Recess round-up: August 26, 2010

A daily dose of education news around the nation – just in time for a little mid-day break!

Class size: Does it matter? Citing research and a November ballot measure in Florida that will seek to modify an existing law that limits class size,  Tamara Henry produced this story with The Hechinger Report for USA Today.

Extended school day: Fifteen public schools in Chicago are taking part in a pilot program that will lengthen the school day. (GOOD)

EdNews: Tune in tomorrow at noon for Alexander Russo’s “Month In Review,” a live half-hour audio discussion of education news. This month’s invited guests are Jay Matthews (Washington Post), Beth Shuster (Los Angeles Times), Greg Toppo (USA Today) and Dorie Turner (AP). Contact Russo with questions, comments or suggestions before or during the show:  by phone  (323) 417-6754, via email or @alexanderrusso on Twitter. (This Week in Education)

Higher Ed: As for-profit colleges face scrutiny from the federal government, Stephen Colbert introduces SCU, “We put the U in we make money off of you.” Colbert’s guest, Andrew Hacker, a professor emeritus at Queens College in New York, talks about how colleges are wasting our money and failing our kids. (The Atlantic)

New Orleans schools: The New York Times reports that New Orleans will receive a $1.8-billion reimbursement for schools that were damaged or destroyed in the flooding that followed Hurricane Katrina. It’s been five years since the levees broke, and former-FEMA Director Michael Brown — who President Bush infamously commended for “doing a heckuva job” — returns to the scene. (The New York Times and Associated Press)

And for a look at research in action in New Orleans, see this piece on an Ed Week blog by Sarah Sparks.

School improvements: With a new state report card due on Friday, for Cleveland, a new school year means it’s transformation time. (The Plain Dealer)

Twitter: A good place to find out what’s up in the world of education is delivered by journalists via Muck Rack. All the news that’s fit to tweet. (Muck Rack)

Recess round-up: August 25,2010

A daily dose of education news around the nation – just in time for a little mid-day break!

Politics K-12: Follow-up and raised eyebrows after yesterday’s Race to the Top Round 2 announcement and why some states won, while others, like New Jersey, lost. (Education Week, GothamSchools and New Jersey Spotlight)

No sore loser: Arizona will proceed with education reforms even though it lost in yesterday’s Race to the Top competition. (The Gov Monitor)

Playing by the rules: How does a $578-million school get built amid cuts and layoffs in Los Angeles? (Christian Science Monitor)

Attitudes: Results from the Phi Delta Kappan/Gallup poll on what Americans think about public schools were released yesterday. Respondents said that improving teacher quality should be a priority and paying kids to perform isn’t right; a majority also said they like charter schoools. (Phi Delta Kappan International)

It’s not about money: State schools superintendent says more money won’t solve Indiana’s educational problems. (Terre Haute TribStar.com)

Revise NCLB: The editorial page of the Los Angeles Times says it’s high-time to revise the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001: “It’s true that many schools across the country have let down their students, but Congress has failed them just as badly. No Child Left Behind is long overdue for thoughtful revision.”

Race to the Top: The biggest losers

Race to the Top winners for round two were announced this morning by the U.S. Department of Education. The ten winners were Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

There were many more surprises today than in the announcement of finalists on July 27th. For those who worked from round-one scores to predict round-two finalists, as I did, it wasn’t hard to seem prescient. The only real surprise in the announcement of round-two finalists was that Arizona, California and Hawaii had made the cut. (They had fared poorly enough in round one — all finishing outside the top 20 — that it seemed they had little chance in round two. But Arizona woke up from the dead, and California — perhaps because of extra encouragement from Education Secretary Arne Duncan — didn’t give up despite its failure to secure teacher-union support.)

Now the biggest surprise isn’t just that Hawaii won, securing for itself $75 million, but that it finished a very respectable third overall. In round one, Hawaii finished a distant 22nd, its application garnering only 364.6 points out of 500. Its second-round application was given 462.4 points, which was the biggest improvement by far of any winning state.

