make it easy to create “mash-ups,” or digital medleys of content of various types.
Educators and education-oriented groups advocating open content say it saves schools money by spreading the time and expense of developing curricular resources over many contributors.
It also passes on the value that teachers add, when they adapt works originated by others, so other educators can benefit from it. Many adaptions give schools more ways of differentiating instruction, by adding language translations, shifting grade level, and adjusting for reading ability, a special geographic or cultural focus, and other tailorings from the standard curriculum.
Ms. Stewart, who is still new to using open content, told other teachers about her experiences at a poster session at the National Educational Computing Conference, held June 29 to July 2, in San Antonio.
A colleague at her school, an English teacher, had gone even further in using open content, she said, by incorporating short videos on punctuation into a class-created wiki, a Web site that allows users to add, remove, and sometimes edit the content, for student content and peer grading.
“Getting students to [assemble their own educational resources] creates a kind of buy-in,” Ms. Stewart said. “It can’t just be teacher-created, because the kids are going to be bored.”
The Knowledge Base
The process of content creation and sharing is also a way to build professional relationships between teachers, proponents of open content say. And the more that teachers get their hands into content creation, the better they can teach that material.
“We can now really build and harness the knowledge base that already exists [among teachers],” said Lisa A. Petrides, the president and founder of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, which is supporting and doing research on open educational resources. “In doing that, we’ll see there’s new knowledge about teaching that we haven’t understood before.”
The institute, which is based in Half Moon Bay, Calif., operates the Open Educational Resources Commons, a Web site that collects and shares free-to-use educational resources globally. The OER Commons site, which allows users to search across different repositories of curriculum content, also gives teachers a means of tagging, rating, and reviewing open educational resources. Teachers can modify the resources and post their revisions for others to use.
Releasing Open Content
Textbooks, however, remain a constant in nearly all schools, and publishers of traditional textbooks do not appear too worried about the open-content movement, at least not yet.
“There may be a trend, or a trend developing—certainly open-source proponents talk about it that way,” said Jay A. Diskey, the director of the school division of the Washington-based Association of American Publishers Inc.
But Mr. Diskey noted that textbook publishers have a great store of expertise in creating curricular materials that meet state academic standards and that conform to expert pedagogical practices and the findings of research. If digital formats are what teachers want, he added, textbook publishers have, over the past six or seven years, added digital materials to supplement print textbooks.
Content becomes “open” when the author assigns to the work a license that releases it from certain rights of the traditional copyright-holder. Depending on the license chosen, it may allow the material to be used for free, adapted, or shared with others for noncommercial or commercial purposes.
The Creative Commons, a nonprofit group based in San Francisco, has created the most widely used set of open licenses that have gained acceptance worldwide. The same set of licenses is used to produce open-source software, such as the Linux operating system and some content-management systems, which can be freely shared and adapted.
Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia, is perhaps the best known open-content collection. It is created by the “wiki” process, through which anyone can add and edit material, under a set of guidelines. Wikis are one method of creating open educational content, but not the only one.
It’s worth noting that not all open educational resources are the result of many hands. The Math Open Reference, a complete Web-based geometry curriculum, for instance, has a sole author, John D. Page, a retired software engineer.
His Web site offers text explanations and highly interactive tools and animations that students can manipulate on their computers. “It allows students to experiment with math concepts and feel them out themselves,” Mr. Page said. He added that the site conforms to the curriculum guidelines of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, based in Reston, Va.
He contends that his site is part of “a storm brewing up,” as schools bridle against having to buy costly textbooks that their teachers often don’t find useful.
Even so, Mr. Page is not prepared to give others the right to alter his online materials. “It’s not meant to be a wiki,” he said.
Professional Payoff
A more typical open-content project is the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium, an effort to develop open instructional materials for all levels of science education.
Samuel S. Donovan, the head of the consortium and a biology professor at the University of Pittsburgh, works with undergraduate faculty members at the university, as well as K-12 preservice teachers and in-service teachers who are taking part in professional development. The consortium uses Creative Commons licenses and stores teacher-created and -adapted materials in a database. The project also is a clearinghouse for open-source software tools with applications in the science classroom, such as modeling tools.
“[Teachers] can use that work not just in their own classroom, but repurpose them, organize them, customize them, and share them back to the educational community,” Mr. Donovan said of the open content.
He sees a payoff in teachers’ professional growth. “In science and biology, the areas I work in, if they’re able to share that back with the community, it creates a very different kind of professional status for teachers. They achieve ownership and professionalism,” Mr. Donovan said.
Much of the consortium’s online open-content collection consists of case-based teaching materials that encourage students to engage in research of the local environment. Another section hosts “a problem space,” offering data sets and posing shared problems that different learning communities are working on. It also offers teachers and students free tools for analyzing data.
Using those activities and tools re-creates the scientific process in a way not obtainable from a textbook, Mr. Donovan said. “It’s analogous,” he said, “to a research community.”
Presenting a real-world approach to science is “very difficult to do in the science classroom,” Mr. Donovan said. “These methods are not equated with open educational resources, but [are] facilitated and really only possible with open educational resources.”
Still, he does not go so far as to say that such methods make textbooks obsolete. “The content-authority sorts of issues are never going to go away,” Mr. Donovan said. “We’re always going to need strong editorial leadership from some experts who know how to organize and present in some coherent fashion the background disciplinary knowledge.”
Early-Literacy Collaboration
Early literacy is another active area of development for open educational resources. One initiative, called FreeReading, aims to help educators teach reading by making high-quality, instructional materials for early reading widely available and free.
As in many open-content projects for educators, FreeReading emphasizes the building of a community, or a social network, to generate and improve reading resources. “We’re looking to provide a reliable forum where teachers can openly and freely share their successful and effective methods for teaching reading in grades K-1, and for at-risk students in later grades,” according to the Web site.
“FreeReading is an ongoing, collaborative, teacher-based curriculum-sharing project,” said Karen M. Fasimpauer, an advocate of open content who helps school districts start programs to provide handheld computers to all of their students. The president of K12 Handhelds, based in Long Beach, Calif., she said she became interested in open content as a source of educational material that school districts could adapt for presentation on handheld devices.
She has also co-founded a wiki to promote elementary school literacy, the Kids Open Dictionary Builder, which invites people from around the world to contribute simplified definitions to an online dictionary that will have language levels and readability appropriate for children.
“We’re hoping lots of people will rip it off and do what they want with it—it’s one of the most basic needed resources,” Ms. Fasimpauer said.
