[Ohiogift] Public Education NewsBlast — Oct. 8, 2013

[Art Snyder]

                October 8, 2013 - In This Issue:
       Who suffers? Head Start, again
  The Common Core battle intensifies
  He has seen the movement's enemy, and it is itself
  How not to roll out a new technology district-wide
  We're asking the wrong questions
  So baby, talk to me
  E.D. Hirsch, vindicated at last
  Charters and SPED
  BRIEFLY NOTED CALIFORNIA
  BRIEFLY NOTED
  GRANTS AND FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES
                                            
Who suffers? Head Start, again

In the short term, schools are unaffected by the federal shutdown, but if the impasse in Congress lasts long, they could feel the squeeze, writes Jackie Mader in The Hechinger Report. From week two onward, the shutdown will delay funding to districts, colleges, and universities that rely on federal money, according to a U.S. Department of Education (ED) contingency plan. With 90 percent of ED employees furloughed, the department can't assist districts or answer questions about implementing reforms. The biggest immediate impact will be felt in Head Start programs, still reeling from sequestration cuts that pushed 57,000 children out of preschools. According to the National Head Start Association, 23 programs in 11 states with grant cycles that were to begin October 1 will lose money. In Prentiss, Mississippi, the Five County Child Development Program, which serves about 900 children, had to close its Head Start classes. "The only funds we have coming in are the federal dollars," said Jonathan Bines, its director. He's gotten calls from parents struggling to deal with the closure. In Jefferson Davis County, where Prentiss is located, the median household income is $26,000 and one out of every four residents lives in poverty. "They don't have any childcare," said Bines. "They're scrambling to find a place to leave their children."?More.?Related


 
The Common Core battle intensifies

Tens of millions of dollars are pouring into the fight over the Common Core, write Stephanie Simon and Nirvi Shah for Politico.com. At first glance, proponents have the advantage: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has pumped over $160 million into developing and promoting the standards, and is planning $4 million in grants to strengthen advocacy. Opponents project a scrappy, grassroots image, but in fact are backed by organizations including the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, the Pioneer Institute, Concerned Women for America, and FreedomWorks. These have circulated talking points, organized petitions, connected activists, and convened anti-Common Core conferences. The battle lines defy partisan categories: Teacher unions have joined with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, and the Obama administration, while the Democratic Progressive Caucus of Florida is allied with Tea Party activists. "It's hard to argue that Common Core proponents haven't been caught flat-footed," observes Andrew Rotherham of Bellwether Education. "There was this overconfidence that the time had come... They forgot that in a democracy, you have to do the nitty-gritty work of persuading people." Pro-Core events this fall will focus on persuading parents, and unions are encouraging teachers to organize town halls. Change the Equation is urging its members to use their corporate intranets to push pro-Core messages to employees, many of them parents.?More



He has seen the movement's enemy, and it is itself

The education reform movement that produced charter schools, tenure reform, "Waiting for Superman," and Michelle Rhee is at risk, Louisiana Schools Chief John White said in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, reports Joy Resmovits in The Huffington Post. In his view, this movement has morphed into an "aggressive style of populism" now skeptical of a "reform effort that has done good in America and that needs to be sustained." This must be addressed within the movement, "lest this generational effort wash out with the tide of the next administration." The reform agenda, he says, has gone from "small-time advocacy" to being the prevailing ideas in governance, education, and philanthropy. The greatest risk it now faces is not the validity of its ideas but the pitfalls of authority itself. To prevent its implosion, White offers a three-part solution: Reformers must shift their mission to one of national responsibility rather than relying too much on "easy sympathy for the urban poor"; the narrative must move beyond casting teacher unions as the enemy to taking on "establishment bureaucracy," such as management of Title I programs; and reformers should focus more on implementing than on devising policies. Implementation of big ideas, such as the revision of teacher evaluations, has come off half-baked, he said.?More