Secretary Duncan said Hawaii’s extraordinary jump was a result of the fact that its first-round application was incomplete, so its low score didn’t reflect its true potential. In her May 27th cover letter to Secretary Duncan, Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle pointed out that “Hawaii is in a unique position to demonstrate that the reforms embodied in ARRA and the education agenda of President Obama’s Administration can be implemented statewide” because the Aloha State is alone among its peers in having a single state-wide school district. Whether this argument helped sway Duncan or Race to the Top reviewers is difficult to know, but it was one of many new aspects to Hawaii’s round-two application.

A few other thoughts on Hawaii: its second-round application was nearly twice as long as its first-round application, and it’s the only state west of the Mississippi River to have won. A number of reporters who asked questions of Duncan today noted that the winners tended to be “urban” states — and, with the exceptions of Hawaii and Ohio, located on the Eastern seaboard. Duncan replied by saying that “geography was irrelevant” in the judging process.

Today’s other major surprises, as I see them, were: 1) that New York finished in second place overall, having come in 15th in the first round; 2) that Arizona almost made the cut, pulling off a spectacular comeback from 40th in the first round to 12th in the second; 3) that the applications of five states — Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Utah — received fewer points than their first-round applications did; and 4) that Colorado, Illinois, Pennsylvania and South Carolina somehow didn’t get a piece of the $3.4-billion pie.

On point #3 above, it’s curious that Alabama managed to earn only 212 points for its second-round application because it earned 291.2 points for its first-round application. Is it really possible that the state submitted a weaker application the second time around? Or was the grading harder? We won’t know until tomorrow, when detailed scores and reviewers’ comments will be released. The only thing that’s clear now is Alabama’s application was almost 50 pages shorter the second time around.

And now we reach point #4, which is really about the big losers — Illinois, South Carolina and Pennsylvania, which seemed well-positioned to win in round two based on their strong performances in round one. (They finished 5th, 6th and 7th, respectively, in the first round.) How and why they fell an average of 10 spots in the rankings between rounds one and two is a mystery, and it will remain a mystery until the shroud is lifted tomorrow when detailed scores and reviewers’ comments are released.

Colorado and Louisiana were also on many people’s lists of likely winners for round two. What happened to them? Between the two rounds they slipped a few spots in the rankings, but it’s unclear why. Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute expressed dismay at the exclusion of Colorado and Louisiana from the winners’ circle. He told the New York Times, “Colorado passed the single most important piece of education legislation of any state, changing their system for teacher evaluations and tenure. And Louisiana has carried out some of the nation’s most amazing reform efforts, including making New Orleans a laboratory for charter schools.” These changes appear not to have been enough.

But the biggest losers of all might well be New Jersey and Arizona, which finished 11th and 12th, respectively, in round two. They finished fewer than six points off Ohio, the 10th and final state to win money. New Jersey, a mere three points behind Ohio, is probably thinking about all of the tweaks it could have made to its application in an effort to win $400 million.

Even though Arizona lost, I think it should get some kind of consolation prize — say, a “most-improved” award from Secretary Duncan for having raised its score from 240.2 points in round one to 435.4 points in round two. This improvement, of nearly 200 points, dwarfs Hawaii’s already-impressive improvement of almost 100 points. But it didn’t win Arizona any money. My suggestion? Duncan is “only” doling out $3.325 billion of the $3.4 billion allocated for round-two winners — so why not give Arizona the leftover $75 million as a consolation prize?

Recess round-up: August 24, 2010

A daily dose of education news around the nation – just in time for a little mid-day break!

Race to the Top: Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island and Washington, D.C. are winners in the competition and will share $3.4 billion in phase 2 funding. (Associated Press)

Higher education: Remedial math often hinders community-college students from earning degrees or transferring to four-year schools. (Lansing [Mich.] State Journal)

Reform: Which big cities in the U.S. provide the best environment for school reform? Which don’t? The Fordham Institute weighs in.

School improvement grants: Secretary Arne Duncan’s ambitious plan to overhaul low-performing schools is “off to an uneven start,” writes Sam Dillon of The New York Times. Delays have arisen because of “negotiations between state officials and superintendents over drafts of proposals. But it also took many months for federal officials to process all the state applications.”

