N.C. teacher shortage fight turns to rehiring retirees

When the State Board of Education agreed to loosen licensing standards for less experienced teachers in November, school districts said the changes alone wouldn't solve North Carolina's annual shortage of 10,000 teachers in the classroom. Now, add community colleges and the University of North Carolina system to the chorus of educators complaining about how hard the state makes it to hire and keep teachers. They're all unhappy about a new rule that requires that state retirees go off the payroll for at least six months before being rehired - saying that will drain them of vetern teachers who want to claim their pensions but keep on teaching. To read more, please go to: http://dwb.newsobserver.com/news/ncwire_news/story/2876495p-9333025c.html

Houston Ties Teachers' Pay to Test Score

The Houston Board of Education unanimously approved the nation's largest merit pay program, which calls for rewarding teachers based on how well their students perform on standardized tests. The $14.5 million program, which immediately replaces a model with lower incentives, would distribute up to $3,000 annually per teacher and up to $25,000 for senior administrators. Abelardo Saavedra, the Houston superintendent of schools, praised the vote, saying that it "will ensure that the academic growth of each child is important and will be compensated." Houston business leaders also supported the change. To read more, please go to:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/13/national/13houston.html

DATA QUALITY CAMPAIGN LAUNCHED at Data Summit
National Organizations join forces to tap into the power of data to improve student achievement

The Alliance for Excellent Education has joined with nine other national organizations concerned about collection, availability, and use of high-quality data to inform policy and improve instruction in a coalition called the Data Quality Campaign (DQC). Together with the other founding members, the Alliance works as a member of the DQC to help facilitate the development of high-quality longitudinal data systems in every state by 2009, increase understanding and promote the valuable uses of longitudinal data to improve student achievement and promote, develop, and use common data standards and efficient data transfer and exchange. The DQC was launched in November in Richmond, Virginia. For more information see www.DataQualityCampaign.org

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Defining, Measuring And Supporting Success: Meeting the Challenges of Comprehensive School Reform Research

During the past decade, a new sense of urgency has propelled educators working in schools, districts and states to search for and implement more effective strategies to improve schools. Many believe that comprehensive school reform (CSR) holds real promise for improving schools, as many CSR programs, and the design models that support them, are based in research and have documented success. However, in the past year, there has been increased emphasis on CSR programs’ evidence of effectiveness and scrutiny of CSR evaluations’ degree of rigor. As a result, stakes are rising for those charged with improving schools through CSR, including model designers, who are increasingly asked to provideevidence that their strategies achieve results. To read more, please go to: http://www.centerforcsri.org/pubs/annual/csrcondefsp02.pdf

Best Schools Share Path to Success

High schools that succeed in boosting achievement of disadvantaged students engage in many of the same practices, including assigning the best teachers to the neediest classes, according to two reports released Wednesday. he Education Trust, which focuses on ways to close the achievement gap between low-income minority students and others, spent the last academic year scrutinizing schools around the country to find out what the better ones were doing to make a difference. ts first report, "Gaining Traction, Gaining Ground," identified four so-called high-impact schools — Los Altos High in Hacienda Heights and three North Carolina schools — and compared them with demographically similar campuses that were making only average strides with their struggling students. To read more, please go to http://www.latimes.com/news/education/la-me-
schools1dec01,1,4142763.story?coll=la-news-learning&ctrack=1&cset=true

A chance for flexible 'No Child' program In 10 states, schools to set their own goals for testing

The U.S. Department of Education made its first significant concession Friday on a cornerstone of its No Child Left Behind Education Act by agreeing that not all schools are failures when their test scores aren't high. For three years, the nation's sweeping education law has used a one-size-fits-all approach to determine which schools succeed or fail. It requires that each state set a single, annual test-score goal for all schools to reach in math and English, regardless of the different demographics and academic backgrounds of its students. To learn more, please go to
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/11/19/MNGF2FR6BR1.DTL.

