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March 31, 2006

10

In light of recent blog discussions, what is your take on the API successes at Moorpark High School?

---article from Daily News---

Moorpark High a perfect 10

Moorpark High earns set of 10s
By Angie Valencia-Martinez, Staff Writer
LA Daily News

MOORPARK - "Test to Ten" is a motto that paid off for Moorpark High School after it scored a pair of 10s in annual state academic rankings, apparently the only Ventura County comprehensive high school ever to do so.
The State Department of Education last week released school-by-school rankings from a low of 1 to a high of 10, derived from a school's Academic Performance Index scores on a scale of 200 to 1,000, with 800 being the state goal.

Moorpark High scored 808 points - based on last year's testing results - earning a set of 10s when compared with schools statewide and schools with similar student demographics. A 10 means a school is in the top 10 percentile, and 1 represents the bottom 10.

"We have reached the top of the mountain this year and we're proud of that," said Anna Merriman, the school district's assistant superintendent of instructional services. "We're not pointing at other school districts and saying 'Ha, ha, we're doing better than you.' But we have done some exceptional things to get our kids to close the achievement gap.

"It certainly takes effort on everyone's part to accomplish this task. It's something that's been going on for years."

Moorpark High was the only comprehensive high school countywide to receive the honor, Ventura County Superintendent of Schools Charles Weis said. Foothill Technology High School in Ventura and Santa Susana High School in Simi Valley scored 10s, but they are both magnet schools.

It marks the first time a Ventura County comprehensive high school has accomplished the feat, Weis said.

"I can't recall another high school being 10/10," he said. "It's really quite an accomplishment. It shows that a comprehensive high school can reach that elite status. I hope it's a challenge for all high schools to do the same."

Last April, just before students engaged in another round of accountability testing, teachers posted signs with an inspiring message all over school: "Test to Ten," Principal Kirk Miyashiro said.

The school reached the benchmark score of 800 last year. In 2004, Moorpark High posted 777 - a 23-point gain from 2003.

"My first goal was to break 800," Miyashiro said. "My second goal was that they rank 10/10. I said, 'Hey, folks, we can do this. We're close ... just knocking on the door.' We pushed last year."

Miyashiro, who was named principal of the 2,450-student campus in 2004, succeeded Merriman. He has always said that scoring well on federal and state tests tops his priority list.

Since 2003, the school ranked 9 and 10, respectively, in the statewide rank and similar schools rank.

Merriman said the school's performance is the result of a districtwide effort, including teachers and administrators, students and parents. However, it is the teachers who make the effort to go the extra mile - often giving up their breaks to help struggling students.

"Our teachers have taken the attitude that whatever it takes, they're going to do," said Merriman, who headed the school for six years before taking the job at the district office. "It's something they've always believed they could do."

Miyashiro attributed the success to teachers and staffers, saying they align the curriculum with the state standards. They also evaluate the test results to find out what's the next step to help each child do better.

"Teachers here have been working on things like standards before they were required by state," he said. "Moorpark called them learning objectives.

"We needed to have items or benchmarks as learning objectives. That started the wheel rolling. Our teachers were already ahead of the game."

School board member David Pollock credits the school's achievement to smaller learning communities, established by Moorpark High School in 1995 and instituting a more intimate school setting.

The school created three academies - health and science, business and freshman honors.

"I frequently hold up Moorpark High School as a model for the state," Pollock said.

Angie Valencia-Martinez, (805) 583-7604

angie.valencia@dailynews.com

Posted by Tim Keaney at 01:15 PM

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March 28, 2006

90% pass

What is your take?

--90% pass High School Exit Exam--

Most pass high school exit exam
By Jean Cowden Moore, jcmoore@VenturaCountyStar.com
March 28, 2006

Nearly 90 percent of seniors statewide have passed the high school exit exam, but the numbers are much lower among poor and minority students, reflecting a persistent achievement gap.

"This shines a harsh light on the achievement gap that we must address," said Jack O'Connell, the state's chief of schools, in announcing the latest results of the California High School Exit Exam this morning. "The level of this achievement gap is simply unacceptable."

This year's seniors are the first class that must pass the exit exam to graduate. The exam covers math through algebra and English through about ninth grade.

The 48,000 seniors statewide who have not yet passed will get one more chance to take the exam in May, though they will not know whether they passed until after graduation.

The numbers released today include seniors who had passed the exam as of this fall. They do not include seniors who re-took the exam in February or March. Those results will be available in late May.

Meanwhile, school districts are figuring out how to handle students who have completed all their high school requirements but have not passed the exam. Several local districts, including Conejo and Oxnard Union, will provide students certificates of completion and allow them to participate in graduation ceremonies.

Districts are also providing students help through after-school tutoring and remedial classes in English and math.

"We are doing intensive care at this point to try and get them over that bar," said Trudy Arriaga, superintendent of the Ventura Unified School District, where roughly 50 students have not yet passed the exam.

Posted by Tim Keaney at 02:26 PM

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March 24, 2006

California Golden Schools Initiative

I don't think there is any question that school funding, and the allocation thereof is a major point, and a critical area that needs to be looked at.

As I have said many times, it is a debate worth having.

The problem is, all we ever hear is the tired "well, we're 43rd in the nation" or "look at our per pupil funding". While we all know that all of those numbers depend on the methodology to acheive them.

Many states that have made educating their youth a priority, have worked together to establish:

1. Where are we now (from a performance/results standpoint)
2. Where do we want to be?
3. What programs and solutions get us there (i.e. what do we need to make it happen)
4. What does all of this cost?
5. How do we pay for it?

In California on the other hand, I don't see these components in the debate. I see:

1. Requests for more money (and funding on a statewide level is going up as tax revenues do because of Prop 98).
2. I see partisan politics.
3. I see California's youth falling further and further behind at a time in our nation's history, when we need them advancing at exponentially higher rates.

To me, the onus is on the education establishment to act on the 5 pieces of action I mentioned above. Show us where we are, where you want to go (and what that buys California Taxpayers, parents, business, teachers etc..), what you need, what is costs and how we pay for it. Period. Then, once it's all factored, put it into legislative form and get it introduced for debate in the Legislature.

If the Legislature fails to act - take it to the people. Tell us the plan, what the investment per taxpayer is, how it's going to work and get it passed.

This could be the single greatest piece of legislation in a long time in California. It could potentially win in a landslide at the polls. It could conceivably change California for the better forever. It could be a sea change of attitude, cooperation and leadership.

California could lead the nation again with the best public schools, but as in anything, a plan must be produced to pave the way, before the investment is going to be made.

The California Golden Schools Initiative is waiting for us - will we miss our opportunity, and fail our youth?

This writer hopes not.

Tim Keaney

Posted by Tim Keaney at 01:47 PM

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Well, some kids left behind - but why?

From the Wall Street Journal -

March 24, 2006


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Spellings Test
March 24, 2006; Page A10

The No Child Left Behind Act has taken its lumps from the education establishment, which loathes its testing and transparency measures. But the latest criticism of the law is more surprising, because it's coming from conservatives who are questioning the Bush Administration's commitment to enforcing its own law.

This week the Alliance for School Choice filed complaints against school districts in Los Angeles and Compton, California, where school officials have neglected to notify parents of their rights under NCLB. These districts have also failed to make transfer options available to kids in underperforming schools.

Under the 2001 law, schools that repeatedly fail to make "adequate yearly progress" as measured by state standards are required to give students the option to attend better schools within the district. To be sure, the California districts singled out in the filing aren't the only ones skirting the law. Similar violations have been reported in Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, New York and elsewhere. A Government Accountability Office report from 2004 found that some three million children in 5,300 schools nationwide were eligible for choice under NCLB, but only about 1% were exercising the option.

Still, Los Angeles and Compton are among the worst cases of noncompliance, according to the Alliance, which filed the administrative actions with the school districts on behalf of several parents with children stuck in failing schools. In the 2003-04 school year less than two-tenths of one percent of eligible students in the Los Angeles Unified School District exercised their rights and actually transferred schools. In Compton, no students have received transfers.

"That only two out of every thousand families with children in failing schools would seek a better school for their children," says the complaint, "betrays the utter inadequacy of [the L.A. school district's] notification and explanation regarding school choice rights."