Stimulus funding: EdMoney.org, a project of the Education Writers Association (with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), lets you track spending on K-12 education from the federal economic-stimulus law in states and school districts nationwide. On a similar note, ProPublica is keeping an “Eye on the Stimulus” with Recovery Tracker. (Education Writers Association and ProPublica)

Study habits: There’s Room for Debate when it comes to looking at what students are learning, and how much they’re studying, in college. (The New York Times )

Technology: It’s back to school. Bring your laptop. (USA Today)

The biggest problem facing U.S. community colleges? Remedial math

Remedial Math at Bronx Community College in New York City (Photo by Ryan Brenizer)

In an important piece in yesterday’s Lansing (Mich.) State Journal, Matthew Miller looked at remedial math classes taught at the community college level. These are courses that teach such basics as graphing y=2x+5 or solving for x in the equation x² + 2x = 8. (Readers uncertain how to solve for x in the equation x² + 2x = 8 can find the solution at the end of this post.) Remedial math, then, consists of things typically taught — but not necessarily learned — in elementary and middle-school math courses.

Nationwide, a majority of incoming community college students find themselves in remedial courses after taking placement exams that show they didn’t master the basics many years before — or that they’ve forgotten the basics. Math has long proven a greater stumbling block than English for most of these students. Miller quotes Kay McClenney, director of the Center for Community College Student Engagement at the University of Texas-Austin, as saying that remedial math “is without question the most significant problem facing American community colleges and maybe American higher education more broadly.”

It is a problem so big, in fact, that it’s sometimes overlooked. In its immensity and obviousness, it falls victim to what could be called the “everybody-somebody-anyb0dy-nobody mentality”:

There’s an important job to be done, and everybody’s sure somebody’ll do it. Anybody can do it, but nobody does. Somebody gets angry because it’s everybody’s job. Everybody thought anybody could do it, but nobody realized everybody wouldn’t do it. Everybody blamed somebody when nobody did what anybody could’ve done.

And so the problem continues and the costs mount. As Miller writes, the costs “can be calculated, not just in tuition dollars, but in degrees left unfinished and careers that never begin.”

But Lansing Community College (LCC) — where over 5,000 students took a remedial math class last year — is determined to change this. According to Miller, LCC has “retooled a computer assisted self-study program meant to prepare students for that most basic remedial math course, adding a human being to the mix. Prior to the change, 3 percent of the students who used the program managed to place into Math 050. Since April, it has been 21 percent.”

And, in a move that might at first seem counterintuitive, LCC shut down its Math Lab. Miller explains: the Lab “let students work at their own pace with help from tutors. Barely half of them passed, which is why LCC closed the lab this summer and carried over the format into smaller classes taught by a single instructor. ‘Personal connections that students make with instructors are particularly important in developmental courses,’ [Kathy] Burgis [chair of the Math Department] said. ‘Ideally, those courses are about more than just the math. They’re about general transferable skills in going to college.'”

Other community colleges around the nation are also trying out new strategies. Earlier this summer, Elizabeth Redden detailed a new approach by the math faculty at Bergen Community College in New Jersey.

(Photo courtesy of the Milken Family Foundation)

And, of course, there’s merit to the notion that our country’s math woes begin long before students reach high school or community college. Last year, my colleagues and I at the Hechinger Institute looked at where the U.S. stands in math education and what the country could be doing differently, and we invite you to explore this important topic with us.

———

As promised, here’s the solution to the equation x² + 2x = 8.

First, this equation can be rewritten as x² + 2x – 8 = 0. Then, it can be factored: (x-2)(x+4) = 0.

Finally, each of these “mini-” equations can be set equal to zero — i.e, x-2 = 0 and x+4 = 0. Thus, x in this equation is either 2 or -4. To double-check your work, plug these numbers back in to the original equation and see if they work out. Substituting 2 for x, I get 2² + 2(2) = 8, or 4+4 = 8, which checks out. Substituting -4 for x, I get (-4)² + 2(-4) = 8, or 16 + -8 = 8, which also checks out.

Recess round-up: August 23, 2010

A daily dose of education news around the nation – just in time for a little mid-day break!

