Education News Roundup: July 17

Today’s Top Picks:

It’s a good thing gubernatorial candidate Peter Cooke released his school funding plan or there wouldn’t be much to today’s roundup.
http://goo.gl/DTegx (SLT)
and http://goo.gl/7o6ux (DN)
and http://goo.gl/ZRpE0 (PDH)
and http://goo.gl/tdLBH (KUTV)
and http://goo.gl/maVMM (KSL)
and http://goo.gl/f4inf (KUER)

2003 Milken Educator Award winner talks with Good Morning Utah about schools in China and India.
http://goo.gl/xgHkW (KTVX)

So … what about substitute teachers?
http://goo.gl/SdSAH (Ed Week)

Well, there goes the chance for your 18-month-old to get a jump start on making her way through “War and Peace.”
http://goo.gl/5nMfJ (AP)

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TODAY’S HEADLINES
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UTAH

Democratic guv candidate decries Utah’s school funding levels Guv hopeful rips school-funding levels, pitches plan to regain lands from feds.

U.S. education crisis

Police: Juan Diego student electrocuted while ‘roofing’

Mother who prompted Amber Alert to appear in court

Dyslexia Center of Utah and Liberty Youth Academy offer specialized help and free screenings

OPINION & COMMENTARY

It’s time for Utah schools to improve, return autonomy to teachers

Show me the money

The threat to American democracy that Romney and Obama aren’t talking about It’s called the civics gap. Only one-third of Americans can name all three branches of government. Education reform’s focus on high-stakes testing has sidelined civics education. To save American democracy, Romney and Obama must discuss how to help schools educate engaged citizens.

Doublethink: The Creativity-Testing Conflict

The New Complacency About Schools Is Ill-Informed Why the latest data on student performance doesn’t mean we can rest on our laurels

Charter Schools — A Single Strand in NJ’s Tapestry of Great Public Schools Charter schools are just one of many ways to avoid the one-size-fits-all approach to education

What Chris Cerf Needs to Know About Albert Shanker

Same old (correct) Jeb Bush on education reform

Can Effective Teaching Transfer Across Schools?

Achievement Growth:
International and U.S. State Trends in Student Performance

The Sheepskin Effect and Student Achievement De-emphasizing the Role of Master’s Degrees in Teacher Compensation

NATION

Substitute Teaching Undergoes New Scrutiny

Student scores slip with new proficiency benchmarks Wisconsin moving toward nationally accepted standards

Push for career-technical education meets parent resistance

TN education reform hits bump in teacher evaluation Classroom observations fail to catch problems, state says

Police break up $3M drug ring linked to Mason teen

Your Baby Can Read company going out of business

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UTAH NEWS
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Democratic guv candidate decries Utah’s school funding levels Guv hopeful rips school-funding levels, pitches plan to regain lands from feds.

Peter Cooke’s No. 1 education priority as governor would be to reduce class sizes, the Democratic candidate said Monday during a stump speech in which he also decried the level of school funding in Utah and presented his own plan to regain federally-owned lands.
Cooke, who is running against Republican Gov. Gary Herbert, lamented Monday morning that Utah schools have lost “hundreds of millions of dollars” partly because of the state’s move to a flat tax, reductions in the amount of property taxes devoted to schools, and a 1996 constitutional amendment that allowed higher education to share income tax revenue with public schools.
The retired two-star general also claims money has been diverted to non-education purposes in the state budget. When pressed for specifics, he said no one knows exactly where the money went and further examination is needed. He also noted that the state has the lowest base per pupil spending in the country and that Utah’s ranking for the proportion of individual personal income going toward education has plummeted.
http://goo.gl/DTegx (SLT)

http://goo.gl/7o6ux (DN)

http://goo.gl/ZRpE0 (PDH)

http://goo.gl/tdLBH (KUTV)

http://goo.gl/maVMM (KSL)

http://goo.gl/f4inf (KUER)