The complaint further alleges that these pitifully low transfer numbers are by design. While NCLB specifies when and how parents must be notified of their options, the school districts have deliberately dragged their feet and gone out of their way to confuse and discourage families. Tactics include, among other things, burying transfer notices in other material sent to homes; giving parents a very narrow time-frame -- say, a week -- in which to make up their mind; and forcing transfers to take place in the middle of a school year. This kind of obstructionism fits the pattern of public school officials around the country who are resisting every challenge to their control of school enrollments, curriculum and especially budgets.

The reason school districts have been able to get away with this behavior is that no one is holding their feet to the fire. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has chosen to hand out exemptions or look the other way instead of enforcing the law. This benign neglect hurts most the very students that NCLB was designed to help. The GAO report found that 80% of children in failing schools were minority and 62% were low-income.

If the districts reject the Alliance complaints, they can be appealed to the state and then federal government. But Secretary Spellings needn't wait for that process and could take action against these recalcitrant districts and impose sanctions if necessary. Under the law, she has the authority to terminate federal funding and compel compliance but so far has been unwilling to use it.

Large urban school districts like the one in Los Angeles respond that the number of students eligible for transfer far exceeds the number of seats available in better schools within the district. But that's not an excuse for noncompliance; that's a reason to let students attend schools outside their public district, including charter schools and private schools.

School districts have little incentive to initiate these reforms on their own, especially when federal enforcement is an empty threat. And if the Bush Administration isn't going to use its funding leverage to ensure that all children have a shot at a decent education, then No Child Left Behind has become yet another illusory reform.

--- your comments please....---

Posted by Tim Keaney at 07:20 AM

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March 23, 2006

Moment of Silence for the Golden State

California Legislature supportive of Puerto Rico becoming 51st state! "Our numbers will look better" - California Legislature

From the Daily News

Sinking state of California

Total bound for four-year colleges, at 23%, is second-lowest in nation
By Lisa M. Sodders, Staff Writer

LA Daily News

California sends a smaller percentage of high school students to four-year colleges than any other state but Mississippi - a trend that experts blame on too few counselors, teachers and college preparatory courses, a new study says.

And the roadblocks to college are even larger in schools with a high percentage of poor students and English-language learners, according to the 2006 California Educational Opportunity Report prepared by the University of California, Los Angeles.

"These roadblocks exist in every school in California, and one in every eight has all of these, making it extraordinarily difficult for students to prepare for college," said UCLA professor Jeannie Oakes, who oversaw the study.

The average high school counselor in California is expected to serve 790 students, the worst ratio in the nation, Oakes said. Ninety-one percent of the state's high schools have more students per teacher than the national average and more than 25 percent assign improperly trained teachers to college prep classes, particularly math.

And less than half of California high schools offer enough classes so that all students can complete a college prep curriculum.

As a result, the study said, only 23 percent of California high school seniors enroll in a four-year college or university. That compares with the nation's lowest figure of 21 percent in Mississippi and highest, 47 percent in Massachusetts.

The study was conducted by UCLA's Institute for Democracy, Education and Access, and UC's All Campus Consortium on Research for Diversity, and focused primarily on enrollment at University of California and California State University campuses.

Oakes acknowledged that many California students begin their path to a bachelor's degree in community college, but said transfer rates remain low. California ranks 37th in the nation in the number of students who earn a bachelor's degree within six years of their high school graduation.

The study segregated the data by state Assembly and Senate districts, which Oakes said was done because the educational infrastructure will require legislative action to fix. Specifically, she said, the state needs to spend more money on K-12 education.

California ranks 11th in per capita income, but 43rd in per capita spending per student, after adjusting for regional cost differences.

The study tracked students from the graduating Class of 2004 who had been enrolled in public school as ninth-graders. It found that 30 percent of the students in the 12th Assembly District, in the San Francisco Bay Area, enrolled in a UC or CSU school, compared with fewer than 5 percent in Los Angeles' 46th Assembly District.

In the San Fernando Valley, the totals ranged from 21 percent in the 44th Assembly District to 7 percent in the 39th District.

Assemblywoman Cindy Montañez, D-Mission Hills, noted that her 39th District has a large number of recent immigrants whose children often are the first in their families to go to college.

Mission College, a community college in Sylmar, might be the only option for many students in the Northeast Valley.

"A lot of our kids in these poor communities still don't have the resources necessary," Montañez said. "We want to put more money into K-12, college preparation and outreach, and ultimately, retention of these students so they graduate from college."

Bob Collins, chief instructional officer for the Los Angeles Unified School District, concurred that the state should spend more on public education, but noted that the LAUSD is taking steps to improve students' chances.

By 2008, all students will be required to complete a college prep curriculum in order to graduate. Each high school has a full-time college counselor, he said, although the demand for more is great.

The report was released the same day as a report by UCLA's Chicano Studies Research Center, which said the education system is failing the nation's Latino students.

Latino students typically attend racially segregated, overcrowded high schools with undertrained faculty and are "tracked" into remedial or vocational programs instead of college prep, according to the report. Fewer than 10 percent transfer to four-year universities from community colleges, and once there, they face additional stress trying to balance schoolwork with off-campus jobs.

Posted by Tim Keaney at 07:26 AM

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March 22, 2006

From Education Week...

Published: March 22, 2006

Economic Trends Fuel Push to Retool Schooling
Leaders want tighter links to workplace, college skills.

By Lynn Olson

With an urgency not seen in decades, policy leaders concerned about America’s global competitiveness and widening income gaps within U.S. society are propelling issues of academic and workforce preparation to the forefront of the nation’s education policy debates.

Worried that current expectations and structures are ill suited to the 21st century, politicians, scholars, and business executives are pushing to ground educational standards far more closely in the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in the new economy.

To that end, they are arguing for a closer connection between K-12 and postsecondary education, on the assumption that decent-paying jobs with opportunities for advancement will require at least some education beyond high school, as well as lifelong learning to adjust to a fluid labor market.

The changes such leaders are advocating could have tremendous repercussions from preschool through graduate school. But do those calling for a new agenda for American education have the analysis right?

Wage Trends
Growth in hourly wages has been stronger for workers with more education.

“The profound problem or challenge in all this is that the relation between education and the economy is essentially a black box,” said Anthony P. Carnevale, an economist with the National Center on Education and the Economy, based in Washington. “It may be that as education more and more determines economic opportunity, we’re going to have to make these links a lot clearer.”

On one side of the debate are those who believe that fundamental shifts in the economy, brought about largely by technology, are creating a premium for knowledge and skills. Students must be prepared to take advantage of those new opportunities, they warn, or risk joining the ranks of the working poor.

On the other side are economists who see a more gradual rise in skill requirements and no shortage of college-educated workers over the next decade. They question the extent to which education offers a solution to the United States’ broader economic problems.

Meanwhile, large disagreements remain about how best to redesign secondary and postsecondary institutions to meet the shifting demands.

Impact of Computers
“There is a growing division within human labor itself—a divide between those who can and those who cannot do valued work in an economy filled with computers,” write the economists Richard J. Murnane and Frank Levy.

In their 2004 book The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market,they argue that not only have job titles changed, but so also have the very tasks within jobs, with routine procedures increasingly being handled by computers or outsourced to workers overseas.

The result is a “hollowing out” of the occupational structure and an increasingly unequal income distribution, they say. At the bottom end of the pay scale are personal-service jobs held by the working poor, such as janitors, cafeteria workers, and security guards.

At the upper end are jobs that require extensive skills and in which people such as managers, doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, and technicians use computers to increase their productivity.

“We’ve seen this extraordinary widening of the income distribution,” said Mr. Murnane, a professor at Harvard University’s graduate school of education, “and a key piece of it is this growth in the college-high school earnings differential. I see this as a real threat to democracy.”

College graduates in the United States earn on average 80 percent more than high school graduates—a gap that has more than doubled in the past two decades, even as the number of college-educated workers has risen. High school dropouts are four times more likely than college graduates to be unemployed.

Mr. Carnevale describes that phenomenon as “middle-class dispersion,” with high school dropouts and graduates falling out of the middle class between 1976 and 2004 and those with bachelor’s degrees or more rising into higher income brackets. “What is striking about this is the ante keeps going up,” he said. “We are certainly creating an hourglass-shaped society, ... and it’s around educational attainment.”

A Skills Shortage—or Not
Other economists agree that there’s a substantial income divide but see no evidence of a looming skills shortage or of a surge in the need for college-educated workers in coming years.