Open Educational Resources
•The BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium makes available open educational resources that teachers can use to help high school and college students study biology by posing and solving problems and communicating with their peers, just as real scientists do.
•The Creative Commons is the nonprofit author of Creative Commons licenses, which allow content creators to tell others which rights to their specific works they reserve and which rights they waive for the benefit of other creators.
•FreeReading is an open instructional program to help teach early literacy through a 40-week scope and sequence of concepts and activities.
•The Math Open Reference is a free interactive math textbook, which covers high school geometry and plans to expand to other areas of math.
•The Open Educational Resources Commons is a comprehensive open-learning network where teachers from pre-K to higher education can share course materials and collaborate on educational issues.
Increase teacher pay in manageable way
From: the Detroit News
http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080710/OPINION01/807100321&imw=Y
Author: Mike Reno
Scrap unsustainable salary hikes for better reward system
Teachers' pay has followed a single salary schedule -- or "step system" -- in which years of teaching experience and college credits alone determine pay raises. Yet shifting expectations, limited funding and increased accountability in education are challenging the viability of this outdated pay system in Michigan.
Under the current system, teaching professionals -- many of whom deserve higher compensation -- are held hostage in a bizarre pay structure that ignores their skills or effectiveness. It artificially rockets up salary early in their career, only to see it stall once they're seasoned.
The step system isn't good for schools either. It can cause district payrolls to grow faster than annual funding increases, leaving districts little choice but to lay off teachers, increase class size or make other instructional cuts.
While the history of teacher salaries might explain why this pay system was established decades ago, it's time to scrap the steps now.
Each year, teachers take one step up the pay scale until reaching the top, typically in 10 years.
The only opportunity for salary increases comes from post-graduate college work. Teachers move to new pay scales -- and new steps -- by earning more college credits or degrees. Most obtain a master's degree within their first 10 years of teaching.
In Rochester, the starting pay for a teacher is $37,697. Top-of-scale is reached after 10 years, and this year it's $83,470 for those with a master's degree.
During the past 10 years, the average contract increase in Rochester has been a meager 2.5 percent (inflation during that period averaged 2.6 percent). However, that average contract increase doesn't actually reflect the pay increases for all teachers or the payroll increase for the district.
A newly minted teacher hired in 1997 was paid $29,771. His or her 2007-08 salary (with a master's degree) would be $83,470. Over 10 years, the average compounded salary increase was an impressive 10.9 percent.
Meanwhile, the seasoned and experienced teacher -- a 10-year veteran already making the top-of-scale $65,918 in 1997 -- would be earning the same $83,470 (plus a few other stipends). The average salary increase for this teacher was just 2.5 percent -- not quite on par with inflation.
This one-size-fits-all system is fundamentally unfair. It's also unsustainable as a business model. Maintaining this system is irresponsible.
A revamped system should be based on measurable metrics such as student achievement and mentoring, as well as principal and peer review.
Subject matter and teaching environment also deserve consideration, all in an effort to reward teachers who are truly making a difference in areas where they're most needed.
A fiscally responsible system would distribute available money in the form of pay increases -- even bonuses -- based on meaningful elements, rather than the number of years of service alone.
Florida's schools are trying a new plan, as well as schools in Houston and Denver. As with all new concepts, the startups have been challenging and subject to criticism -- primarily from teacher unions. But the concept is sound, and Michigan needs similar forward thinking.
Local boards in Michigan are ill-suited to the task and are no match for powerful teacher unions that are resistant to change.
Ideally, the Michigan Education Association -- the state's largest teachers union -- would be part of the solution. It could help to secure voluntary implementation at the local level. If the MEA refuses to participate in a new compensation system, then perhaps the state should unilaterally intervene.
Changing the compensation system in Michigan's public education is necessary, not only for financial reasons, but also to reward those teachers that make a difference.
http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080710/OPINION01/807100321&imw=Y
Author: Mike Reno
Scrap unsustainable salary hikes for better reward system
Teachers' pay has followed a single salary schedule -- or "step system" -- in which years of teaching experience and college credits alone determine pay raises. Yet shifting expectations, limited funding and increased accountability in education are challenging the viability of this outdated pay system in Michigan.
Under the current system, teaching professionals -- many of whom deserve higher compensation -- are held hostage in a bizarre pay structure that ignores their skills or effectiveness. It artificially rockets up salary early in their career, only to see it stall once they're seasoned.
The step system isn't good for schools either. It can cause district payrolls to grow faster than annual funding increases, leaving districts little choice but to lay off teachers, increase class size or make other instructional cuts.
While the history of teacher salaries might explain why this pay system was established decades ago, it's time to scrap the steps now.
Each year, teachers take one step up the pay scale until reaching the top, typically in 10 years.
The only opportunity for salary increases comes from post-graduate college work. Teachers move to new pay scales -- and new steps -- by earning more college credits or degrees. Most obtain a master's degree within their first 10 years of teaching.
In Rochester, the starting pay for a teacher is $37,697. Top-of-scale is reached after 10 years, and this year it's $83,470 for those with a master's degree.
During the past 10 years, the average contract increase in Rochester has been a meager 2.5 percent (inflation during that period averaged 2.6 percent). However, that average contract increase doesn't actually reflect the pay increases for all teachers or the payroll increase for the district.
A newly minted teacher hired in 1997 was paid $29,771. His or her 2007-08 salary (with a master's degree) would be $83,470. Over 10 years, the average compounded salary increase was an impressive 10.9 percent.
Meanwhile, the seasoned and experienced teacher -- a 10-year veteran already making the top-of-scale $65,918 in 1997 -- would be earning the same $83,470 (plus a few other stipends). The average salary increase for this teacher was just 2.5 percent -- not quite on par with inflation.
This one-size-fits-all system is fundamentally unfair. It's also unsustainable as a business model. Maintaining this system is irresponsible.
A revamped system should be based on measurable metrics such as student achievement and mentoring, as well as principal and peer review.
Subject matter and teaching environment also deserve consideration, all in an effort to reward teachers who are truly making a difference in areas where they're most needed.
A fiscally responsible system would distribute available money in the form of pay increases -- even bonuses -- based on meaningful elements, rather than the number of years of service alone.
Florida's schools are trying a new plan, as well as schools in Houston and Denver. As with all new concepts, the startups have been challenging and subject to criticism -- primarily from teacher unions. But the concept is sound, and Michigan needs similar forward thinking.
Local boards in Michigan are ill-suited to the task and are no match for powerful teacher unions that are resistant to change.