U.S. education crisis

SALT LAKE CITY – Keith Ballard, the 2003 U.S. Educator of the Year, appeared on Good Morning Utah Tuesday to discuss how the U.S.’ educational system ranks among others in the world.
http://goo.gl/xgHkW (KTVX)

Police: Juan Diego student electrocuted while ‘roofing’

DRAPER, Utah – A report from the Draper Police Department said Juan Diego student Adam Colosimo was electrocuted while climbing a building, resulting in his death.
Draper Police said Colosimo was “roofing” on of Gateway Community Church in Draper with two of his cousins.
Chad Carpenter from the Draper Police Department said “roofing” is a recent trend where teens climb buildings and other structures.
http://goo.gl/SI5A1 (KTVX)

Mother who prompted Amber Alert to appear in court

A Utah mom who promoted an Amber Alert according to police, is expected in court Tuesday morning, but she is not facing kidnapping charges.
Police said Athena Venus Barker took her 10-year-old daughter, Aliyah Crowder, from her West Valley City elementary school in March.
Barker did not have custody of the girl, prompting concerns for Aliyah’s safety.
An Amber Alert was issued and police tracked down Barker and her daughter in Northern Utah, where Barker turned the girl over to police.
http://goo.gl/g9T8M (KSTU)

Dyslexia Center of Utah and Liberty Youth Academy offer specialized help and free screenings

ST. GEORGE – The opportunity to find out whether your child has a learning disability and how to treat it is priceless, and now the necessary screenings are too, but only for a limited time at the Liberty Youth Academy.
http://goo.gl/SbxOC (SGN)

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OPINION & COMMENTARY
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It’s time for Utah schools to improve, return autonomy to teachers Deseret News op-ed by M. Donald Thomas, former superintendent of the Salt Lake School District and president of Public Education Support Group

The 1983 publication of A Nation at Risk was intended to create significant improvements in public education. The study was followed by an array of simplistic reforms, including a teaching-for-the-test mentality and an emphasis on outcome-based education, as reflected in the No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top programs. Unfortunately, none of these have succeeded in significantly improving efficiency and accountability in American schools.
The issues troubling education nationally are especially prevalent in our state. In most of Utah’s schools, academic results are at or below the national average. Utah teacher salaries are equal to those in Alabama, South Carolina and Mississippi. Worse yet, Utah has the highest student-teacher ratio in the nation — 24.4 to 1.
Education must be improved in Utah. To do so will require strong, innovative leadership from the governor’s office. Legislation must be submitted and enacted with specific, research-based provisions that are proven to improve education. Such legislation must provide a weighted funding index for children who live under poverty conditions — the same is already provided for special education children.
http://goo.gl/P1CJp

Show me the money
(Provo) Daily Herald commentary by columnist Randy Wright

Democratic candidate for Utah governor Peter Cooke, a retired two-star general, thinks the Republican-led legislature has been stingy with education money.
“It is time to do something to save our public schools. It’s time for leadership to make Utah’s public education system great again,” he said Monday. “Our governor and state Legislature appear to not care enough about the future of public education to devote more of the state’s current resources to fund it, or to find additional funds.”
Where do people get this stuff? If there’s anything the legislature demonstrably does care about, it’s education. While every General Fund category has been virtually flat (or with minimal growth) for a decade, public education has climbed around 60 percent. And that’s even in the face of recession.
http://goo.gl/jqPEf

The threat to American democracy that Romney and Obama aren’t talking about It’s called the civics gap. Only one-third of Americans can name all three branches of government. Education reform’s focus on high-stakes testing has sidelined civics education. To save American democracy, Romney and Obama must discuss how to help schools educate engaged citizens.
Christian Science Monitor op-ed by Scott Warren, Iris Chen, and Eric Schwarz (Scott Warren is the executive director of Generation Citizen. Iris Chen is the president and CEO of the I Have a Dream Foundation. Prior to this role, she served as Teach For America’s New York City executive director. Eric Schwarz is the co-founder and CEO of Citizen Schools.)