After analyzing U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data on projected shifts among 724 occupations between 2002 and 2012, for example, the economist Lawrence Mishel, the president of the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute, concluded that the jobs of the future would require only slightly greater education credentials than those of today.

In 2002, about 27 percent of workers were in occupations requiring a college degree or more, he calculates. That would rise to 28 percent by 2012, with no expansion, he predicts, of jobs requiring only some college. The BLS does not track changes in education and skill demands within job categories, however.

Mr. Mishel points out that in the most recent business cycle—between 2000 and 2004—the real earnings of those with a bachelor’s degree actually fell by 5.2 percent. That could mean the supply of such workers is catching up with the demand, he says, or that the offshoring of skilled jobs is generating a downward pressure on earnings growth even among the college-educated.

While it’s right to stress the importance of a highly educated workforce, Mr. Mishel says, simply increasing Americans’ education levels won’t resolve issues of rising income inequality or global competition from such emerging powerhouses as China and India.

“If you were speaking to a sophomore class or a senior class of high school students, my message would be, ‘It’s in your best interest to get as much education and skill as you can because you would do better than you otherwise would,’ ” he said. “If I were sitting with the president [of the United States], it’s not clear to me that I can say we need to do something to accelerate the growth of college graduates.”

Similarly, in his Feb. 27 column in The New York Times, the economist Paul Krugman argued that the growing income inequality in the United States stems less from the rise of college-educated workers and more from the “giant income gains of a tiny elite.” Between 1972 and 2001, he noted, the wage and salary income of Americans at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent—creating a “rising oligarchy” that has little to do with the returns to education, he said.

A Leaky Pipeline
Economists generally agree, meanwhile, that demographic changes over the next two decades threaten to make income disparities worse unless the nation does a much better job addressing the educational needs of low-income and minority students. Those students traditionally have been least well served by the public schools and have far less access to postsecondary education and training than do their white and better-off peers.

In a report released in November, the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, based in San Jose, Calif., warned that if current trends continue, the proportion of workers with high school diplomas and college degrees will decrease and the personal incomes of Americans will drop over the next 15 years.

Earnings Advantage
The differential between the wages of college and high school graduates has grown over time.

College graduates earned an average of 80 percent more than workers with just a high school diploma in 2004, a gap that was far wider than in 1975. But from 2000 to 2004, the differential shrank as real earnings of college graduates fell by 5.2 percent.

*Click image to see the full chart.

SOURCE: Economic Policy InstituteThat’s because the non-Hispanic white portion of the working-age population ages 25 to 64 is declining, and the minority portion is increasing. In 2000, 30 percent of white working-age Americans and 46 percent of Asian-Americans had at least a bachelor’s degree. But that was true for only 15 percent of African-Americans and 11 percent of Hispanics.

High school students seem to have gotten the message that college is important: More than 90 percent of seniors say they plan to obtain some form of postsecondary education. But a far lower percentage actually earn a degree of any kind.

A recent study by the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, based in Boulder, Colo., found that for every 100 students who start high school, only 67 earn a diploma within four years. Of those, only 38 enter college, 26 are still enrolled after sophomore year, and just 18 graduate on time with either an associate’s or a bachelor’s degree. (“On time” is defined as three years for an associate’s and six years for a bachelor’s degree.)

One problem is that an estimated 40 percent of students in four-year colleges and 63 percent of those in two-year colleges must take at least one remedial course, decreasing the likelihood that they will earn degrees and forcing their institutions to invest resources in reteaching skills that should have been learned earlier.

One reason it’s hard to resolve the debate about the relationship between education and the economy is that both employers’ “needs” and the “skills” required for specific jobs are not easily defined or measured, says James Rosenbaum, a professor of sociology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

“Needs,” for example, are often measured by the wages employers pay for employees with certain years of education or test scores. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the workers actually need or use those academic skills or education levels on the job.

School-Work Disconnect
In an analysis for the American Diploma Project, for example, Mr. Carnevale and researcher Donna M. Desrochers found that 84 percent of workers in well-paid professional jobs had taken Algebra 2 or higher, and that the vast majority had taken four years of at least grade-level English.

The ADP—a coalition of states organized by Washington-based Achieve Inc.—then assembled teams of curriculum experts to identify the content within such courses, and to develop a preliminary set of workplace expectations for English and mathematics. Teams of English and math faculty members from K-12 and two- and four-year colleges in participating states also identified the skills needed for college, based on a review of their states’ high school graduation tests, as well as national college-admission and -placement exams.

The ADP found a growing convergence between the intellectual demands needed for work and higher education. For instance, both employers and college professors stressed correct English grammar and usage, effective oral and written communication skills, and the ability to define and research a problem and present a reasoned position or solution.

The 22 states that now belong to the ADP Network have agreed, among other steps, to make the college-preparatory curriculum the default curriculum for students, including the levels of math and English identified by Mr. Carnevale and Ms. Desrochers.

But Mr. Carnevale is quick to point out a “profound disconnect” between what students take in school and its ultimate use.

“It is true that if you’re going to get a good job in America, you’ve got to take Algebra 2,” he said. “On the other hand, when you look at college majors, and even more so when you look at occupations, the content in Algebra 2 has very little to do with either.

“That is, you never use that content again,” he said, “but it predicts your success in college and in the labor force. So it is effectively a screen.”

More recently, Mr. Carnevale has analyzed data from the Occupational Net Data System, a federally financed project in which a team of industrial psychologists interviewed workers in 1,000 occupations to identify the knowledge, skills, and abilities used on the job. Higher scores on measures of complex problem-solving, critical thinking, and creativity all were associated with both higher education levels and higher earnings.

Similarly, in The New Division of Labor, Mr. Murnane and Mr. Levy argue that high-wage jobs demand “expert thinking” skills (the ability to solve new problems that cannot be solved by rules, or to apply previously acquired knowledge to new, open-ended situations) and “complex communication” skills (the ability to convey information and persuade others of a particular interpretation of an idea).

Empowering students with such skills, the two authors write, will require high schools to re-evaluate both what and how to teach.

“These are not specific subjects that compete for classroom time with math, science, and social studies,” Mr. Murnane explained. “These are the tools that enable students to understand the concepts behind the facts.”

Academic Emphasis
Others worry that by focusing too much on academic skills and preparation for college, educators may ignore other skills and habits of mind that employers value, such as attendance, dependability, and a strong work ethic.

Demographic Divides
The percent of working-age people who have a bachelor’s degree varies among groups.

The proportion of Americans ages 25 to 64 with a four-year degree or higher has increased for all racial and ethnic groups, but the gaps between the various groups widened from 1980 to 2000, according to figures from the U.S. Census.

*Click image to see the full chart.

SOURCE: National Center for Higher Education Management SystemsThey also question whether young people headed directly to the workplace or those already struggling in school would benefit more from a traditional college-preparatory curriculum than from one tailored to their situation. While the achievement level of high school graduates needs to rise, those experts say, the more immediate goal should be to equip many more of them with solid 9th- or 10th-grade-level skills.

In their 1996 book Teaching the New Basic Skills,Mr. Murnane and Mr. Levy calculated that a large part of the growing wage gap between high school and college graduates between 1978 and 1986 could be attributed to the stronger basic skills that college graduates had acquired in high school, which they defined as the ability to read and do math at the 9th grade level or higher.

Requiring all young people to complete a curriculum that demands far more, critics of such policies say, could backfire and fails to address students’ lack of engagement, motivation, or interest in academic coursework.

“If we’re losing students now,” said Robert I. Lerman, an economist at American University in Washington, “it’s unlikely, unless we’re able to really have massive gains in achievement up to the 8th and 9th grade, that just tacking on more of these high school requirements will do the job.”

While research has found that taking a full slate of academically rigorous courses in high school significantly increases students’ likelihood of completing a college degree, Mr. Lerman and others worry that a “college for all” mentality has devalued the role of career and technical training.

Research by John H. Bishop, an economist at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., has found that taking career and technical courses in high school beyond the introductory level predicts higher wages and earnings eight years after graduation, with the effects of vocational coursetaking slightly larger for students who get an associate’s or bachelor’s degree.

“I don’t think we’ve even begun to exploit the possibilities of improved career-focused education and training,” said Mr. Lerman.