Ideally, the Michigan Education Association -- the state's largest teachers union -- would be part of the solution. It could help to secure voluntary implementation at the local level. If the MEA refuses to participate in a new compensation system, then perhaps the state should unilaterally intervene.
Changing the compensation system in Michigan's public education is necessary, not only for financial reasons, but also to reward those teachers that make a difference.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Schools lagging in use of digital assessments
From: eSchool News
http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/index.cfm?i=54483&i-d
By Laura Devaney, Senior Editor, eSchool News
http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/index.cfm?i=54483&i-d
By Laura Devaney, Senior Editor, eSchool News
Survey charts schools' progress (and remaining challenges) in using technology to transform education
Schools and colleges have made great progress in using technology to support their enterprise-level programs and in providing new learning tools to students, but according to a new survey from the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA), most still fall short in using digital assessments to target instructional needs precisely. One year ago this month, SIIA launched an ambitious project called the Vision for K-20 Education. The project included a framework for using technology to transform education and a series of annual surveys to assess schools' progress toward achieving these goals. (See "SIIA: Get K-20 vision in focus.") SIIA released findings from the first of these annual surveys at the National Educational Computing Conference in San Antonio July 1.
The survey revealed that educational institutions are using security tools to protect student data and privacy for almost all applications, systems, and computers. It also pointed to the widespread availability of internet access throughout the majority of responding institutions.
But schools were found lacking in their use of digital assessment tools, SIIA said. K-12 schools in particular are focusing primarily on mandated testing procedures, which require that every student take the same test, instead of using computer-based adaptive testing, which can provide a much more detailed view of a student's strengths and weaknesses.
Survey results showed that K-12 schools lag behind postsecondary institutions in their overall progress in using technology, although this is consistent with numerous other surveys indicating that technology is adopted earlier at the postsecondary level, SIIA said. The survey also noted that a comparison between K-12 and postsecondary schools can be problematic, owing to the different needs and target goals at the K-12 and postsecondary levels.
The smallest schools--those with fewer than 450 students--also appeared to be lagging behind their larger counterparts in implementing the project's goals.
"The Vision K-20 initiative calls for a coalition of stakeholders, including educators, business executives, policy makers, and academic leaders, to recognize the need to prepare our students for global competition," said Karen Billings, vice president of SIIA's education division.
The initiative calls for every K-20 institution, by the end of the decade, to use technology and eLearning to increase student engagement and achievement; provide equity and access to new learning opportunities; document and track student performance; empower collaborative learning communities; maximize teaching and administrative effectiveness; and build student proficiencies in 21st-century skills.
For the survey, educators responded to 20 statements about their technology use, and their answers were scored from 1-4. If a respondent indicated the most extensive possible use of a certain technology, that response was given a 4 and was awarded 100 percent. If the respondent selected the answer corresponding to the lowest possible use of a technology, his or her answer received a 1 and was awarded 25 percent.
Responses were sorted into five categories encompassing the Vision's Five Measures of Progress: 21st-century tools, anytime/anywhere access, differentiated learning, assessment tools, and enterprise support.
Here are the average scores in each category:
• Enterprise Support: 68 percent
• 21st-Century Tools: 66 percent
• Anytime/Anywhere Access: 62 percent
• Differentiated Learning: 55 percent
• Assessment Tools: 46 percent
The average overall score for all 20 questions was 61 percent.
The survey also calculated schools' progress toward the initiative's Seven Vision Goals. These goals are to facilitate communication, connectivity, and collaboration; enable students to learn from any place at any time; deepen learning and motivate students; manage the education enterprise effectively and economically; support accountability and inform instruction; help schools meet the needs of all students; and nurture creativity and self-expression.
Results from the first year of the survey indicate that schools have made the most progress in facilitating communication and giving students access to anywhere, anytime learning. The least progress has been made in nurturing creativity and self-expression and helping schools meet the needs of all students.
"Some people are there, but not everybody is there, and we have several different ways of getting them there," Billings said. Neither educators nor SIIA members can achieve the vision alone, she said, which is why education stakeholders must work together to ensure that technology helps to close achievement gaps and strengthen learning.
"Schools often believe that other districts are ahead of them, but that's often not the case," she added.
Billings said SIIA is starting to compare its survey results to data from the Hayes Connection's "America's Digital Schools" reports and Project Tomorrow's annual "Speak Up" surveys.
The Vision K-20 survey was conducted between March and June 2008, and 387 educators from across the nation responded online at the project's web site. After submitting the survey, each participant received a progress report showing how close his or her school was to achieving the project's goals and measures.
The Short, Happy Lives of Teachers
From: Teacher Magazine
http://www.teachermagazine.org/tm/articles/2008/07/09/40tln_norton.h19.html
Author: John Norton
As we climb over the hump of summer toward a new school-year horizon, it’s a good time to share this fun (and often illuminating) activity we tried out recently in the Teacher Leaders Network discussion group.
The idea came from a newspaper feature describing a trend toward "succinct prose." The story cited a recent book published by Smith Magazine which carried the intriguing title, Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.
As the feature story noted, this and similar collections of extremely short prose have been inspired by a six-word novel said to have been written by Ernest Hemingway on a dare. The novel read: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."
The six-word memoirs published by Smith include one from TV chef Mario Batali ("Brought it to a boil, often"); another from an anonymous student ("Deferred all math homework to Dad"), and this from a long-suffering English teacher: "Grading AP essays, I crave Tolstoy."
Here’s the specific question we tossed into the TLN Forum arena:
If you were writing a mini-memoir of your teaching life, what would your six words be? Your memoir might be funny, inspirational, profound, mundane, deeply true. Want to play? Mull it over, doodle with pen and napkin or your favorite digital tool, and post your memoir for all of us to read.
Below are some of our favorite mini-memoirs from the TLN chat group. You’ll find a bit of humor, a lot of pride, and plenty of evidence that teachers are some of the glue that holds society together.
We hope Teacher Magazine readers will use the Comments tool at the end of this post to share a six-word story of your own teaching life.