Charter schools: A mainstay in New Jersey’s poorest cities, charter schools are competing for funds against affluent suburbs. (The Philadelphia Inquirer)

Class size: In 2002, Florida approved a constitutional amendment to limit class size from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade.  By 2010-2011, class-size averages will be calculated at the classroom level. But “the state’s official student count could mean painful funding cuts for public schools that exceed the strict student caps on core academic classes.” With that in mind, the state legislature has added a November ballot measure that, if passed, will cap the average number of students per class at the school-wide level. (Orlando Sentinel)

EduJobs: Despite the federal government’s allocation of $10 billion to preserve 160,000 jobs in the 2010-11 school year, some districts don’t want to spend money right away. (Education Week)

Homeschooling: About 300,000 children in Texas will be homeschooled this year; that’s up 20 percent from five years ago. (Houston Chronicle)

New Orleans: Tune in to Spike Lee’s If God is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise on the HBO network tonight and tomorrow. Lee documents ongoing efforts to restore housing and education in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill. (The New York Times and GOOD)

School funding: The (Newark, N.J.) Star-Ledger takes a look at some of the difficult choices facing the state right now, asking “Who will win the war over the future of public education in New Jersey?”

Teaching the teachers: Recent college graduates, with five weeks of supplemental training, begin to Teach for America. (The Washington Post)

Virtual schools: The Oregon Board of Education sets out to determine “who decides whether a child can attend an online-only school.” (The Bend Bulletin)

Assignment memo: Basic-skills programs

An estimated 20 percent of the American workforce is functionally illiterate. And a 2006 survey of 431 companies revealed that the vast majority of young adults entering the workforce lack basic skills. To remedy this problem, many companies turn to training programs tailored to the needs of specific jobs to get workers up to speed.

So what do these basic-skills programs look like? How much ground is covered, and how challenging is the material? Why are such programs an appealing strategy for companies?

Check back with The Hechinger Report later for the full story.

Have ideas for the story? Tips? Comments? Leave them below!

Recess round-up: August 20, 2010

A daily dose of education news around the nation – just in time for a little mid-day break!

Federal funding: Opting not to make a statement about state sovereignty, Utah Gov. Gary Herbert “broke with conservatives” in the state legislature and plans to apply for $101 million in stimulus funds for teacher and staff salaries. (Examiner.com)

Adequate yearly progress: Virginia’s Franklin County School Superintendent Charles Lackey criticized federal requirements for “adequate yearly progress” (AYP) as being “unrealistic and unreasonable.” (The Franklin News-Post)

School choice: The San Francisco Chronicle takes a look at the confusion and problems that arise when trying to navigate the city’s school choice system.

Turnaround grants: Kevin Gordon takes on the task of turning around one of Florida’s lowest-performing high school. (St. Petersburg Times)

Business and education: At the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber’s annual State of the Schools luncheon, speakers stressed the need for business and community leaders to work to improve education. (The Oklahoman)

Budgets: Higher education leaders in Nevada are preparing to ask the governor for more money in the face of demands two of the last three years for budget cuts. This time, they’ll request an increase in funding of nearly 25 percent. (Las Vegas Review-Journal)

In U.S. schools, where’s the rigor?

A quarter-century ago, the nation was transfixed by the question, Where’s the beef?

Now, the question we should be asking ourselves about our nation’s schools is, Where’s the rigor?

Or, Where’s the academic beef?

Concerns about the lack of rigor in U.S. schools were renewed yesterday, when new data were published on how prepared — or not — U.S. high school students are for college. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Stephanie Banchero said, “New data show that fewer than 25% of 2010 graduates who took the ACT college-entrance exam possessed the academic skills necessary to pass entry-level [college] courses.”

The story, as reported by many outlets, was that the average ACT score has fallen slightly since 2007. But the real story — and the one that Banchero focused on — is that the vast majority of our high school graduates aren’t ready for college or a career. And this holds true even when they follow a supposedly “rigorous” course of study, taking four years of English and three years each of math, science and social studies.

It turns out that much of what U.S. schools now offer is “rigorous” in name only. Said differently, a distinct lack of academic rigor is de rigueur.