Most policy experts and researchers agree that the signals students now get from postsecondary institutions and employers about the skills they need and the importance of acquiring those skills in school are weak at best.

Conflicting tests for college admissions and placement send different signals to students about what they need to know to succeed in college, such experts say, and the fact that most students enroll in nonselective institutions means few feel any real pressure to take high school academics seriously.

On the labor-market side, employers typically don’t hire students directly out of high school for jobs with career ladders and benefits, and rarely look at high school transcripts, so few graduates see an immediate payoff to doing well academically.

“Our secondary schools can do a lot better,” said Mr. Bishop. “But the way to get better is … to somehow persuade our kids to work harder, and to hire teachers who know their subjects better and to empower them to demand more of the students.”

And that, many policy experts argue, requires tighter connections between secondary and postsecondary institutions and between schools and employers.

“All the roads to improving our economic position in the world lead through high school,” said Bob Wise, a former governor of West Virginia and the president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, a Washington-based group focused on improving secondary education. “It’s the jumping-off point for what people do with their lives, whether it’s on to college or whether they go into the workplace.”

Posted by Tim Keaney at 10:35 AM

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March 21, 2006

County Schools Gain - or do they?

County schools make gains in achievement
By Jean Cowden Moore, jcmoore@VenturaCountyStar.com
March 21, 2006

Nine local high schools met the state's target for academic achievement, up from only two last year, in state rankings released today.

The gains reflect overall improvement among high schools statewide, where 12 percent hit the target, up from 7 percent last year.

Jack O'Connell, the state's chief of public schools, attributed some of those gains to the California High School Exit Exam, which he said has focused teachers' attention on getting all students to learn essential English and math, whatever their background.

This year's seniors are the first class that must pass the exit exam to graduate.

"I believe the California High School Exit Exam has been a key driver of progress as our students concentrate on learning the standards," O'Connell said in a press release. "It has also resulted in more focused instruction and individualized attention for struggling students."

The rankings, called the Academic Performance Index, are based on students' scores on the California Standards Test, the high school exit exam, and the California Achievement Test.

Schools receive scores based on a scale of 200 to 1,000, with 800 being the goal.

Those scores, in turn, determine a school's statewide ranking, which is based on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest. The first score compares all schools statewide. The second compares schools with similar demographics.

This year, three high schools posted a pair of 10s — Moorpark, Santa Susana in Simi Valley, and Foothill Technology in Ventura. Santa Susana and Foothill are both magnet schools. Moorpark was the only traditional high school to earn a pair of 10s.

Moorpark High's showing was part of an overall strong performance among Moorpark schools, where every campus but one posted a 10 in the similar school rankings.

Similar school rankings are considered a truer indicator of academic achievement than the overall rankings because they account for factors such as wealth, which often correlates directly with test scores.

This year, the California Department of Education tweaked the characteristics it uses in determining similar schools, in an effort to make the comparisons more accurate.

Assistant Superintendent Anna Merriman said she believes Moorpark has started to close the achievement gap, though the district must still do more to reach " reticent learners."

Students who don't speak English as their first language are now expected to be in English-only classes by second grade.

Moorpark also has focused on reading in every grade, bringing in reading experts and Success Maker, a computer program that allows students to work at their own pace, Merriman said.

"It's a lot of little pieces, not just one great big piece," Merriman said. "We have a lot of people saying to kids, Failure is not an option,' and they keep repeating that mantra. I think our families have also bought into the idea that the way out of poverty is through education."

The Rio Elementary District, where of students come from low-income families, posted some of the lowest scores in the area. Two of the schools posted a pair of 1s in the rankings. And no school earned more than a 5 in either set of rankings.

The district has been through a rough time recently, getting rid of two superintendents in less than three years. The school board recently agreed to pay former Superintendent Yolanda Benitez and her attorneys $1.4 million to settle a wrongful termination suit

The Oxnard Elementary District also posted low scores, with no school earning above a 6 in the rankings.

Posted by Tim Keaney at 11:35 AM

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March 19, 2006

Viva' la C4!

Auditor's report: Bond spent well
Audit good news for Simi district
By Angie Valencia-Martinez, Staff Writer
LA Daily News

SIMI VALLEY - Simi Valley Unified appropriately spent the first $11 million of the $145 million construction bond approved by voters two years ago, an auditor's report shows.
The independent audit is good news for the 29-school district, which came under fire last year by a citizens' bond oversight committee for transferring $1.5 million in bond money to the general fund. District officials blamed the mistake on an accounting error.

"Everything is OK," school board member Greg Stratton said. "The money is being spent correctly. Now let's make sure it's being spent wisely."

The report - conducted by Vicenti, Lloyd, Stutzman LLP - audited the money generated by the Measure C4 bond that was approved by voters in 2004.

Lowell Schultze, associate superintendent of business and facilities, said the auditors reviewed 97 invoices, totaling $9 million. They reported only two minor problems: a $35,000 invoice paid without prior approval and a $17,000 invoice that lacked sufficient documentation.

Overall, the report shows the district is in compliance and the funds had been properly spent and on voter-approved projects, not for salaries of school administrators or other operating expenses, officials said.

"We're very happy with the report," he said. "It shows we're managing the money and spending on what it's supposed to be spent on."

The watchdog group, a requirement under state law, chided the school district for not releasing the report sooner.

"That audit should have happened last year," said Mike McCaffrey, chairman of the nine-member oversight committee. "We were very pleased to read the results of the audit and happy everything checked out the way we hoped."

Bond-related construction is expected to continue for the next four years.

---end---

What are your thoughts on the Auditor's report? To review or read it, I am sure it's posted on the district web site, or the C4 Bond ICOC web site. I'm confident you'll be able to find the auditors' report in one of these two places, otherwise you may want to make a public records request of the district...

Oh...nevermind.

Posted by Tim Keaney at 08:23 PM

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March 15, 2006

Congratulations!

From the Star:

Royal students named to national choir
March 15, 2006

Seven Royal High School students auditioned and were chosen to attend National Honor Choir in Salt Lake City, Utah.

The students, directed by Bonnie Graeve, Royal choral director, are Sara Pulsipher, Emily Candish, Rochelle Kitzmann, Bradley Meyer, Tiffany Bickford, Jon Geerson and Kira Conley.

Posted by Tim Keaney at 01:42 PM

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March 14, 2006

Whose Government is it?

It's yours. Lock, Stock and Barrel.

Fights with elected officials over public information are never ending. It seems that among mankind's strongest urgings is the desire to hold secrets, hide documents and keep voters and taxpayers in the dark.

Every legislator, from the freshest freshman to the House speaker and lieutenant governor, is paid by tax dollars. Everything in Government, from pencils to computers, is paid for with tax dollars. Yet government agencies still don't want you to know what their doing with your money.

I would think they're hiding something, if I weren't convinced they were simply more inept.

What do you make of the story in the Star this week, that says 40% of local public agencies don't know how to comply, or are not in compliance with the Public Records act?

Not entirely, the local school districts were the worst offenders.

Comments?

Posted by Tim Keaney at 08:47 PM

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March 09, 2006

From the Daily News

What do YOU think is important to build?

---

Sacrificial lambs
Fancy arts school drains money from other district projects

LA Daily News

Los Angeles Unified School District officials seem awfully willing to sacrifice a lot of education benefits for the sake of building Eli Broad's dream school on the edge of downtown.
The admittedly impressive plans for the district's performing arts high school at the corner of Grand and Cesar Chavez avenues is coming in many millions over budget, for a total of $208 million. That's $208 million for a school that could have been, should have been, built for less than $50 million.

That's $160 million or so just to bring to life the vision that billionaire Broad wanted for the gateway of his Grand Avenue renovation.

On Tuesday, the Los Angeles school board approved a $171.9 million bid to move forward on construction of the graded lot, formerly the site of an LAUSD administration building _ $55 million above the last cost estimate.

To find the extra money, the school board has agreed to take $60 million away from other districtwide programs, ultimately short-changing the vast majority of the LAUSD's students. To make amends, the board has consented to allow 500 students from outside the area to attend the new high school - a costly perk for a few that comes at the expense of the many. In addition, the district will also be delaying the start of another 500-seat high school in the school-starved area, meaning that local kids will suffer, too.

The school board blames the cost overruns on inflation in the price of construction materials, as well as switching architects. But that's basically a way to obscure the truth if not an outright lie.

