[Ohiogift] Public Education NewsBlast — June 27, 2013

[Art Snyder]

                June 27, 2013 - In This Issue:
       Teacher prep 'an industry of mediocrity'
  NCTQ 'nonsense'
  NGSS: Not so hot
  A striking return on investment
  Assessments we can believe in
  Professional Growth & Support
  Unpersuasive on the Brown plan
  BRIEFLY NOTED CALIFORNIA
  BRIEFLY NOTED
  GRANTS AND FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES
                                            NewsBlast will be taking next week off in observance of the national holiday. 

Happy Fourth!

 
Teacher prep 'an industry of mediocrity'

A new report by the National Council on Teacher Quality finds that institutions producing America's traditionally prepared teachers are "an industry of mediocrity." The review gives ratings for 608 institutions based on a set of key standards, and offers additional data on another 522. The authors report enormous resistance from many programs they sought to assess; in some cases, they sued for data. On a scale of four stars, less than 10 percent of rated programs got three stars or more. Only four programs, all secondary-level, garnered four stars: Lipscomb and Vanderbilt, both in Tennessee; Ohio State University; and Furman University in South Carolina. One institution, Ohio State, earned more than three stars for both its elementary (3½ stars) and secondary (4 stars) programs. A mere quarter of programs restrict admissions to students in the top half of their class. Fewer than one in nine elementary programs, and just over one-third of high school programs, are preparing candidates at the level necessary to teach the new Common Core State Standards. Three out of four elementary-teacher preparation programs are not teaching methods of reading instruction that will substantially raise the number of proficient readers. Finally, just seven percent of programs ensure their student- teachers will have uniformly strong experiences, such as only being placed in classrooms taught by effective teachers. More


NCTQ 'nonsense'

In The Washington Post, Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University writes that the new ratings of teacher preparatory programs by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) are seriously flawed. The researchers' methodology consisted of a review of published course requirements and course syllabi against a checklist that did not consider quality of instruction, evidence of student learning, or graduate outcomes, Darling-Hammond says. Most schools of education nationally declined to participate in the data collection due to concerns around methods -- so documents were collected through websites and public records requests. The degree of inaccuracy in data is "shocking," she writes: For instance, Columbia was rated highly for the selectivity of an undergraduate program that does not exist. Stanford received low scores for the reported absence of courses in secondary mathematics that in fact exist (candidates take three full courses in mathematics curriculum and instruction) and are prominently displayed, along with syllabi, on its website. Last month, NCTQ published ratings of states' teacher-education policies that bore no relationship to the quality of their training systems or outcomes as measured by student achievement. In that study, the highest-achieving states on the NAEP -- including Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, New Jersey, and Minnesota -- all got grades of C or D, while low-achieving Alabama got the top rating. More


NGSS: Not so hot
A new evaluation of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute gives the standards a grade of C. It declares them inferior to those of 12 states and the District of Columbia, as well as the NAEP and TIMSS frameworks, though superior to the science standards of 16 states and the PISA framework. The remaining 22 states have standards on a par with the NGSS, as does the ACT science assessment framework. According to the authors, the NGSS fail to integrate and balance necessary content with critical "practices" through which students can extend learning and deepen understanding. They omit essential content that would lay the groundwork for high school physics and chemistry, as well as for college-level science. Too often, the authors note, the NGSS assume that students have mastered prerequisite content that is never spelled out for earlier grades. They incorporate "assessment boundaries" in some standards to limit the scope of knowledge and skills to be tested on state assessments, but this will likely just limit curriculum and instruction. Finally, the authors find the NGSS fail to include math content that is critical to science learning, especially at the high school level, where math is essential for physics and chemistry. More


A striking return on investment
The Children's Aid Society and The Finance Project have released a case study of community schools that demonstrates a significant social return on investment (SROI) for the community-schools strategy. Researchers examined two community school sites in Washington Heights in New York City, P.S. 5/Ellen Lurie Elementary School and its sister site, the Salomé Ureña de Henriquez Campus (grades six to 12), and identified eight primary goals for participating students -- including readiness to enter school, academic success, health and safety, and family and school engagement -- and analyzed 40 measurable outcomes to achieve them. After extensive research of third party sources, the authors assigned financial values to each benefit and gathered cost data to reflect the monetary value -- in terms of improved outcomes, revenues generated, and costs avoided -- of the resources needed to run community schools. Once the benefits were adjusted to reflect the value of past investments in current dollars, the figure was divided by investment costs. The researchers found that every dollar invested in the schools over a three-year period produced a $10.30 and $14.80 return in social value, respectively. A companion publication provides a comprehensive, three-step guide, complete with tools and worksheets, to help community school leaders measure and communicate the social and economic value of their schools and programs. Report & Companion Guide