They asked. I listened. We learned. (Majorie)
Life on the bell curve's edge. (Amy B)
Every day is a new adventure. (Amy E)
Reading creates new worlds—let's go! (David)
Exercised the muscle of the mind. (Nancy D)
Please, don't ask me for more! (Kim after a hard year)
Daily empowering students who learn differently. (Special ed teacher Mary Z)
No growth, no life. Struggling, soaring. (George)
Teacher, warrior, fighting for the future. (Gail T)
Always celebrating the joy of learning. (Louisa)
We learned by doing, always curious. (Marsha)
Making a difference. Leaving a legacy. (Dayle)
Connecting academic concepts to life applications. (Consumer sciences teacher Susan G)
Maximizing talents of others with enthusiasm. (Joanie)
Hard work and work worth doing. (Rona)
Shaping the future in the present. (Mark)
First class life with second graders! (Donna)
Painting big pictures and brighter education. (Preschool teacher and artist John H)
Learning with children, teachers and leaders. (Ellen H)
Untied shoelaces, missing front teeth – elementary! (Michelle)
Conduit for powerful current of discovery. (Elaine)
Learning as much as I teach. (Jane)
Active noisy classroom means brains working. (Cossondra)
Networked learner: learning never stops. (Sheryl)
Teachers wanted, patience mandatory, sanity optional. (Renee)
Champion of the underdog, forever passionate. (Jon)
Portal to the world beyond cornfields. (Karen in Indiana)
Forming artistic consciousness: society's future leaders. (Catherine)
Teaching middle school. Lost my mind? (Bill)
Teacher, learner, together we build futures. (Kathie)
Cheerleader aspirations. I teach. Same thing. (Cindi)
Keeping democracy alive for Generation Next. (Mary T)
Hoped to make difference. Was transformed. (Laura)
Loved science first; love students now. (Deborah)
Student potential boundless; teacher growth endless. (Nikki)
I just want to teach. Period. (Susie H)
There you have it-36 teacher memoirs, each exactly six words long. What’s yours?
—John Norton
TLN Moderator
Consorted with teachers; wiser for it.
http://www.teachermagazine.org/tm/articles/2008/07/09/40tln_norton.h19.html
Author: John Norton
As we climb over the hump of summer toward a new school-year horizon, it’s a good time to share this fun (and often illuminating) activity we tried out recently in the Teacher Leaders Network discussion group.
The idea came from a newspaper feature describing a trend toward "succinct prose." The story cited a recent book published by Smith Magazine which carried the intriguing title, Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.
As the feature story noted, this and similar collections of extremely short prose have been inspired by a six-word novel said to have been written by Ernest Hemingway on a dare. The novel read: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."
The six-word memoirs published by Smith include one from TV chef Mario Batali ("Brought it to a boil, often"); another from an anonymous student ("Deferred all math homework to Dad"), and this from a long-suffering English teacher: "Grading AP essays, I crave Tolstoy."
Here’s the specific question we tossed into the TLN Forum arena:
If you were writing a mini-memoir of your teaching life, what would your six words be? Your memoir might be funny, inspirational, profound, mundane, deeply true. Want to play? Mull it over, doodle with pen and napkin or your favorite digital tool, and post your memoir for all of us to read.
Below are some of our favorite mini-memoirs from the TLN chat group. You’ll find a bit of humor, a lot of pride, and plenty of evidence that teachers are some of the glue that holds society together.
We hope Teacher Magazine readers will use the Comments tool at the end of this post to share a six-word story of your own teaching life.
They asked. I listened. We learned. (Majorie)
Life on the bell curve's edge. (Amy B)
Every day is a new adventure. (Amy E)
Reading creates new worlds—let's go! (David)
Exercised the muscle of the mind. (Nancy D)
Please, don't ask me for more! (Kim after a hard year)
Daily empowering students who learn differently. (Special ed teacher Mary Z)
No growth, no life. Struggling, soaring. (George)
Teacher, warrior, fighting for the future. (Gail T)
Always celebrating the joy of learning. (Louisa)
We learned by doing, always curious. (Marsha)
Making a difference. Leaving a legacy. (Dayle)
Connecting academic concepts to life applications. (Consumer sciences teacher Susan G)
Maximizing talents of others with enthusiasm. (Joanie)
Hard work and work worth doing. (Rona)
Shaping the future in the present. (Mark)
First class life with second graders! (Donna)
Painting big pictures and brighter education. (Preschool teacher and artist John H)
Learning with children, teachers and leaders. (Ellen H)
Untied shoelaces, missing front teeth – elementary! (Michelle)
Conduit for powerful current of discovery. (Elaine)
Learning as much as I teach. (Jane)
Active noisy classroom means brains working. (Cossondra)
Networked learner: learning never stops. (Sheryl)
Teachers wanted, patience mandatory, sanity optional. (Renee)
Champion of the underdog, forever passionate. (Jon)
Portal to the world beyond cornfields. (Karen in Indiana)
Forming artistic consciousness: society's future leaders. (Catherine)
Teaching middle school. Lost my mind? (Bill)
Teacher, learner, together we build futures. (Kathie)
Cheerleader aspirations. I teach. Same thing. (Cindi)
Keeping democracy alive for Generation Next. (Mary T)
Hoped to make difference. Was transformed. (Laura)
Loved science first; love students now. (Deborah)
Student potential boundless; teacher growth endless. (Nikki)
I just want to teach. Period. (Susie H)
There you have it-36 teacher memoirs, each exactly six words long. What’s yours?
—John Norton
TLN Moderator
Consorted with teachers; wiser for it.
Garrett urges teachers to turn up the technology
From: Tulsa World
http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?articleID=20080709_16_A17_spancl553071
By ANGEL RIGGS World Capitol Bureau
She also unveils an online tool to aid educators.
OKLAHOMA CITY — State Superintendent Sandy Garrett called on teachers Tuesday to integrate more technology into classrooms to engage students who have spent their entire lives in a digital world.
She also unveiled the state Department of Education's Time Analysis Tool, an online process designed to help school leaders identify and better plan for school-day disruptions, such as assemblies, trips and intercom announcements.
"Students shouldn't be required to power down to boredom each morning they arrive at school," Garrett said. "And their teachers shouldn't have to struggle to make the most of minutes that are too few and far between."
Speaking to about 3,000 education leaders gathered for the annual Superintendent's Leadership Conference in Oklahoma City, Garrett stressed that today's children have spent their entire lives immersed in technology but are being forced to "power down" when they enter the classroom.
"In order to teach the children well, we must integrate technology into the learning process," she said. "We should be able to individualize rather than standardize instruction."
Garrett also addressed the increasing amount of student testing nationwide and noted concerns that school counselors are being pulled from their jobs to serve as test coordinators. She estimated that schools spend between two to six weeks each spring testing students.
http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?articleID=20080709_16_A17_spancl553071
By ANGEL RIGGS World Capitol Bureau
She also unveils an online tool to aid educators.