The original plan for the site was to build a standard, but pleasant-looking school to relieve the serious overcrowding in nearby schools. The overruns stem directly from the fact that the school board bent to the vision of Broad, who wanted an architecturally significant school at the site, which sits on the far end of Grand Avenue. Broad is deeply involved in the renovation of Grand Avenue from ho-hum city street to a gleaming and attractive civic space.

Having a cool arts school on the edge of Grand Avenue is a nice addition, for sure. But it should not come at the cost of the other students in the district.

School board members should remember that they serve the students of the entire district. And treating those students like sacrificial lambs by diverting funds to feed the civic ambitions of an elite few is unconscionable.

Posted by Tim Keaney at 08:36 PM

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March 07, 2006

Out of Floods, Hope for Katrina's Kids

From The Associated Press -

New Orleans schools reborn by Katrina

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AP) -- The slimy mildew clinging to classroom walls for years, the termite-eaten floors, the paint peeling from school ceilings -- Hurricane Katrina washed all that way.

The storm that destroyed much of this city also devastated the New Orleans public schools.

But that wasn't all bad.

The system, regarded as one of the worst in America, had been rotting for decades: Buildings were neglected. Kids weren't learning. Millions of dollars were squandered or stolen.

Now, six months after Katrina, only a small number of schools has reopened so far, but many people see the storm's destruction as a unique opportunity to rebuild a system that had no place to go but up.

"This is the silver lining in the dark cloud of Katrina," says Sajan George, a turnaround expert who began working at the schools before the storm. "We would not have been able to start with an almost clean slate if Katrina had not happened. So it really does represent an incredible opportunity."

But how does a school system reinvent itself in a city when money is scarce and misery plentiful?

Boldly.

That's what some educators are proposing with a plan that calls for a major shakeup: Schools would be grouped in clusters run by managers. Students would have choices about where they'd attend. And most money and hiring decisions would shift from the superintendent's office to the principals, who are considered more attuned to their schools' needs.

"We have to have a whole new mind-set about how we approach public education," says Scott Cowen, president of Tulane University and head of a mayoral committee that developed the plan. "If we can get our heads around true transformation, we can turn it around."

But change won't come easily.

There's a long history here of squabbling among board members, scandal and academic failure. And that was before Katrina. Now there are new headaches: Thousands of teachers have no jobs. Parents are frustrated with the slow pace of school reopenings. And insiders are openly skeptical of plans for the future.

"I don't think you turn around a failing system by changing the structure of the system," says Ora Watson, interim superintendent of the New Orleans public schools.

Watson also feels not everyone is being heard.

"Some people are being left out of the conversation," she says. "I'm talking about poor people, people who populated the schools, the African-American community."

The Bring New Orleans Back Education Committee that developed the plan says it consulted a diverse group of more than 1,500 people from New Orleans, including teachers, parents and students, along with experts around the nation, and is committed to creating top-quality schools in every neighborhood.

The Orleans Parish school board has endorsed the plan.

Katrina compounded troubles

It has been no secret something had to be done to fix a system so mismanaged that budgets hadn't been balanced in five years, teachers often received inaccurate paychecks and corruption was endemic.

The system was already on the brink of financial collapse when Katrina roared in, severely damaging about a quarter of the schools: Roofs caved in. Fierce winds blew out walls and hurled desks through windows. Floodwaters drowned about 300 buses.

Total losses could reach as high as $1 billion.

Federal dollars will go a long way toward rebuilding, but the schools still face a projected $111 million deficit by June.

And the traditional streams of school dollars -- property and sales taxes -- have shrunken dramatically because some neighborhoods still look like post-apocalyptic burial grounds and many businesses remain shuttered.

Yet schools will be a major barometer of New Orleans' success in luring families back home.

"As long as we don't replicate what we had before, I think schools can be a magnet," in repopulating the city, says Jim Brandt, president of the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana, a think tank.

George, a managing director of Alvarez & Marsal, the turnaround firm hired to help the schools, agrees. "There is something symbolic about physically opening a school that encourages people to come back," he says.

It took three months for the first regular public school to reopen. Now, 20 schools are holding classes, with about 9,500 students -- slightly more than 15 percent of some 60,000 enrolled before the storm. Three more schools may open in April.

Some parents grumble that's not enough, but caution makes sense, says Bill Roberti, another Alvarez & Marsal managing director. "Do you rush and open them the way they were," he asks, "or do you take the time and try to fix them?"

Explaining who's in charge of the schools these days requires a scorecard and some background.

Katrina prompted two dramatic changes that have turned the old Orleans Parish school system into a shadow of its former self:

Last fall, the state was given authority to take control of about 90 percent of the city's public schools -- those considered "failing" because they fall below a state average based on test scores, dropout rates and attendance.

A handful of schools had already been taken over before the storm. Now, 112 of 128 that were in the Orleans Parish system are part of a state-administered "school recovery district" and will remain that way for five years.

The second big shift came when some educators -- led by a school board member -- split off 13 schools in the Algiers area on the less-damaged west bank of the Mississippi River and had them designated as charters.

Charter schools have their own boards, so they can design their own schedules and curriculum and choose their own principals and teachers.

After Katrina, chartering schools turned out to be "the most expedient and quickest way to jump start the system," because federal dollars were immediately available for them, says Cecil Picard, the state superintendent of education.

There is no long-range plan to replicate them throughout New Orleans, but some say it's a fresh start.

"It allows you to change one school at a time," says Brian Riedlinger, director of instruction at the Algiers Charter Schools Association.

System plagued by problems

And change clearly is needed in a system where some schools didn't have enough books or even enough toilet paper before Katrina.

Constant turnover at the top didn't help, either. Since 1996, nine temporary or permanent superintendents have run the public schools, according to Picard.

While there were outstanding public schools -- including the state's No. 1 in test scores -- there were many more failures. Even insiders say there were disparities.

"Some schools prospered at the expense of others," says Riedlinger, a 20-year veteran of the New Orleans schools. "We called it the 'haves' and 'have nots.' ... There was never a sense of equity in the school district."

To make matters worse, incompetence and fraud bled the schools of resources.

"The system was just corrupt and terrible from top to the bottom," says Carter Guice, an assistant U.S. attorney. "It was a dog's breakfast of negligence to criminality."

Since 2004, 24 people in the schools, including administrators, teachers and secretaries have been indicted on federal charges such as travel fraud, extortion and taking kickbacks. Fifteen have pleaded guilty.

Questions about financial wrongdoing also surfaced a few years ago when $71 million in federal funds could not be accounted for; an audit turned up most of the money, however, and sloppy record-keeping was blamed.

Then last year, the state hired Alvarez & Marsal. They were stunned by what they found.

"They hadn't done bank records, so nobody could tell you exactly how much cash they had on hand," George says. "Nobody could reconcile the payroll accounts. Nobody could tell you how many employees they had."

The payroll error rate reached as high as 20 percent -- compared with less than 1 percent nationally -- meaning teachers frequently were underpaid or overpaid.

The plan to overhaul the system recommends moving most budget decisions to local schools.

"If you do that, you keep the pool of available money that can be stolen small enough so that it's not really worth going to jail for," says school board member Jimmy Fahrenholtz. "I'm very realistic."

Most people here expect a smaller school system in the years ahead. The state estimates about 28,000 students will be back this fall in about 50 schools.

Educators say turning the schools around will take years, maybe even a generation, and they know many residents -- including those who want to return -- will be looking for signs of progress.

"People are waiting to see, just as they are waiting to see if the levees will be strong enough," says Brandt, the think tank president. "They're waiting to see whether it's a new school system or the same old, same old. People are going to be watching very carefully."

Posted by Tim Keaney at 02:01 PM

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March 05, 2006

Gala Force Winds

Last night, at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, I was privaleged to attend the first annual Simi Valley Education Foundation "Gala for Education". This spectaular event, hosted by SVEF in the Air Force One pavilion, brought together over 450 local business people, educators, political leaders, volunteers and more to rasise funds for the mission of the Education Foundation.

KUDOS should go to SVEF president Dan White, for having the vision and courage to try and do such a big, and unique event. Event Chairs Karen Hawk, Michelle Foster and Glen Becerra should be commended for pulling the event together - the entire board of SVEF and it's many corporate and personal sponsors should be commended big time.