Banchero quotes Susan Traiman, public policy director for the Business Roundtable, as calling the disconnect between the ACT results and supposedly rigorous coursework “false advertising” by high schools.

Part of the problem with talk about “rigor” is that no one really seems to agree on what the word means. Governors boast of the rigors of their K-12 educational systems, while every principal proclaims his or her school “rigorous.” The Common Core Standards, meanwhile, “include rigorous content and application of knowledge through high-order skills.”

A lack of clarity on just what “academic rigor” is led us, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to explore the concept two years ago. We asked dozens of people — from politicians and policymakers to parents, students and teachers — to define the concept for us. We asked leading neuroscientists to explain what goes on in the brain when someone engages in rigorous learning. We looked at curricula that claim to be rigorous and asked whether they truly are. We also looked at what other countries do to offer their students a more rigorous education than the one most U.S. students receive. We invite you to explore our findings here.

It’s now the year 2010, but our schools often feel stuck where they were in the 1980s.

Where’s the progress?

Scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also referred to as the “Nation’s Report Card,” have been largely flat for the last few decades. High school graduates who head off to higher education turn out to be unready for the rigors of college much of the time. Alarming numbers of students need remediation, which is a nice way of saying they didn’t learn things in their K-12 careers that they could or should have. (Note that I’m not assigning blame here to specific groups — teachers, parents, students, administrators, politicians — but rather pointing out that our system in many ways isn’t working. We’re all culpable, to varying degrees, for the failure.)

I invite everyone to read, or reread, the National Commission on Excellence in Education’s report, A Nation At Risk: The Imperative For Educational Reform. Here’s an excerpt: “More and more young people emerge from high school ready neither for college nor for work. This predicament becomes more acute as the knowledge base continues its rapid expansion, the number of traditional jobs shrinks, and new jobs demand greater sophistication and preparation.”

How well these two sentences capture our predicament in 2010!

That they were originally written in 1983 should scare us. The diagnosis of America’s educational woes in A Nation At Risk is as relevant today as it was when first published nearly three decades ago. The report quotes Paul Copperman as saying, “Each generation of Americans has outstripped its parents in education, in literacy, and in economic attainment. For the first time in the history of our country, the educational skills of one generation will not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach, those of their parents.”

(courtesy of the College Board's recent "College Completion Agenda" report)

If this was true of those coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s — Generation X — it’s even truer of today’s young people. The alarm bells have been repeatedly sounded by the Obama administration, which has articulated a goal of having the U.S. reclaim first place in the world for the percentage of our population aged 25-34 with postsecondary degrees or certificates by the year 2020.

Where do we stand now? In 12th place.

Where did we stand in 1991? In third place.

In the 1970s, we’re rumored to have been number one.

Asking too little of our students does them a great disservice — something that even President George W. Bush acknowledged, saying that we as a nation must move beyond the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” the status quo in education that has prevailed for far too long.

A version of this article appeared on The Washington Post’s “Answer Sheet” on August 20, 2010.

Recess round-up: August 19, 2010

A daily dose of education news around the nation – just in time for a little mid-day break!

Federal funding: South Carolina may not be able to get $143 million in stimulus money to save teacher jobs because it doesn’t currently spend enough on higher education. (Bloomberg Businessweek)

Teacher evaluations: Parents and community members argue both for and against Seattle teachers being judged on student test scores, although the decision will ultimately be made behind closed doors. (Seattle Times)

“Sample” college: Students who think they want to attend the University of Phoenix’s Southern Arizona campus but don’t have much college experience will take an orientation class before enrolling. And, perhaps more importantly, the class will be free – no need to borrow money until after it’s over. (Arizona Daily Star)

Ninth grade: The Orlando Sentinel takes a look at some of the reasons freshman year is difficult for many students, and what high schools are doing to ease the transition.

Delaware’s New Castle County Vocational Technical School District is hoping it made a difference by having school staff visit incoming ninth-graders at home over the summer. (DelawareOnline)

ACT results: Papers across the country are reporting on ACT results, from the good to the bad to just more of the same. In Oregon, scores are up, but “few students are considered college ready.” And in Wisconsin, the scores were the lowest they’ve been in over a decade, with a large gap between white and minority students. (various)