Speaking to the NAACP last week in Houston, Mitt Romney reiterated his education agenda, calling for increased school choice to allow students to escape the “mediocre schools” that “set [students] up for failure.” Earlier this spring, Mr. Romney joined President Obama and school reformers in calling educational inequity the “civil rights issue of our era,” pledging to make it one of his campaign’s three top pillars.
That both presidential candidates are committed to education is laudable – our public schools are far from where they need to be. But unfortunately, this latest round of the education debate has once again left out a central purpose of our public education system: creating engaged and informed citizens.
Education advocates have drawn attention to our education problems by spelling out their real and dire consequences. In March, a Council on Foreign Relations report, co-authored by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, warned that “educational failure puts the United States’ future economic prosperity, global position, and physical safety at risk.”
This is all true, and important. But, perhaps even more important, educational failure puts our very democracy at risk.
http://goo.gl/eIt5o

Doublethink: The Creativity-Testing Conflict Education Week op-ed by Yong Zhao, author of Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization

Doublethink is “to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them,” according to George Orwell, who coined the phrase in his novel 1984.
American education policymakers have apparently entered the zone of doublethink.
They want future Americans to be globally competitive, to out-innovate others, and to become job-creating entrepreneurs. Last year, the Obama administration announced a $1 billion-plus public-private initiative to support entrepreneurial activities, which included support and rhetoric surrounding youth-entrepreneurship education. And the U.S. Department of Education says that “entrepreneurship education as a building block for a well-rounded education not only promises to make school rigorous, relevant, and engaging, but it creates the possibility for unleashing and cultivating creative energies and talents among students.”
State leaders have taken similar actions. California, Massachusetts, and Oklahoma have begun exploring the development of measures to gauge the extent to which schools foster creative and entrepreneurial qualities in their students, according to a Feb. 1, 2012, article in Education Week.
In the meantime, the policymakers want students to be excellent test-takers.
http://goo.gl/ppeCH

The New Complacency About Schools Is Ill-Informed Why the latest data on student performance doesn’t mean we can rest on our laurels Time commentary by Joel I. Klein, CEO of News Corp.’s education division

Just when you thought we’d reached a consensus on the need to dramatically improve America’s schools, a chorus is emerging to suggest all is well. First, a new book out from Harvard University Press, Is American Science In Decline? notes that “American high school students are … performing better in mathematics and science than in the past,” helping explain why the authors’ answer to the title question is “no.” This comes on the heels of a USA Today op-ed last month urging us to “Quit Fretting: U.S. is Fine in Science Education.” And why can the fretting end? Because, the pundits tell us, last year 65% of students had a “basic” grasp of science on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), up from 63% in 2009. Their conclusion: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
It’s hard to overstate how dangerous such complacency is. Not to mention how ill-informed. Popping the champagne corks over slight upticks in NAEP scores, for example, ignores what every serious educator knows: scores of “basic” on that test evidence only limited familiarity with a subject — as opposed to “proficiency,” which was demonstrated by only 35% of our eighth graders in math and 34% in reading.
The broader reality is even more sobering. Only the top quarter of America’s K-to-12 students are performing on par with the average students in Singapore, Hong Kong, Finland, Taiwan, and South Korea.
http://goo.gl/oY1Ae

Charter Schools — A Single Strand in NJ’s Tapestry of Great Public Schools Charter schools are just one of many ways to avoid the one-size-fits-all approach to education New Jersey Spotlight op-ed by Chris Cerf, acting Commissioner of Education for the state of New Jersey

This week, the Department of Education will announce which charter schools will open in September, along with additional strategies to hold all charter schools accountable for results. Since charter schools have been in New Jersey for 15 years, it makes sense to go beyond the frequent misrepresentations to have an honest conversation about what charter schools are and why they are important to New Jersey.
Let me be clear from the start — I support great public schools, whether they are district, charter, magnet, or vocational. A child in a classroom does not care about the governance structure of a school; what matters to children and families is whether they have an effective teacher that brings out the best in them and whether they are succeeding. We should all have only one priority — making sure every student is in a great school that meets his needs and is preparing him for success in college and career.
As one way to create great schools, the legislature authorized charter schools in New Jersey in 1995.
http://goo.gl/RaxcN