As the results come in, hopefully I'll be able to post the final fundraising totals, but I believe well in excess of $100,000 was raised in one night, to benefit the students in Simi Vally schools.

Once again, congratulations to Dan, Karen, Michelle, Glen and all of the supporters and board of the Simi Valley Education Foundation.

Tim Keaney

Posted by Tim Keaney at 01:41 PM

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March 03, 2006

PTA is "P'd" off

This week in the WSJ, there was an explosive commentary on the PTA. Here, in their entirety are the WSJ article, and the open letter response from the National PTA.

What do you think of the PTA? Locally and nationally?

Tim

From the WSJ:

Losing the 'P' in PTA

By RITA KRAMER
February 24, 2006; Page W13

The hand-lettered sign outside the door to P.S. 166 on Manhattan's Upper West Side said "PTA Meeting Thursday." To be exact, it was a parent group that would be meeting, not the PTA.

The sign was proof of the extent to which "PTA" has become a generic term, like "Kleenex" or "Xerox." Many parents are unaware of just how far the century-old National Congress of Parents and Teachers (known since 1924 as the PTA) has strayed from its origins in social uplift or from the classic 1950s-era image we may still have of it -- an organization devoted to school service, fund-raising (think of those bake sales) and wholesome parent-teacher relations.

In fact, the PTA has been losing members steadily for almost a half-century now, from a high point of more than 12 million in the early 1960s to a current membership of about half that. Today only about a quarter of K-12 schools in the U.S. have a PTA chapter. The reasons for this decline are familiar ones: money and politics.

The PTA had its beginnings in an era of women's clubs and settlement houses, when affluent, idealistic women went to work bettering the conditions of the urban poor. Although women still couldn't vote, they could exercise influence through thousands of civic organizations and social clubs around the country. Soon enough, they cast a critical eye on the conditions of children in the public schools. They sought to address such matters as nutrition and hygiene and to help Americanize the offspring of immigrants arriving in waves from southern and eastern Europe.

In 1897, the members of the first National Congress of Mothers -- the name of the group that would eventually become the PTA -- saw their mission as fostering "a love of humanity and of country...and the advantages to follow from a closer relation between the influence of the home and that of the school." The president of the national PTA declared at a recent convention: "We simply must change the country." What happened?

In "The Politics of the PTA" (2002), Charlene Haar explains that the PTA shifted its focus mainly because of its longstanding alliance with the National Education Association. Formed in 1857, the NEA once shared the parent group's concern for schoolchildren in such matters as school curriculum and the qualifications of public-school teachers. Indeed, in 1920, the National Congress felt so much in line with the NEA that it moved into the association's impressive Washington headquarters. Already allied with the teachers group on support for a "progressive" curriculum that would emphasize "life skills," the PTA would from then on curb its more general social programs and limit itself to matters directly affecting education.

Ms. Haar chronicles the major policies on which the two groups cooperated throughout the 20th century. Having begun as equals, the PTA gradually became the subservient partner. Both organizations refused to support the National Defense Education Act -- passed in 1958 in the wake of the Soviet's launch of Sputnik -- because, as Ms. Haar explains, it "provided funds for mathematics, science and other defense-related curricula but could not be used for teacher salaries."

By the 1960s, the PTA was known as "a coffee-and-cookies organization" -- unquestioningly offering its seal of approval to the newly unionized NEA. It was the issue of teacher strikes, though, that dealt the reputation of the PTA its final blow. In 1961 the AFT, representing New York City's teachers, staged the nation's first citywide strike, and in 1968 Florida teachers followed with the first statewide strike. To avoid conflict, the PTA abandoned any pretense of independence and supported the walkouts.

A few years later, the PTA tagged along with the NEA, lobbying for a cabinet-level federal department of education. What followed were a series of legislative victories for the teachers unions. Among their outstanding lobbying successes, backed by the PTA, was the defeat of a bill co-sponsored by Sen. Patrick Moynihan in 1978 proposing a tax credit for as much as half of private-school tuition. In the aftermath, many parents began their exodus from the PTA, including a large number of Catholics whose tuition fees for parochial schools would have become less burdensome under the plan.

Today the PTA supports all of the union's positions, including increased federal funding for education and opposition to independent charter schools, to vouchers and to tuition tax credits for private and religious schools. This "parent" group lobbies for teachers to spend less time in the classroom and to have fewer supervisory responsibilities like lunchroom duty. Moreover, they want a pay scale for teachers that is based on seniority, not merit. In November, the PTA even helped to defeat California's Proposition 74, which called for limiting teacher tenure by extending the probation period for new teachers from two to five years, a proposal designed to give administrators more time to weed out bad instructors.

With polls indicating that the union label is a liability with the public, an arrangement has developed whereby the NEA provides needed financial support for the PTA, which in turn bolsters union positions at the grass-roots level. As one union official put it: "[T]he PTA has credibility...we always use the PTA as a front."

Not only does the PTA support the NEA on issues that protect the public-school teachers' monopoly, the parent group also speaks up in favor of the NEA's more radical curriculum ideas, like sex-education programs that replace "don't" with "how to" and that propose the inclusion of a gay/lesbian unit starting as early as kindergarten.

Many parents have decided that they no longer want to fund this kind of nonsense: They feel that their dues money would be better spent close to home, on after-school programs, computers and school supplies. As the PTA becomes increasingly irrelevant to the lives of children in public schools and parents become less willing to pay its dues, it is gradually being replaced by alternative, mostly home-grown, organizations that may call themselves guilds or councils or associations but are generally known as Parent Teacher Organizations -- PTOs. These groups collect no dues and follow no political line.

Tim Sullivan, a Massachusetts entrepreneur and former New York City public-school teacher, saw the need among the independent groups forming around the country for the kind of information and services once provided by the PTA. In 1999 he founded a company for independent parent-teacher groups. PTO Today publishes a magazine and maintains a Web site that provides opportunities for parent networking on its message boards. Both in print and online, PTO Today answers the kind of questions that parents of public-school children ask -- how to organize a family night, how to raise money for extras like arts-and-crafts supplies and what kind of insurance is necessary for field trips. With any luck, the PTOs will put the PTA out of business entirely.

Ms. Kramer's books include "Ed School Follies: The Miseducation of America's Teachers" and "Maria Montessori: A Biography."

---From the PTA...---

February 28, 2006

Dear Paul Gigot,

There is no substitute for the PTA. Rita Kramer’s commentary “Losing the ‘P’ in PTA,” (February 24) is a distorted depiction of the historical significance and contributions of millions. PTA is the nation’s preeminent volunteer member organization led, driven, and supported by parents and others committed to its founding mission. The issues have changed over the years, but PTA’s focus has not—to speak on behalf of all children; provide information to assist parents in raising and protecting their children; and encourage parent and public involvement in education.

The tradition and history of PTA lends a solid foundation and significant body of knowledge to parents and families nationwide. Today’s PTA volunteer has access to resources to help their children succeed academically, skill development to help them become better parents, learning tools to improve communication with teachers, training to speak out about public school needs, and support to keep the school campus and neighborhood safe.

Most schools have a parent group of one kind or another, but not all parent groups are the same. A parent group is not measured in dollars; it’s more than print and dot-com how-tos; it has a role greater than hosting bake sales. Ms. Kramer’s account overlooked the secret to PTAs success—the people. PTA volunteers connect everyday to improve their schools.

Parents hold a great stake in the future and support of children’s education. PTA is the path through which they can make the greatest impact. When a school community supports the decision to have parents organized as a PTA, the result is informed and engaged parents, a more supportive learning environment for students, and a better reputation for the school and community. That’s the PTA difference.

Anna Weselak President, National PTA

Lombard, IL

Posted by Tim Keaney at 08:22 PM

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Black Flight?

From The Wall Street Journal - Opinion Journal

Black Flight
The exodus to charter schools.

BY KATHERINE KERSTEN
Thursday, March 2, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

MINNEAPOLIS--Something momentous is happening here in the home of prairie populism: black flight. African-American families from the poorest neighborhoods are rapidly abandoning the district public schools, going to charter schools, and taking advantage of open enrollment at suburban public schools. Today, just around half of students who live in the city attend its district public schools.