OKLAHOMA CITY — State Superintendent Sandy Garrett called on teachers Tuesday to integrate more technology into classrooms to engage students who have spent their entire lives in a digital world.
She also unveiled the state Department of Education's Time Analysis Tool, an online process designed to help school leaders identify and better plan for school-day disruptions, such as assemblies, trips and intercom announcements.
"Students shouldn't be required to power down to boredom each morning they arrive at school," Garrett said. "And their teachers shouldn't have to struggle to make the most of minutes that are too few and far between."
Speaking to about 3,000 education leaders gathered for the annual Superintendent's Leadership Conference in Oklahoma City, Garrett stressed that today's children have spent their entire lives immersed in technology but are being forced to "power down" when they enter the classroom.
"In order to teach the children well, we must integrate technology into the learning process," she said. "We should be able to individualize rather than standardize instruction."
Garrett also addressed the increasing amount of student testing nationwide and noted concerns that school counselors are being pulled from their jobs to serve as test coordinators. She estimated that schools spend between two to six weeks each spring testing students.
Garrett was interrupted with applause when she said she is supportive of testing as a diagnostic tool and for accountability but wondered whether it was "over the top."
She again was applauded when she pledged to ask lawmakers to hire "graduation coaches" who would mentor students at risk for dropping out of school and for funds to hire full- or part-time district test coordinators.
Graduation coaches are especially needed, she said, as the state enters into "high-stakes" testing that requires students, beginning with this year's ninth-graders, to pass four of seven exams to receive high school diplomas.
Garrett also noted this year's tight budgets for many schools, saying she's "gravely concerned" about the rising costs districts face.
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Undocumented students have a degree of anxiety
From: Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/education/la-me-ucla8-2008jul08,0,6025873.story
By Gale Holland, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
http://www.latimes.com/news/education/la-me-ucla8-2008jul08,0,6025873.story
By Gale Holland, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
He took 15 AP classes in high school, and kicks himself for passing up two others. Now, he is graduating from UCLA, with a double major in English and Chicano Studies and a B-plus grade point average.
But for all his success, Miguel does not share the full-bodied exuberance of the graduating seniors who marched last month five abreast into Pauley Pavilion, belting out the '60s hit "Build Me Up, Buttercup." A native of Puebla, Mexico, he is an illegal immigrant.
Around the UCLA campus, ubiquitous kiosk signs encourage students to "Jump Into Great Jobs!" But for Miguel, any employment will be difficult. Like many undocumented students, he may elect to prolong his studies to stave off an uncertain future.
"When you're in school you have a place in society, you're a university student," Miguel, 23, said during an interview at a campus coffee spot on graduation day. "When you graduate, you're just an immigrant again.
"Miguel and other students, who asked that their full names be withheld for fear that they or their families could face federal action, are caught between contradictory U.S. immigration policies.
A 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision entitled illegal immigrants to public education from kindergarten through high school; 50,000 to 70,000 graduate from U.S. high schools each year (California's share, by some estimates, is 40%), according to experts. But the students' access to higher education has not been guaranteed by the courts and Congress.
Over the last seven years, California and nine other states have encouraged undocumented college students to pursue higher education by offering many who graduated from California high schools in-state tuition. California public universities do not ask about legal status on applications. Some private universities, including Loyola Marymount and Santa Clara, have scholarships tailored for illegal immigrants. They are not entitled to most financial aid or loans at public colleges.
Their numbers at the university level remain low. The UC system had an estimated 271 to 433 undocumented students, out of total enrollment of 214,000, in 2006-2007, the latest figure available, a spokesman said.
But attending college, and even doing splendidly, does nothing to alter these students' illegal status. A proposed federal law called the Dream Act would have offered a pathway to citizenship for many college students and members of the military. But supporters last year were unable to secure enough votes to prevent a filibuster of the bill.
Opponents said the students are looting limited educational resources that should go to citizens and legal residents.
"To these students, I say I hope you return to your home country right away," said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach), "and I hope you repay what you have spent of other people's money. It's a horrible crime."
Students have come far
Advocates argue that it's inhumane and counterproductive to ostracize students who have come so far with so little.
"These students have been here since they were small children, and we've done everything to encourage them to stay in school and help them prepare for college," said UCLA Asst. Vice Provost Alfred Herrera of the Center for Community College Partnerships. "The sad reality is most of these students are the best and the brightest."
And if history is any guide, they aren't leaving. Some, instead, remain in school.
Living off academic stipends, scholarships and a steady diet of ramen, these students play out an endless "Groundhog Day" script of school applications, research projects and degrees.
"They mostly hang around colleges, assistantships, getting paid to do surveys. It's not employment, it's catch-as-catch can," said Michael Olivas, an expert on immigrants in higher education who teaches at the University of Houston Law Center.
"I think continuing your studies is the best option for us now," said Tam Tran, 24, who heads to Brown University this fall for a five-year doctoral program in American Civilizations.
Born in Germany to Vietnamese parents, Tran has a complex immigration history: a U.S. immigration board in 2001 found that her family faced political persecution in Vietnam for past anti-Communist activities, but ordered them deported to Germany.
Germany, however, would not take them. The nation only recognized as citizens children born on its soil to German parents.
She said she would have liked to stay at UCLA, maybe go to film school. But the public university can't give her aid, while both Brown and Yale universities offered generous packages.
Robert Lee, professor in the Department of American Civilization at Brown, said the university is not bothered that Tran might be unable to work in the U.S. in her academic field. "Even as students, they're producing important academic product," Lee said. "We don't train all students to become university professors; they might end up working for an NGO [non-governmental organization], or a film producer . . . or in government service, maybe not in the U.S."
'Miley Cyrus Americans'
Stephanie, 22, drops out roughly every other quarter towork at low-paying jobs like making cardboard boxes.
"The reason I don't feel bad about it taking me so long to get through is that as long as I'm a UCLA student, I can say, 'We're on our way, we're up-and-comers," said Stephanie, over dinner recently at a Japanese restaurant.
Stephanie's parents brought her here at age 4, after the disco craze dissolved in the Philippines, leaving her father, a lighting installer, without a job, she said. Her parents only told her she was undocumented when she tried to transfer to UCLA, she added.
"What people don't get is we're Miley Cyrus Americans," said Stephanie, an aspiring writer and copy editor. "English is the only language I speak."
A story about Stephanie in the Daily Bruin newspaper earlier this year drew scant sympathy. Stephanie "has a choice to make: become a legal resident or continue to live a life of deferring the task her parents should have taken care of years before," a letter to the editor said.