How not to roll out a new technology district-wide

Anya Kamenetz of The Hechinger Report spoke to two LAUSD contractors who have first-hand knowledge of LAUSD's iPad fiasco, and their insiders' view reads like a primer of how not to deploy a new technology in a district. The first problem was the district's timeline. The iPad idea surfaced in November 2012 as a proposal to spend $17 million in bond money, and had only a small pilot in the spring. Second was a lack of professional development and a failure to recognize the human-resource needs inherent in a big device rollout. (One reason students found it so easy to turn off the security controls to access restricted sites was that many teachers were unfamiliar with how the controls worked.) Third, taking devices home was not piloted, so in the full rollout, teachers quickly discovered that checking devices out at the end of the day and back in at the beginning used up precious classroom time. Parents, meanwhile, don't want to be liable for iPad loss, breakage, or theft. Fourth, Los Angeles paid a reported $678 apiece for Apple iPads, higher than retail (although the price does include educational software). Still, iPads aren't durable machines, and significantly, they lack keyboards. Just after Labor Day, the district announced it might spend an additional $38 million on wireless keyboard accessories.?More



We're asking the wrong questions

California has embarked on a bold experiment in education, with policy shifts like the Common Core State Standards and the Local Control Funding Formula making districts dramatically more autonomous, writes Patrick Atwater on the Ed Source website. This is a golden opportunity to transform education's one-size-fits-all model. Management-labor disputes have raged over which group of adults in a district get power, but the model of school as a place where students sit in rows and get talked at for hours each day is unchanged. Consider class-size reduction, a reform favored in the '90s in California and hastily implemented, which resulted in new instructional space superseding space for play and kids losing recess. Atwater says it makes little sense to speak of "optimal" class sizes in universal terms: "What regression should one run to uncover the truth of whether every human learns best in a classroom with under 20 students, a classroom of 34 students, alone in his backyard, or among a hundred thousand online peers?" Why not consider that a given student might learn best in one environment for one line of inquiry, and in a different environment for another? Education extends far beyond formal schooling, and the shortcomings of our current school structures are foundational. Before we ask what class size is optimal, for instance, we should ask what constitutes a classroom.?More


     
So baby, talk to me

Pediatric surgeon Dana Suskind, her staff, and a rotating cast of research assistants are working to help low-income parents engage their children in rich, meaningful conversation from the moment they're born, reports Sara Neufeld in Slate Magazine. The first trial of the Thirty Million Words Project (named after research finding that a child born into poverty hears 30 million fewer words by age 3 than a child born affluent) is complete, for which Suskind's staff visited low-income mothers on Chicago's South Side and trained them in a parent-talk curriculum. Every week, a young child in a participating family spent a day wearing a device to record the number of words heard and spoken, plus the number of "turns" in a conversation -- back-and-forth between parent and child. Words on television did not count. The full results aren't yet published, but individual participants' data show dramatic increases in parent-child interaction. The Thirty Million Words curriculum is delivered in 12 weekly home visits, each with a multimedia computer presentation for the home visitor and parent to review together on a laptop. Topics in the Thirty Million Words curriculum include how to go on a television "diet" and how to effectively encourage a child. Home visitors always present the research behind their recommendations rather than simply being directive.?More



E.D. Hirsch, vindicated at last

A generation after being widely criticized as elitist and narrow-minded, the education theorist E. D. Hirsch Jr. is experiencing a revival, writes Al Baker in The New York Times. Curricula developed by his Core Knowledge Foundation have been adopted by schools in 25 states. Not since 1987, when he published "Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know," which included a list of 5,000 essential concepts, has Hirsch been so in demand. His newfound popularity can be attributed to the Common Core, which he did not write, but his lesson plans, teaching materials, and exercises match its heightened expectations of student progress. Philosophically, the ideal of a rigorous nationwide standard is vindication of Hirsch's criticisms of modern education. Hirsch acknowledges his current moment represents "a decline in the culture wars" around his Core Knowledge concept. Diane Ravitch, a friend, said that while she agrees with his emphasis on background knowledge, her concern "is about when, not whether," to introduce it. Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution said he was "very sympathetic" to Hirsch's arguments, but credited them with forging small inroads rather than widespread change. All said, Hirsh still worries that Common Core proponents might doom the standards by saddling them with test preparation and meaningless assessments, rather than ones that measure learning in history and civics, science, and literature.?More