As a result, Minneapolis schools are losing both raw numbers of students and "market share." In 1999-2000, district enrollment was about 48,000; this year, it's about 38,600. Enrollment projections predict only 33,400 in 2008. A decline in the number of families moving into the district accounts for part of the loss, as does the relocation of some minority families to inner-ring suburbs. Nevertheless, enrollments are relatively stable in the leafy, well-to-do enclave of southwest Minneapolis and the city's white ethnic northeast. But in 2003-04, black enrollment was down 7.8%, or 1,565 students. In 2004-05, black enrollment dropped another 6%.

Black parents have good reasons to look elsewhere. Last year, only 28% of black eighth-graders in the Minneapolis public schools passed the state's basic skills math test; 47% passed the reading test. The black graduation rate hovers around 50%, and the district's racial achievement gap remains distressingly wide. Louis King, a black leader who served on the Minneapolis School Board from 1996 to 2000, puts it bluntly: "Today, I can't recommend in good conscience that an African-American family send their children to the Minneapolis public schools. The facts are irrefutable: These schools are not preparing our children to compete in the world." Mr. King's advice? "The best way to get attention is not to protest, but to shop somewhere else."
They can do so because of the state's longstanding commitment to school choice. In 1990 Minnesota allowed students to cross district boundaries to enroll in any district with open seats. Two years later in St. Paul, the country's first charter school opened its doors. (Charter schools are started by parents, teachers or community groups. They operate free from burdensome regulations, but are publicly funded and accountable.) Today, this tradition of choice is providing a ticket out for kids in the gritty, mostly black neighborhoods of north and south- central Minneapolis.

While about 1,620 low-income Minneapolis students attend suburban public schools, most of the fleeing minority and low-income students choose charter schools. Five years ago, 1,750 Minneapolis students attended charters; today 5,600 do. In 2000-01, 788 charter students were black; today 3,632 are. Charters are opening in the city at a record pace: up from 23 last year to 28, with 12 or so more in the pipeline.

According to the Center for School Change at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute, Minneapolis charter school enrollment is 91% minority and 84% low-income, while district enrollment is 72% minority and 67% low-income. Joe Nathan, the center's director, says that parents want strong academic programs, but also seek smaller schools and a stable teaching staff highly responsive to student needs. Charter schools offer many options. Some cater to particular ethnic communities like the Hmong or Somali; others offer "back to basics" instruction or specialize in arts or career preparation. At Harvest Preparatory School, a K-6 school that is 99% black and two-thirds low income, students wear uniforms, focus on character, and achieve substantially higher test scores than district schools with similar demographics.

Since the state doles out funds on a per-pupil basis, the student exodus has hit the district's pocketbook hard. The loss of students has contributed to falling budgets, shuttered classrooms and deep staff cuts, and a district survey suggests more trouble ahead. Black parents in 2003 gave the Minneapolis school system significantly more negative ratings than other parents, the two major beefs being poor quality academic programs and lack of discipline. Preschool parents, another group vital to the district's future, also expressed disillusionment: 44% expressed interest in sending their children to charters. Charter school parents, in contrast, appeared very satisfied: 97% said they would be "very likely" or "somewhat likely" to choose a charter again.

The school board has promised to address parent concerns, but few observers expect real reform. Minneapolis is a one-party town, dominated by Democrats, and is currently reeling from leadership shake-ups that have resulted in three superintendents in the last few years. The district has handled budget cutbacks and school closings ineptly, leading some parents to joke bitterly about its tendency to penalize success and reward failure.

Parents are particularly angry about seniority policies, which often lead to the least experienced teachers being placed in the most challenging school environments. Nevertheless, a few weeks ago the Minneapolis school board approved a teacher contract that largely continues this policy, along with other union-driven practices that perpetuate the status quo.

Black leaders like Louis King have had enough. He has a message for the school board: "You'll have to make big changes to get us back." He says the district needs a board that views families as customers and understands that competition has unalterably changed the rules of the game. "I'm a strong believer in public education," says Mr. King. "But this district's leaders have to make big changes or go out of business. If they don't, we'll see them in a museum, like the dinosaurs."
Minneapolis families seeking to escape troubled schools are fortunate to have the options they do. That's not the case in many other states, where artificial barriers--from enrollment caps to severe underfunding--have stymied the growth of charter schools.

The city's experience should lead such states to reconsider the benefits of expansive school choice. Conventional wisdom holds that middle-class parents take an interest in their children's education, while low-income and minority parents lack the drive and savvy necessary. The black exodus here demonstrates that, when the walls are torn down, poor, black parents will do what it takes to find the best schools for their kids.

Ms. Kersten is a columnist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Posted by Tim Keaney at 04:37 PM

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March 02, 2006

Happy Anniversary?

Two years ago today, Simi voters overwhelmingly approved Measure C4, a $145 million bond issues designed to:

Increase and improve classroom space
Modernize campuses
provide needed technology to schools and classrooms

As well as a litany of other things, such as weight rooms, high school tracks & seating and a performing arts auditorium at Santa Su High.

so.... How's it going?

Has classroom space been added to alleviate the extraordinary attendance at the high schools and middle schools?

How has your school been modernized? What actions have taken place on your campus?

What technology has been added to your campus?

How much has been spent yet?

How is the "independent citizens oversight committee" doing? Have you been to a meeting? Where can we find out more about this organization?

Is Simi Unified in Compliance with the law regarding bond management?

So happy anniversary Simi Valley! Should we roll out a birthday cake and celebrate the success of C4? Or should we be like others on birthdays, who get depressed when they have less money than they thought, and even less to show for it?

Your call.

Tim Keaney

Posted by Tim Keaney at 08:05 AM

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March 01, 2006

The inalienable right to "DOH"

D’oh! More know Simpsons than Constitution
Study: America more familiar with cartoon family than First Amendment

The Associated Press
Updated: 1:22 a.m. ET March 1, 2006

CHICAGO - Americans apparently know more about “The Simpsons” than they do about the First Amendment.

Only one in four Americans can name more than one of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment. (Survey: can you name the five freedoms?)

But more than half can name at least two members of the cartoon family, according to a survey.

The study by the new McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that 22 percent of Americans could name all five Simpson family members, compared with just one in 1,000 people who could name all five First Amendment freedoms.

Joe Madeira, director of exhibitions at the museum, said he was surprised by the results.

“Part of the survey really shows there are misconceptions, and part of our mission is to clear up these misconceptions,” said Madeira, whose museum will be dedicated to helping visitors understand the First Amendment when it opens in April. “It means we have our job cut out for us.”

The survey found more people could name the three “American Idol” judges than identify three First Amendment rights. They were also more likely to remember popular advertising slogans.

It also showed that people misidentified First Amendment rights. About one in five people thought the right to own a pet was protected, and 38 percent said they believed the right against self-incrimination contained in the Fifth Amendment was a First Amendment right, the survey found.

The telephone survey of 1,000 adults was conducted Jan. 20-22 by the research firm Synovate and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

_________________________________________________________

Posted by Tim Keaney at 07:42 AM

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A debate worth having - 2

Published in Education Week: March 1, 2006
‘No Child’ Effect on English-Learners Mulled
Teachers welcome attention, fault focus on test scores.
By Mary Ann Zehr
Clifton, N.J.
Educators who specialize in teaching English-language learners are of mixed minds about the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

They agree that the 4-year-old law has brought unprecedented attention to those students by requiring schools to isolate test-score data for English-learners. The growing awareness of the challenges such students face, they note, has spurred an increase in professional development, particularly for teachers of regular classes.

They disagree, though, on whether changes in instruction spurred by the law have been positive or negative overall. And many of them say it’s wrong to penalize schools whose English-learners’ test scores fall short.

Such conflicting opinions reflect the continuing national debate over President Bush’s flagship education initiative, as its effects reverberate through public schools across the country.

Janina J. Kusielewicz, the supervisor of basic skills and bilingual education for the public schools here in this New Jersey district, expresses an ambivalence about the law that many of her colleagues nationwide share.

“I don’t like to give the No Child Left Behind Act any credit, but it has given [English-as-a-second-language] teachers clout in the mainstream,” she said. She added, though, that “the fact it’s punishing schools for having a high number of English-language learners is unconscionable.”

It’s unrealistic, many educators say, that the law requires such students to take the same state academic tests as children who have been speaking English all their lives. The law does permit states to provide tests in students’ native languages, but only 10 states do so, and then mostly only in Spanish and not necessarily for both reading and math.