Assessments we can believe in

A new report from the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education offers criteria for high-quality student assessments. New assessments should tap "higher-level" cognitive skills that allow students to transfer learning to new situations and problems. The abilities to evaluate, compare, hypothesize, and investigate, and the abilities to analyze, synthesize, design, and create should be the focus of at least one third of the total points in mathematics and at least half in English language arts. Assessments should evaluate critical abilities such as communication (speaking, reading, writing, and listening in multimedia forms), collaboration, modeling, complex problem solving, research, experimentation, and evaluation, and tasks should measure these abilities as they will be used in the real world. Assessments should be as rigorous as those of the leading education countries, in terms of the tasks they present as well as the level of performance they expect. Assessment tasks should also represent the curriculum in ways that respond to instruction and have value for guiding and informing teaching. Finally, in order to have assessments that are truly valid for a wide range of learners, they should accurately evaluate students' abilities reliably across testing contexts and scorers. They should also be free from bias, and designed to reduce unnecessary obstacles to performance that could undermine validity for some subgroups. More

     
Professional Growth & Support

A new report from Education Resource Strategies challenges school system leaders to expand the traditional definition of teacher professional development to one of Professional Growth and Support, which can include any use of people, time, and money that bolsters improvement of teaching. This can range from time devoted to teacher evaluation debriefs, to the cost of required planning blocks, to salary increments for education credits. The paper urges a more holistic approach to building teaching effectiveness that moves beyond "training" and is integrated into a larger school-improvement strategy. It offers analysis of three different school systems -- Duval County, Florida; Washington, DC; and charter network Achievement First -- to identify six steps to re-envision teacher professional growth. It recommends that school leaders: quantify current spending on the universe of teacher Professional Growth & Support; capitalize on mandates and growing investments in Common Core State Standards, student assessment systems, and teacher evaluation to create integrated systems; leverage expert support to guide teacher teams in shared instructional content; support growth throughout a teacher's career by restructuring compensation and career paths; add and optimize time to address organizational priorities as well as individual needs; and overhaul legacy policies and make strategic tradeoffs. The report is accompanied by a series of tools to help districts assess their use of professional development dollars and consider ways to allocate them more effectively. More


Unpersuasive on the Brown plan

A new review from the National Education Policy Center looks at the Reason Foundation's brief assessing California Governor Jerry Brown's school-finance reform plan. The brief touts the plan and suggests improvements, some of which are based on the recent school-finance bill in Colorado. Yet while the Reason brief asserts that Brown's proposed plan is better than the status quo -- arguing it would more equitably distribute funding across local public school districts -- the NEPC review finds no data in the brief to support these claims. The bulk of Reason's report is dedicated to the claim that Brown's reforms should be expanded to include weighted student funding that is distributed directly to each school, with the principal given autonomy over how the money is spent. The brief makes the claim that this process would be more equitable, efficient, and transparent, but the reviewer finds little evidence presented that supports this claim. The reviewer finds instead "a highly filtered summary of existing literature on the efficacy of weighted student funding for improving educational equity or school quality," which he finds unpersuasive. "While many would concur that California's funding system is in disrepair," the reviewer writes, "the Reason report offers little precise or valuable guidance for policymakers."  More

BRIEFLY NOTED CALIFORNIA
New era
LAUSD's incoming freshmen class will be the first that must pass a rigorous college-prep curriculum with a "C" in order to get a diploma. More
 
Lucky for them
Just 19% of students in the LAUSD who started ninth grade as the class of 2011 would have fulfilled the more rigorous standards that will apply in the future. More
BRIEFLY NOTED 
Another reprieve
The U.S. Department of Education will allow some states that have gotten waivers from parts of the ESEA to postpone using student growth on state tests as a factor in personnel decisions for up to one additional year, to 2016-17. More
 
More implications for school finance
The system Texas uses to fund public schools violates the state's Constitution by not providing enough money to school districts and failing to distribute it fairly, a judge has ruled. More
 
To what end?
Michigan joined Indiana as the only other state to halt implementing the Common Core State Standards for mathematics and language arts after Gov. Rick Snyder signed the state's budget. More
 
Depth in accountability
The Maryland State Department of Education has approved 21 out of 22 teacher and principal evaluation plans that are required to take effect for the 2013-14 school year. More
 