Charters and SPED

A new study from the Manhattan Institute examines the disparity in special education rates between charter and traditional public schools. The study, which uses data from New York City, finds the gap in special education enrollment exists primarily because students with disabilities -- particularly those with autism or a speech or language impairment -- are less likely to apply to charters in kindergarten than general education students. This gap grows as students progress from kindergarten through third grade, with 80 percent of this growth because charters are less likely than district schools to classify students as needing special education services, and more likely to declassify them. The other 20 percent of the gap's growth stems from student transfers between charter and district schools, since greater proportions of general education students enter charters between kindergarten and third grade, reducing the total proportion of students with special needs. The special education gap between charter and traditional schools occurs mostly in the categories of emotional disability and specific learning disability; rates of classification in autism, speech or language impairment, or intellectual disability are similar in charter and traditional public schools over time. Special education students are also more mobile, regardless of school type: Nearly a third leave a school before the fourth year of attendance, whether charter or traditional.?More


BRIEFLY NOTED CALIFORNIA
Attendance crisis
One out of every four California elementary school students -- nearly one million total -- are truant each year, jeopardizing their academic futures and depriving schools of needed dollars.?More
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Certain individuals ruining it for everybody
For the second straight year, the Los Angeles Unified teachers' union refused to endorse the district's application for a prestigious federal grant, which officials said would have brought in $30 million to fund counselors and instructional coaches at high-needs middle schools.?More
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Coming soon
Lesson plans about the roles of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans in California and U.S. history are a step closer to making their way into Los Angeles Unified School District high schools by early 2014.?More

BRIEFLY NOTED?
K.C., no
Missouri Education Commissioner Chris Nicastro will recommend that Kansas City Public Schools remain unaccredited this year.?More
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Developing a problem
Half the principals in Washington, D.C.'s traditional public schools were deemed "developing" -- one rung above "ineffective" -- on newly revised evaluations that for the first time sorted administrators by their performance.?More
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Snowballing
The number of Indiana students applying to receive vouchers that allow them to use state money to pay for private schools has more than doubled for a second consecutive year.?More
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Be their guest
Arizona lawmakers are free to give parents what amounts to a voucher of public funds to educate their children at any private or parochial school they want, the Arizona Court of Appeals has ruled.?More
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Less dismal
The results are out for Kentucky's second year of Common Core-aligned testing, with student scores slightly less discouraging than in Year One.?More
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We have exactly zero problem with this
Hillary Clinton is advancing herself as an advocate for the nation's littlest learners -- an important, popular and risk-free position.?More
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Didn't see this one coming
Texas is starting its once-a-decade adoption of new science textbooks, reigniting a battle over?whether to include information on?creationism, evolution and global warming.?More
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See what happens when you behave?
Texas has won an NCLB Waiver after exchanging its own state accountability system for one that aligns with federal requirements to set achievement goals of?100 percent student proficiency by 2019-2020.?More
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Rubber rooms prove durable
The Bloomberg administration is suing the teachers union for failing to comply with an agreement intended to expedite cases involving teachers accused of misconduct or incompetence.?More
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Forearmed
Schools across the country -- including in Newtown -- will be getting extra guards, the Department of Justice has announced.?More
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Sound policy
The community-meals-eligibility option authorized by Congress in 2010 is proving popular with high-poverty schools and is significantly increasing student participation in school lunch and school breakfast programs funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, according to a report released by two national anti-poverty advocacy groups.?More
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Welcome news
A recent study shows that tobacco use in all forms has fallen among all subgroups of students over a 12-year period.?More


GRANTS AND FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES


National Federation of Independent Business: Young Entrepreneur Awards
The NFIB Young Entrepreneur Awards program raises awareness among the nation's youth of the critical role that private enterprise and entrepreneurship play in the building of America. Maximum award: $10,000 in tuition assistance. Eligibility: high school seniors. Deadline: December 18, 2013.
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Stag Hunt Enterprises: Grant for District Innovation
Stag Hunt Enterprises is offering a prize to the California district that will best use or has already used flexibility under recent policies to change the education paradigm in its schools. Maximum award: $1,000. Eligibility: school districts in California. Deadline: November 5, 2013.
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Innovation Generation: Christopher Columbus Awards
The Christopher Columbus Awards is a national, community-based STEM competition for middle school students and teachers looking to make a difference in their community.? Working in teams, students identify a problem in the community and apply the scientific method to create an innovative solution. Maximum award: $25,000 grant. Eligibility: schools (grades 6-8) and community groups. Deadline: February 3, 2014.
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QUOTE OF THE WEEK:
"We're boring our kids to death... We're failing our low-income kids and doing a mediocre job at best with our other kids. This is reality. We need to get our act together." -- Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America


 

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