What Chris Cerf Needs to Know About Albert Shanker Commentary Diane Ravitch, Research Professor of Education at New York University

Chris Cerf, the acting commissioner of education in New Jersey, published an article today defending charter schools, which have become very controversial in his state. They have become controversial because the state is trying to push them into suburbs that have great public schools and don’t want them, and they have become controversial because the public is beginning to revolt against for-profit charters, especially for-profit online charters, which Cerf is promoting.
People in New Jersey are beginning to realize that every dollar that goes to a privately managed charter school is a dollar taken away from their own public school. Because the budget is not expanding, it IS a zero sum game. Fixed costs do not decline when children leave the school.
Despite Governor Chris Christie’s frequent belittling of New Jersey teachers and schools, New Jersey is one of the highest performing states in the nation on the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress. So, citizens of the state have good reason to oppose the Christie administration’s efforts to turn more taxpayer dollars over to private entrepreneurs.
http://goo.gl/hKAJg

Same old (correct) Jeb Bush on education reform Orlando (FL) Sentinel commentary by columnist Beth Kassab

If you didn’t know any better, you might think Jeb Bush is beginning to sound like a garden-variety liberal.
He talks about the income gap and the ways the poor are kept from moving into the middle and upper classes and how that is changing our country for the worse.
He warns that there are some efforts in more conservative legislatures to undermine education reform.
And he concedes that Mitt Romney and President Obama aren’t that far apart when it comes to school policy — and Bush helped write Romney’s education plan.
Not to mention the kerfuffle in June when the former governor said his father and Ronald Reagan would have a hard time fitting into today’s Tea Party-dominated Republican Party.
But we do know better. And that’s why Bush’s comments at the GE Foundation’s Summer Business and Education Summit in Orlando on Monday didn’t seem to come out of left field.
http://goo.gl/18HcO

Can Effective Teaching Transfer Across Schools?
Education Week commentary by columnist Stephen Sawchuk

At least one study indicates, tentatively, that the answer may be a “yes.”
The idea of helping ensure the best teachers are paired with the weaker students makes a lot of intuitive sense. It’s been among the policy proposals stemming from a renewed focus on teacher evaluations.
For instance, in agreeing to accept 2009 economic-stimulus legislation, states had to pledge to take steps to improve their teachers’ effectiveness, and, borrowing a formulation from the No Child Left Behind Act, to ensure an “equitable distribution” of high-quality teachers between high- and low-poverty schools.
At the same time, scholars have also suggested that value-added measurements can be influenced by factors such as a teacher’s peers, and by other cultural factors within a schools.
http://goo.gl/fxfc5

A copy of the study
http://goo.gl/oYasN

Achievement Growth:
International and U.S. State Trends in Student Performance Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance & Education Next analysis

“The United States’ failure to educate its students leaves them unprepared to compete and threatens the country’s ability to thrive in a global economy.” Such was the dire warning recently issued by a task force sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations. Chaired by former New York City schools chancellor Joel I. Klein and former U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, the task force said that the country “will not be able to keep pace—much less lead—globally unless it moves to fix the problems it has allowed to fester for too long.”
The report’s views are well supported by the available evidence. In a 2010 report, only 6 percent of U.S. students were found to be performing at the advanced level in mathematics, a percentage lower than those attained by 30 other countries. Nor is the problem limited to top-performing students. Only 32 percent of 8th graders in the United States are proficient in mathematics, placing the United States 32nd when ranked among the participating international jurisdictions.
Although these facts are discouraging, the United States has made substantial additional financial commitments to K–12 education and introduced a variety of school reforms. Have these policies begun to help the United States close the international gap?
http://goo.gl/nV1Cq

The Sheepskin Effect and Student Achievement De-emphasizing the Role of Master’s Degrees in Teacher Compensation Center for American Progress analysis