More Ariz. Students 'Attending' Virtual Schools

This year, an unprecedented number of Arizona K-12 students will take their classes online through virtual schools. It's part of a distance-learning tide that has rolled through higher education and corporate America and is spreading more rapidly into high schools and below. Statewide, one in 10 students, or 10,816, took at least one class through virtual schools last year, with more enrolling this year, state officials said. Hundreds attend all of their classes online. To learn more, please visit:

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1114virtualschools.html

Mission Possible: Tying Earning to Learning
Pay for performance is miscast as a financial or programmatic reform. It is in fact a systemic reform.

The concept of linking what teachers earn to what students learn appears, at first glance, to be simplicity itself. A budget is intended to be a statement of what an organization believes in. So this linkage seems a natural way to tie a district’s budget to its core mission of educating students. Yet the task of implementing this concept has proven unusually challenging to practitioners, policymakers, and reform advocates. To read more, please go to http://www.ctacusa.com/MissionPossible-95.pdf

Nevada will reward school innovation with $78 million

Starting in January, $78 million in state money will go to Nevada schools that propose innovative approaches to improving student performance. The state Commission on Educational Excellence made that decision following last week's release of a National Assessment of Educational Progress report showing Nevada's fourth and eighth graders were below the national average in reading and math proficiency. Commission Chairwoman George Ann Rice said the panel must be open to "new thinking" by some of the local school districts.

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Ariz. Web Site To Serve All Teachers, Students

Arizona education officials hope to have 50,000 state teachers, 1 million students and their families linked through one Web site by next August. The new full-service Web site, called IDEAL, is filled with learning tools to help schools customize education for individual students and their parents. State education officials hope it can improve test scores, teacher training and parents' understanding of how the school system works. To find out more, please go to:

http://www.dailystar.com/dailystar/news/94470.php

University of Chicago Steps Up Work on City Schools

The University of Chicago , criticized a few years ago for closing its venerable education department, has lured a prominent education scholar to join its faculty this fall to head a new interdisciplinary committee focused on improving urban schools.

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2005/09/14/03chicago.h25.html

Students Not Ready For College?

Test scores from the nation's two college admissions tests, the ACT and SAT, show that high school students entering the Class of 2009 are not academically prepared for college. This transcript highlights a discussion of the results and future of higher education.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education/july-dec05/sat_8-30.html

In Maryland , School Says No to Gangs of the Past

Students at Nicholas Orem Middle School in Hyattsville , MD are seeing bright colors splashed upon their school hallways-only this time, it's not from graffiti. It's brightly colored paintings and murals, created by more than 100 students in a summer school project guided by Latino youth advocates and a University of Maryland community initiative. They even planted a vegetable and herb garden in a once-desolate courtyard. School officials said they were on alert for gang tensions following heavily publicized stabbings this month at a Montgomery summer school and shopping center and in the Prince George 's community of Langley Park. Rather than focus on gangs and enforcement, administrators and teachers are now focusing more on talking with students and less on punishing them. The school even works to boost school morale by handing out freeze pops or other treats to students every Friday after a fight-free week. For more information, please visit: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2005/08/22/AR2005082200285.html

New Report Reveals Funding Gap Between Charter and Traditional Schools

According to a recent study, p ublic charter schools operate with thousands of dollars less per student than traditional schools. Across 16 states and the District of Columbia , charter schools receive about 22 percent less in per-pupil public funding, or $1,800, than the district schools that surround them. That amounts to about $450,000 per year for a typical charter school of 250 students. The funding gap is wider in most of the twenty-seven urban school districts studied, where it amounts to $2,200 per student. The report found that charter schools received less operating money from local taxes than did traditional public schools, and typically lacked access to significant state and local funds to build and renovate schools. For more information, please visit: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/23/national/23charter.html