Stephanie and Miguel said they would risk deportation if they sought legal status.
Even the most prestigious academic posting has not shielded students from immigration authorities. Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a classics scholar, Princeton salutatorian and illegal immigrant from the Dominican Republic, was able to pursue a masters at Oxford University without facing possible exclusion upon his return only through an intense legal and publicity campaign, his lawyer, Stephen Yale-Loehr said. Yale-Loehr is an immigration law professor at Cornell Law School.
As it is, Padilla was able to obtain only a temporary waiver and visa so he could travel to the U.S. during summer and vacations to work on a research project for Princeton.
"Naturally the uncertainty over my status has been a source of anxiety," Padilla said in an e-mail from Oxford. "But I've tried to keep that anxiety quite separate from my academic and extracurricular pursuits. I feel enormously privileged to have studied first at Princeton and now at Oxford."
This same optimism pervaded speeches at a small graduation ceremony arranged by the UCLA chapter of IDEAS, a campus support organization for students, documented and undocumented, who receive the in-state tuition exemption.
About 10 students talked about life as an "Underground Undergrad" (the title of a book undocumented UCLA students released this spring): the two- to three-hour commutes, crashing on couches, eating only if somebody could sneak them into the dining hall. Several said they were hopeful the Dream Act will be reintroduced soon, and this time pass, opening the door to legalization.
But mainly, they expressed gratitude for their education.
"I choose not to place the burden [of my situation] on everyone," said Matias Ramos, another graduating senior, whose grandmother flew in from Argentina for the event. "I have had the blessing of encountering a lot of people who've helped me."
"A lot of stereotypes that linger on, we break all of them," said Miguel. "All of us are very assimilated and we're very proud of it. . . . We're driven by huge optimism.
"But as she cleared cut fruit from the refreshment table, Tran grew wistful.
"We're always in a position where we're oppressed and privileged at the same time," she said. "I wonder if getting a PhD in American studies is going to prove I'm an American?"
So when the teacher at Gaenslen Elementary School, 1250 E. Burleigh St., got an e-mail last school year inviting her to pilot an Internet-based anti-b
From: Science Daily
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080707161429.htm
ScienceDaily (July 8, 2008) — Adults who had improved nutrition in early childhood may score better on intellectual tests, regardless of the number of years they attended school, according to a new article.
"Schooling is a key component of the development of literacy, reading comprehension and cognitive functioning, and thus of human capital," the authors write as background information in the article. Research also suggests that poor nutrition in early life is associated with poor performance on cognitive (thinking, learning and memory) tests in adulthood. "Therefore, both nutrition and early-childhood intellectual enrichment are likely to be important determinants of intellectual functioning in adulthood."
Between 1969 and 1977, Guatemalan children in four villages participated in a trial of nutritional supplementation. Through the trial, some were exposed to atole--a protein-rich enhanced nutritional supplement--while others were exposed to fresco, a sugar-sweetened beverage. Aryeh D. Stein, M.P.H., Ph.D., of the Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta, and colleagues analyzed data from intellectual testing and interviews conducted between 2002 and 2004, when 1,448 surviving participants (68.4 percent) were an average of 32 years old.
Individuals exposed to atole between birth and age 24 months scored higher on intellectual tests of reading comprehension and cognitive functioning in adulthood than those not exposed to atole or who were exposed to it at other ages. This association remained significant when the researchers controlled for other factors associated with intellectual functioning, including years of schooling.
"Nutrition in early life is associated with markers of child development in this population, and exposure to atole for most of the first three years of life was associated with an increase of 0.4 years in attained schooling, with the association being stronger for females (1.2 years of schooling)," the authors write. "Thus, schooling might be in the causal pathway between early childhood nutrition and adult intellectual functioning."
"Our data, which suggest an effect of exposure to an enhanced nutritional intervention in early life that is independent of any effect of schooling, provide additional evidence in support of intervention strategies that link early investments in children to continued investments in early-life nutrition and in schooling," they conclude.
This study was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and from the National Science Foundation. The National Institutes of Health, the Thrasher Fund and the Nestle Foundation have funded the work of the INCAP Longitudinal Study since its inception.
Journal reference:
Aryeh D. Stein; Meng Wang; Ann DiGirolamo; Ruben Grajeda; Usha Ramakrishnan; Manuel Ramirez-Zea; Kathryn Yount; Reynaldo Martorell. Nutritional Supplementation in Early Childhood, Schooling, and Intellectual Functioning in Adulthood: A Prospective Study in Guatemala. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med., 2008;162(7):612-618 [link]
Adapted from materials provided by JAMA and Archives Journals.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080707161429.htm
ScienceDaily (July 8, 2008) — Adults who had improved nutrition in early childhood may score better on intellectual tests, regardless of the number of years they attended school, according to a new article.
"Schooling is a key component of the development of literacy, reading comprehension and cognitive functioning, and thus of human capital," the authors write as background information in the article. Research also suggests that poor nutrition in early life is associated with poor performance on cognitive (thinking, learning and memory) tests in adulthood. "Therefore, both nutrition and early-childhood intellectual enrichment are likely to be important determinants of intellectual functioning in adulthood."
Between 1969 and 1977, Guatemalan children in four villages participated in a trial of nutritional supplementation. Through the trial, some were exposed to atole--a protein-rich enhanced nutritional supplement--while others were exposed to fresco, a sugar-sweetened beverage. Aryeh D. Stein, M.P.H., Ph.D., of the Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta, and colleagues analyzed data from intellectual testing and interviews conducted between 2002 and 2004, when 1,448 surviving participants (68.4 percent) were an average of 32 years old.
Individuals exposed to atole between birth and age 24 months scored higher on intellectual tests of reading comprehension and cognitive functioning in adulthood than those not exposed to atole or who were exposed to it at other ages. This association remained significant when the researchers controlled for other factors associated with intellectual functioning, including years of schooling.
"Nutrition in early life is associated with markers of child development in this population, and exposure to atole for most of the first three years of life was associated with an increase of 0.4 years in attained schooling, with the association being stronger for females (1.2 years of schooling)," the authors write. "Thus, schooling might be in the causal pathway between early childhood nutrition and adult intellectual functioning."
"Our data, which suggest an effect of exposure to an enhanced nutritional intervention in early life that is independent of any effect of schooling, provide additional evidence in support of intervention strategies that link early investments in children to continued investments in early-life nutrition and in schooling," they conclude.