When English-learners score well on the standardized tests, educators say, it’s often because they have reached fluency in English. Such students, they say, are then taken out of the ELL category, leaving behind those with weaker English skills, whose performance can subject their schools to sanctions under the federal law.

Requirements for Schools
The No Child Left Behind Act—an overhaul of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act signed into law by President Bush in January 2002—requires that schools break down test results for various subgroups of students, including English-language learners. The schools must reach the same accountability goals for each subgroup that they must meet for all students.

Schools face sanctions, such as being required to permit their students to transfer to other schools, if even one subgroup fails to make the level of adequate yearly progress, or AYP, the state has set to comply with the law.

Many schools have failed to make AYP because the test scores of their English-learners were too low.

Some educators say that schools have responded to the pressure to raise test scores for children who speak little English by narrowing the curriculum.

Then there are those who contend that the law has indirectly caused schools to match the language of instruction with the language of tests, regardless of what approach to language would work best for their English-learners.

For example, some schools have abandoned bilingual education in favor of English-only methods because of the law’s requirement that students must eventually take tests in English.

But, if the state has a corresponding test in students’ native language, other schools have permitted teachers to teach almost exclusively in that language—and cut back on English instruction.

The law requires states to give all students standardized tests in reading and mathematics in grades 3-8 and at least once in high school. It permits states to give both the math and reading tests to students in their native languages for three years, and a fourth or fifth year on a case-by-case basis.

Teaching English-Language Learners
The Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol, or SIOP, is a model for teaching English and academic content simultaneously.

• Write content objectives clearly for students.

• Write language objectives clearly for students.

• Explicitly link concepts to students' backgrounds and experiences.

• Emphasize key vocabulary (e.g., introduce, write, repeat, and highlight) for students.

• Use a variety of techniques to make content concepts clear (e.g., visuals, hands-on activities, demonstrations, and gestures.)

• Provide frequent opportunities for interactions and discussion between teacher and student and among students, and encourage elaborated responses.

• Provide sufficient waiting time for student responses.

SOURCE: Making Content Comprehensible for English Language Learners. The SIOP Model 2004.Kathleen Leos, the director of the office of English-language acquisition at the U.S. Department of Education, said recently that if schools narrow the curriculum for English-learners or teach to the language of the test to comply with NCLB, they are misinterpreting the law.

“We’re not funding programs, we’re funding students. We’re funding language acquisition and academic achievement,” she said. “How you choose to do that is left up to the state.”

Eva D. Rogozinski, the ESL resource teacher at Christopher Columbus Middle School in Clifton, has mixed views about the law’s impact on English-learners.

Because of the law, she said, “there’s more communication between ESL teachers and mainstream teachers, and the English-language learners aren’t thought of as a separate entity.” She doubts that her district would have provided extensive training in ESL strategies to mainstream middle and high school teachers without the federal law.

Ms. Rogozinski is one of 20 teachers at her school trained in the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol, or SIOP, which is a model for simultaneously teaching ESL students academic content and English. It was co-developed by the Washington-based Center for Applied Linguistics.

The ongoing training has improved instruction for English-language learners, Ms. Rogozinski said. As an example, she said mainstream teachers are more likely to draw those students out in discussions instead of assuming they can’t respond to questions.

But Ms. Rogozinski resents that Columbus Middle School has been put on a “needs improvement” list under the federal law in part because English-language learners didn’t meet the state’s goals for adequate yearly progress. It’s simply not fair for schools to be put under so much pressure to improve the scores of English-learners on a test that wasn’t designed for them, she argues.

About 60 percent of the students in the Clifton public schools, located in a suburb of Newark, N.J., come from homes where a language other than English is spoken. About 750 of the district’s 10,600 students, or some 7 percent, are English-language learners. Ninety-three of the 1,300 students at Columbus Middle School are English-learners.

Impact in the Classroom
In the camp of those who believe that the No Child Left Behind Act has been more of a detriment than a benefit to English-language learners is one of the few researchers who have studied the impact that the law has had on instruction.

For her doctoral dissertation, Kate Menken, an assistant professor of bilingual education and the teaching of English to speakers of other languages at City College of the City University of New York, interviewed 128 educators and English-language learners at 10 high schools in the city during the 2003-04 school year about the effects of the law. She observed classes at four schools.

“The focus I’ve mostly seen is test ‘drill and kill,’ ” said Ms. Menken. She added, “English as a second language, which used to be guided by research and experience of effective methods for English-language learners, is now guided by the test.”

For example, she writes in her research paper, ESL classes in New York City now emphasize literature and literary analysis rather than more communicative aspects of the language because that’s what students need to know for the New York state English Language Arts Regents Exam. That test is used by the state for accountability under the federal law and as a high school exit exam.

Ms. Menken documents in her research how some schools have increased the amount of time spent on ESL to help students pass the Regents English test, which must be taken in English. But in other subjects, some teachers have actually decreased the amount of time they spend teaching English—when the Regents test for their subject matter is available in students’ native languages. Alba A. Ortiz, a special education and bilingual education professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has noticed that some Texas schools are also matching the language of instruction with the language of the test. Texas provides its reading and math tests in Spanish for grades 3-6.

“You will have an elementary school, and the students are being tested in Spanish,” she said. “Then the early-grade teachers want to teach only in Spanish so the students will pass the test, but the 4th and 5th grade teachers are frustrated they don’t get students who can be proficient in English before they reach middle school.”

Focused Training
Joseph Telles, a program coordinator for English-learners in Local District 7 of the Los Angeles Unified School District, says the disaggregation of test scores for English-learners required by the federal law “has shone the light on our group.” He added that “now we have a lot more focused in-service training” for teachers on how to work with English-language learners.

Many educators see the increase in professional-development programs on how to teach English-language learners as a bright spot in the implementation of the law.

“The No Child Left Behind Act is certainly having an impact on English-language learners at the classroom level,” Deborah Short, the director of language education and academic development for the Center for Applied Linguistics, a nonprofit research organization on language, said in an e-mail response to questions for this story.

“One example,” she wrote, “is the number of grade-level and content-area teachers who are participating in specialized professional development in order to instruct these students more effectively.”

The center provided the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol training for Columbus Middle School in Clifton and is including the school in an ongoing study of the effectiveness of the model for teaching English-learners. Mainstream teachers are in their second year of the training, and it’s clear that some are applying what they’ve learned.

Math teacher Michele Trigo, left, gestures to students during a lesson called "I think...I know...I wonder." Mainstream teachers at the school use language-education methods to help English-learners.

—Emile Wamsteker for Education WeekOn the same day in six different classrooms recently, teachers wrote on the blackboard a learning objective for language and one for academic content—a SIOP recommendation.

In one class, for example, the language objective was for students to use the math terms of numerator, denominator, mixed number, and improper fraction.

In teaching how to calculate the surface of a cylinder or a rectangular prism, Nadia Dubanowitz, an 8th grade math teacher, asked her students to cut the outlines of those objects from a one-dimensional form on a sheet of paper and then fold them into three-dimensional forms. The class of 22 students has eight ESL students.

Ms. Dubanowitz taught with hands-on activities even before her SIOP training, which encourages the method. Because of the training, though, “I focus more on vocabulary than we did before,” she said. “I use more visuals.”

Michele Trigo, another math teacher, has posted a “word wall” in her classroom that reminds students of new math vocabulary, which is also a SIOP suggestion.

One of the SIOP methods that she’s found particularly effective is having students say at the end of the lesson a sentence beginning with any of the following expressions: “I think,” “I know,” “I learned,” or “I wonder.” After a recent lesson on circles and circumferences, she asked each student to do that exercise.

“I learned that to find the radius, you have to divide the diameter by 2,” said one girl, who is fluent in English.

But for a boy who moved here from Puerto Rico a year ago, it’s not easy to express in English what he has learned.

“I learned that,” he said, pointing to the blackboard.

“What’s that?” asked Ms. Trigo.

“Circumference,” he said.

“What’s the formula for circumference?” she asked.

The youth mumbled an answer.

“What’s the number for pi?” she asked.

“Catorce [fourteen],” he said in Spanish.

“Tell me in English. Did you write it down?”

“Three-point-one-four,” he said, after checking his notes.

“Excellent.”

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Let's have a debate...

Posted by Tim Keaney at 07:19 AM

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