Check mate
Chicago Public Schools has said that 663 employees at schools the district is closing, including teachers, teaching assistants, and bus aides, don't qualify to follow students to their new schools and will be laid off. More
 
Only a matter of time
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has signed into law a parent trigger for the Recovery School District in New Orleans. More
 
Retooled
The Nevada Board of Education unanimously adopted legislative changes to a new teacher evaluation system rolling out this fall that will have a four-tiered rating system that grades teachers "highly effective," "effective," "minimally effective" or "ineffective" based on student test scores and how well teachers model good teaching practices. More
 
Go team go
Nevada is one of six states awarded a National Governors Association grant and technical assistance to improve early childhood education. More
 
Two out of three
New Hampshire's new education tax law violates the state Constitution's ban on sending public money to religious schools, but the program can continue to provide scholarships for secular schools and homeschooling, a judge has ruled. More
 
Not a moment too soon
With just days before Kentucky's new high school dropout law takes effect, dozens of school districts are preparing to increase their mandatory attendance age to 18 and seize on state grant money that has been promised to help plan for the change. More
 
Full speed ahead
New Jersey will forge ahead with plans to link student test scores to thousands of teachers' evaluations starting with next spring's state tests, despite a new federal offer to delay using them in tenure decisions. More
 
Stealth vouchers
Wisconsin Senate Republicans passed the state budget by a one-vote margin as the state schools superintendent raised concerns a little-noticed provision could lead to a flood of students attending private schools at taxpayer expense. More
 
Never too early
Missouri education officials are recommending that early childhood programs use a system developed in California to assess whether children are ready to enter school. More


GRANTS AND FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES

Civil War Trust/History Channel: Best Civil War Lesson Plan Contest
Teachers are invited to enter their best lesson plans on the American Civil War. Lessons must be authored by only one teacher, there is no group entry category; follow the format of Civil War Trust Lesson Plans; include a goal(s) and measurable objectives; include a list of the materials to be used, as well as copies of teacher-created handouts; include an approximation of the time involved and appropriate grade level; include an explanation of the methods to be used and procedure of the lesson; use at least one primary source -- a historic photograph, document, letter, diary, artifact, etc.; and use original work, turning in permission for any copyrighted materials. Maximum award: $2,500. Eligibility: single teachers at public or private schools. Deadline: July 1, 2013.
 
Travelers Insurance: Grants for Helping Underrepresented Youth
Travelers supports initiatives that improve academic and career success for underrepresented youth, specifically targeted at public school children in grades five through 12, students in transition to post-secondary education, and students in post-secondary learning environments. Maximum award: varies. Eligibility: 501(c )3 organizations in the Twin Cities (primarily Saint Paul); Hartford, Conn.; and selected locations where Travelers has a significant business presence. Deadline: July 12, 2013.
 
LEGO Children's Fund: Grants for Collaborative Programs
The LEGO Children's Fund will provide grants for collaborative programs, either in part or in total, to organizations that focus on early childhood education and development; technology and communication projects that advance learning opportunities; or sport or athletic programs that concentrate on underserved youth. Maximum award: $5,000. Eligibility: 501(c)(3) organizations. Deadline: July 15, 2013.
 
AASA: Educational Administration Scholarship
The School Superintendents Association's Educational Administration Scholarships provide incentive, honor and financial assistance to outstanding graduate students in school administration who intend to make the school superintendency a career. Maximum award: $2,500, plus a $500 travel allowance to attend AASA's National Conference on Education. Eligibility: members of the AASA at the aspiring superintendent rate. Deadline: July 30, 2013.
 
Fender Music Foundation: Grants
Fender Music Foundation grants are awarded to music academies, schools, local music programs and national music programs across America, particularly in-school music classes, in which the students make music; after-school music programs that are not run by the school; and music therapy programs, in which the participants make the music. Maximum award: up to 8 instruments. Eligibility: established, ongoing and sustainable music programs in the United States, which provide music instruction for people of any age who would not otherwise have the opportunity to make music. Deadline: rolling.
 
QUOTE OF THE WEEK:
""Have we made progress? Yes, we've made tremendous progress. The South has made a lot of progress.You don't have the public Klan meetings. You don't have the blatant discrimination. But you still have intimidation. You still have racism. As long as the potential for discrimination is still there, the act is still needed." -- Kenneth Dukes, a minister in Montevallo, Alabama, regarding the recent Supreme Court ruling on parts of the Voting Rights Act. 



 

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