This study was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and from the National Science Foundation. The National Institutes of Health, the Thrasher Fund and the Nestle Foundation have funded the work of the INCAP Longitudinal Study since its inception.
Journal reference:
Aryeh D. Stein; Meng Wang; Ann DiGirolamo; Ruben Grajeda; Usha Ramakrishnan; Manuel Ramirez-Zea; Kathryn Yount; Reynaldo Martorell. Nutritional Supplementation in Early Childhood, Schooling, and Intellectual Functioning in Adulthood: A Prospective Study in Guatemala. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med., 2008;162(7):612-618 [link]
Adapted from materials provided by JAMA and Archives Journals.
Internet program teaches harms of bullying to elementary students
From: eSchool News
http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/around-the-web/index.cfm?i=54474&i-d
By DANI MCCLAIN
Primary Topic Channel: Safety & security
Anne Kasdorf was fed up with the “your mama” jokes and the name calling.
So when the teacher at Gaenslen Elementary School, 1250 E. Burleigh St., got an e-mail last school year inviting her to pilot an Internet-based anti-bullying curriculum, Kasdorf jumped at the chance.
“I knew with it being online, the kids would get really into it,” she said. “And they did.”
The state Department of Public Instruction and the Children’s Health Education Center have partnered to create Bullyfree Basics, a program for elementary school students that transforms lessons on the dangers of spreading rumors and insulting classmates into animated, interactive games. The collaboration is the latest development in DPI’s effort to address the humiliations suffered in hallways, on school buses and, increasingly, on social networking Web sites.
Children and teens treating each other cruelly is nothing new, but what’s changed in recent years is educators’ sense of their own role in prevention, said Jon Hisgen, a health and physical education consultant at DPI. The idea that being bullied is an unavoidable part of growing up has faded as adults have realized how much bullying interferes with students’ learning.
“If there’s fear that they could be hurt or have things said about them, that preoccupies their thoughts all the time they’re in school,” Hisgen said. “The ability of the brain to take in and analyze information is shot because they’re thinking about what could happen when they leave that classroom.”
Two years ago, Hisgen wrote a print-based curriculum specifically for third- and sixth-grade students. The agency brought in Milwaukee’s Children’s Health Education Center last year to create an online program for fourth- and fifth-graders as a way to both strengthen a culture of kindness in Wisconsin elementary schools and experiment with online delivery. The Children’s Hospital affiliate offers similar curricula on nutrition, body image and tobacco, alcohol and other drugs.
“Online gives us the opportunity to educate them and then use the games to reinforce those messages,” said Bridget Clementi, the organization’s director. “We find it works from the students’ standpoint more than sending an outreach educator or using an in-house educator to give those kinds of messages.”
This past academic year, Bullyfree Basics was used in 34 districts statewide, including Greendale, Oak Creek and Kenosha Unified, Clementi said. Gaenslen Elementary, where Kasdorf teaches, was one of 13 Milwaukee public schools that took part.
She said the format worked well for her classroom, which is equipped with a laptop for each student. The children loved a game called “Bully Buster,” in which they used the laptop’s mouse to target unkind activities that appear in bubbles superimposed on a cartoon playground.
The goal is to earn points by busting bubbles that contain phrases such as “making fun of someone’s clothes,” “making threats,” “cutting in line,” and “passing notes.” Bubbles containing phrases such as “ask before taking” and “tell the truth” also appear on the screen.
The exercise gave her students an opportunity to talk about behavior they didn’t like and strategies to protect themselves, Kasdorf said.
One boy in particular was known to grow angry quickly and take out his frustrations on others. But after three months of working through the program, his classmates could stop him with a quick reference to the games they had played together.
“Toward the end of the year, the other kids would remind him about the lessons,” Kasdorf said. “He needed that reminder: ‘Oh yeah, we learned about that. We’re trying to be better citizens.’ ”
http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/around-the-web/index.cfm?i=54474&i-d
By DANI MCCLAIN
Primary Topic Channel: Safety & security
Anne Kasdorf was fed up with the “your mama” jokes and the name calling.
So when the teacher at Gaenslen Elementary School, 1250 E. Burleigh St., got an e-mail last school year inviting her to pilot an Internet-based anti-bullying curriculum, Kasdorf jumped at the chance.
“I knew with it being online, the kids would get really into it,” she said. “And they did.”
The state Department of Public Instruction and the Children’s Health Education Center have partnered to create Bullyfree Basics, a program for elementary school students that transforms lessons on the dangers of spreading rumors and insulting classmates into animated, interactive games. The collaboration is the latest development in DPI’s effort to address the humiliations suffered in hallways, on school buses and, increasingly, on social networking Web sites.
Children and teens treating each other cruelly is nothing new, but what’s changed in recent years is educators’ sense of their own role in prevention, said Jon Hisgen, a health and physical education consultant at DPI. The idea that being bullied is an unavoidable part of growing up has faded as adults have realized how much bullying interferes with students’ learning.
“If there’s fear that they could be hurt or have things said about them, that preoccupies their thoughts all the time they’re in school,” Hisgen said. “The ability of the brain to take in and analyze information is shot because they’re thinking about what could happen when they leave that classroom.”
Two years ago, Hisgen wrote a print-based curriculum specifically for third- and sixth-grade students. The agency brought in Milwaukee’s Children’s Health Education Center last year to create an online program for fourth- and fifth-graders as a way to both strengthen a culture of kindness in Wisconsin elementary schools and experiment with online delivery. The Children’s Hospital affiliate offers similar curricula on nutrition, body image and tobacco, alcohol and other drugs.
“Online gives us the opportunity to educate them and then use the games to reinforce those messages,” said Bridget Clementi, the organization’s director. “We find it works from the students’ standpoint more than sending an outreach educator or using an in-house educator to give those kinds of messages.”
This past academic year, Bullyfree Basics was used in 34 districts statewide, including Greendale, Oak Creek and Kenosha Unified, Clementi said. Gaenslen Elementary, where Kasdorf teaches, was one of 13 Milwaukee public schools that took part.
She said the format worked well for her classroom, which is equipped with a laptop for each student. The children loved a game called “Bully Buster,” in which they used the laptop’s mouse to target unkind activities that appear in bubbles superimposed on a cartoon playground.
The goal is to earn points by busting bubbles that contain phrases such as “making fun of someone’s clothes,” “making threats,” “cutting in line,” and “passing notes.” Bubbles containing phrases such as “ask before taking” and “tell the truth” also appear on the screen.