Connecticut Brings Lawsuit to No Child Left Behind Law

Connecticut recently became the first state to challenge the No Child Left Behind law in course, arguing that the centerpiece of President Bush's education law amounts to an unfunded mandate from the federal government. The lawsuit raises the stakes in a heated fight between states and the Bush administration over the law, and experts say Legislatures around the country will be watching the case carefully. Experts expect that states could vote to join the lawsuit or file their own. The lawsuit argues that No Child Left Behind is illegal because it requires expensive standardized test and other school programs that the government doesn't pay for. For more information, please visit: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050822/ap_on_re_us/no_child_lawsuit

HHS Releases Findings of Head Start Impact Study

HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt announced the initial findings of a study on the impacts of the Head Start program. The report, entitled Head Start Impact Study: First Year Findings, finds that while children in Head Start gain many positive benefits, on most measures graduates and enrollees of the program continue to lag significantly behind children from more economically advantaged families. The study found that Head Start produced small to moderate impacts in areas such as pre-reading, pre-writing, vocabulary and in health and parent practice domains. However these impacts did not close the gap between low-income children in the Head Start program and the general population of three- and four-year olds. Over 900,000 disadvantaged children nationwide are enrolled in the Head Start program. The President's plan to strengthen Head Start includes encouraging state and local coordination, emphasizing the skills children need to succeed in school, and enhancing quality through accountability. For more information on this study, please visit: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/opre/hs/impact_
study/reports/first_yr_finds/firstyr_finds_title.html .

U.S. Department of Education Announces Availability of Funds for a School Dropout Prevention Program

The Office of Vocational and Adult Education is accepting grant applications for fiscal year 2005 School Dropout Prevention Programs. The grant funds will support the development and implementation of effective, sustainable, and coordinated school dropout prevention and reentry programs. The Department will award two grants ranging from $2,000,000 to $2,500,000. For additional information visit: http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/01jan2
0051800/edocket.access.gpo.gov/2005/pdf/05-13578.pdf

New Policy Helps States Better Assist Students with Disabilities

Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings last month announced the details of a new No Child Left Behind policy designed to help states better assist students with disabilities. The guidelines follow up on the secretary's April announcement to chief state school officers of additional alternatives and flexibility to implement the law. The new guidelines reflect the latest scientific research that shows students with disabilities-approximately 2 percent of all students-can make progress toward grade-level standards when they receive high-quality instruction and are assessed with alternate assessments based on modified achievement standards. Under the new flexibility option, eligible states may implement short-term adjustments to their adequate yearly progress decisions to reflect the need for alternate assessments based on modified achievement standards; this is a separate policy from the current regulation that allows up to 1 percent of all students being tested (those with the most significant cognitive disabilities) to take an alternate assessment. "Under this policy, to be made final under a new rule, students with academic disabilities will be allowed to take tests that are specifically geared toward their abilities, as long as the state is working to best serve those students by providing rigorous research-based training for teachers, improving assessments and organizing collaboration between special education and classroom teachers," Secretary Spellings said. "If you stand up for the kids and provide better instruction and assessment, we will stand by you."  For more information, visit www.ed.gov .

New York State-based schools have shown improvement on the New York Statewide Testing Program (NYSTP)

Edison Schools, an education management organization that partners with public schools and districts across the country, reports that all of its New York State-based schools have shown improvement on the New York Statewide Testing Program (NYSTP) in the area of English Language Arts. One of Edison's highest performing schools in New York is Harriet Tubman Charter School in the Bronx. Harriet Tubman fourth grade students increased their scores by 22 percent in one year, compared to the average 10 percent gain by the New York City School District. The school received more good news recently from the U.S. Department of Education, with a grant from the No Child Left Behind Improving Literacy Through School Libraries program.

Online Extra: "The Recipe Is Right" for Education
Says Secretary Margaret Spellings about the Administration's No Child Left Behind program: "We're here for the long haul"

Even the loudest critics of Bush Administration school reforms give Education Secretary Margaret Spellings high praise for her expertise and her willingness to listen to diverse views. Still, Spellings faces tough challenges as she tries to expand the President's No Child Left Behind reform law to the high school grades. And she's learning that in the new job, you sometimes get into debates with cartoon rabbits...

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