The exercise gave her students an opportunity to talk about behavior they didn’t like and strategies to protect themselves, Kasdorf said.
One boy in particular was known to grow angry quickly and take out his frustrations on others. But after three months of working through the program, his classmates could stop him with a quick reference to the games they had played together.
“Toward the end of the year, the other kids would remind him about the lessons,” Kasdorf said. “He needed that reminder: ‘Oh yeah, we learned about that. We’re trying to be better citizens.’ ”
Presidential Hopefuls Differ on K-12 Spending
From: Education Week
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/07/16/43electspend_web.html?tmp=1783663338
By Alyson Klein
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/07/16/43electspend_web.html?tmp=1783663338
By Alyson Klein
Educators are still waiting for the presumptive Democratic and Republican presidential nominees to put forth detailed plans on education that would allow a comparison of how the two would shape federal K-12 policy over the next four years.
But in at least one area, the differences between Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., are clear: education spending.
Sen. McCain pledged in a speech last month “to make government in Washington more efficient” and to “freeze discretionary spending until we have completed top-to-bottom reviews of all federal programs to weed out failing ones.”
Sen. Obama, meanwhile, has proposed about $18 billion annually in new federal education spending, including programs aimed at expanding early-childhood education and bolstering teacher training.
While it’s unclear how he would reshape the No Child Left Behind Act, Sen. Obama has also advocated additional funding for the law’s programs.
“We can’t afford to leave the money behind for No Child Left Behind,” he said in a June 3 speech in St. Paul, Minn., in which he unofficially claimed the Democratic nomination. “We owe it to our children to invest in early-childhood education [and] recruit an army of new teachers and give them better pay and more support.”
By contrast, Sen. McCain thinks the NCLB law has been adequately funded, Lisa Graham Keegan, a top education adviser to the candidate, said at a forum June 12 at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington think tank.
By contrast, Sen. McCain thinks the NCLB law has been adequately funded, Lisa Graham Keegan, a top education adviser to the candidate, said at a forum June 12 at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington think tank.It isn’t clear whether Sen. McCain’s plan to freeze domestic spending for a year would include all federal education programs.
Some analysts say level funding or cuts appear likely, given Sen. McCain’s plan to keep most of President Bush’s tax cuts in place and to balance the federal budget.
“It’s impossible that he could make investments in education,” said Robert Gordon, who was Sen. John Kerry’s domestic-policy adviser during the Massachusetts Democrat’s 2004 presidential campaign. “It’s impossible to imagine he could do anything but cut spending on education, just because it’s the only way to begin to make the numbers add up.”
Sen. Obama’s plan to repeal President Bush’s tax cuts for some high-income taxpayers “makes it possible to talk about investments in education,” said Mr. Gordon, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the advocacy arm of the Washington-based CAP.
Federal Funding Debate
Edward Kealy, the executive director for the Committee for Education Funding, a Washington-based lobbying group, said that if Sen. McCain, as president, decided to level-fund education programs, that would amount to a cut, because increasing student enrollments and inflation would mean the same amount of funding wouldn’t go as far.
Dan Lips, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, based in Washington, said that federal education spending has risen by more than 40 percent since the enactment of the No Child Left Behind law more than six years ago, and that the boost hasn’t led to a significant increase in student achievement.
He noted that federal appropriations account for just 9 percent of all K-12 education spending nationally, and he suggested that states and local governments would be better positioned to finance and implement many education programs.
“Federal funding comes with strings,” Mr. Lips said. “I think people should recognize that there isn’t simply a pot of additional funding buried under Capitol Hill that could be used to improve schools.”
Sen. McCain’s campaign did not respond to calls seeking more detail on his education spending proposals by press time. But, during the Fordham Foundation event, Ms. Keegan said the senator would release an education plan around “back to school” time.
Sen. McCain has put forth some interesting statements embracing performance-based pay for teachers, Mr. Gordon said. But, to carry out those plans, he will have to deliver the resources, Mr. Gordon said.
“The political reality is that if you’re going to drive reform, ... you need to put money behind that,” he said.
It’s unclear whether Sen. McCain’s plan to freeze most domestic programs would continue the stalemate over reauthorization of the NCLB law.
Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, cited President Bush’s unwillingness to raise education funding as one major reason that the law’s renewal, which had been scheduled for 2007, has stalled.
Obama’s Boost
Sen. Obama’s $18 billion education plan includes significant funding for prekindergarten programs, including proposals to quadruple enrollment in Early Head Start, expand the child-care-development tax credit so that it better targets low-income families, and increase aid for programs that provide home-visiting services to disadvantaged first-time mothers.
Sen. Obama’s $18 billion education plan includes significant funding for prekindergarten programs, including proposals to quadruple enrollment in Early Head Start, expand the child-care-development tax credit so that it better targets low-income families, and increase aid for programs that provide home-visiting services to disadvantaged first-time mothers.The Democrat’s pre-K-12 plan includes new money to offer “teacher residencies,” which would permit students interested in serving in high-need schools to work alongside master teachers while earning a degree in education.
And Sen. Obama has suggested $1 billion to help create “career ladders” for teachers, which would allow some educators to get extra pay for serving as mentors to new teachers. He’s also proposed a $200 million program to help school districts extend instructional time.
In addition, Sen. Obama would like to put more federal money into education research, although his plan isn’t specific about how much.
The prekindergarten portion of the plan would be paid for by delaying a project at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for five years, auctioning off surplus federal property, closing a tax loophole for corporate executives, among other measures, according to the proposal.
The rest of the programs would be paid for “using a small portion of the savings associated with fighting the war in Iraq,” according to the education plan outlined on Sen. Obama’s campaign Web site, although that plan gives no details about how much funding might become available through such savings or when.
But the $18 billion figure sounds “like an overreach,” said Mr. Lips of the Heritage Foundation. If Sen. Obama is elected, education will have to compete with other priorities, including health care and energy, he said.
Mr. Kealy of the Committee for Education Funding said, though, that Sen. Obama’s proposal could represent a “turning point for education funding, which has seen only modest increases in recent years.”
“That’s something to hold a new administration accountable to,” Mr. Kealy said. “We know there will be all sorts of statements during election season. But you’ve got to be there for the long haul.
“A new administration will come in, and they’ll say, ‘There’s so many things we didn’t expect. We’ll just have to put this stuff on hold for a while.’ ”
“A new administration will come in, and they’ll say, ‘There’s so many things we didn’t expect. We’ll just have to put this stuff on hold for a while.’ ”
Vol. 27, Issue 43
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