Beginning this year with its 2012 graduating class, the University of Notre Dame ended its practice of offering diplomas made of sheep’s skin, a tradition that has all but disappeared except in some stubborn corners of academia. But the tendency of employers to pay premiums to workers holding certain diplomas is thriving. This tendency, dubbed the sheepskin effect, makes a labor market more efficient if those workers holding the sheepskin are indeed more productive than those without them.
Most certainly, the U.S. teacher labor market could be more efficient. Although teachers with master’s degrees generally earn additional salary or stipends-the so-called “master’s bump”-they are no more effective, on average, than their counterparts without master’s degrees. The more nuanced evidence suggests that master’s degrees in math and science do confer an instructional advantage on teachers of those subjects, yet approximately 90 percent of the master’s degrees held by teachers come from education programs that tend to be unrelated to or unconcerned with instructional efficacy.
http://goo.gl/Z1EnM

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NATIONAL NEWS
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Substitute Teaching Undergoes New Scrutiny Education Week

The mythology surrounding the substitute teacher is not a pretty one: Paper airplanes, lost learning, bullying. But as schools collect more information about teacher absenteeism and its consequences, districts and schools are exploring ways to professionalize substitute teaching—or experiment with alternative ways of coping with teacher absences.
“Almost everyone appreciates at a gut level that what happens in the regular teacher’s absence is not often something to brag about. It’s kind of an underbelly, one of the darker secrets of what happens in public education,” said Raegan T. Miller, the associate director for education research at the Center for American Progress, a think tank in Washington that is among several national groups and schools currently studying the issue.
While substitute teachers are largely seen as occasional pinch hitters for full-time teachers, statistics show that students spend a good chunk of their time in school with them. The Washington-based National Council on Teacher Quality estimates that the average teacher misses between six and 10 days of school per year. And some research now links high rates of teacher absence to lower-than-expected achievement results for students.
That has led a growing number of educators to call for creating a more professionally prepared substitute-teaching workforce.
http://goo.gl/SdSAH

Student scores slip with new proficiency benchmarks Wisconsin moving toward nationally accepted standards Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The percentage of Wisconsin public school students considered proficient or advanced in reading and math dropped suddenly Tuesday – from around 80% to less than 50% – based on higher expectations for student performance adopted by the state Department of Public Instruction and applied to the latest 2011 state achievement test.
The recalibrated proficiency levels released Tuesday by the DPI are a first look at how the picture of school performance in Wisconsin will change under a new school accountability system, part of an approved plan that freed Wisconsin from key mandates of a federal education law that required 100% student proficiency in reading and math by 2014.
In exchange, the state proposed a more holistic system for measuring school progress, and also raised the benchmark for proficiency on the annual Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination to correlate with the respected National Assessment of Educational Progress.
The results: Only 35.8% of Wisconsin’s WKCE test-takers in third through eighth and 10th grade in fall 2011 scored proficient or better in reading, and just 48.1% scored proficient or better in math.
Compare that with March, when the state released 2011 WKCE results that showed 78% and 82% of students scored proficient or better in math and reading.
http://goo.gl/wcnxP

Push for career-technical education meets parent resistance Hechinger Report

SAN DIEGO — Career and technical education has come a long way since the days when students could be steered from academics into hairstyling, auto repairs or carpentry. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to sell the concept of having all students take courses in CTE, as it is known.
Take what happened this March in La Jolla, Calif. Parents rose in protest after the San Diego Unified School District proposed new high school graduation requirements mandating two years of career and technical education courses—or two to four courses. The district would have been the first in the nation to have such a mandate, experts believe. Parents circulated an online protest petition and school officials spent hours in a meeting to assure hundreds of parents that courses like computerized accounting, child development and website design could be in the best interest of all students.
But afterwards, when parent leaders asked the crowd who favored the requirement, every single parent at the meeting voted against it.
http://goo.gl/wJDXG

TN education reform hits bump in teacher evaluation Classroom observations fail to catch problems, state says Nashville Tennessean

Tennessee’s new way of evaluating classrooms “systematically failed” to identify bad teachers and provide them more training, according to a state report published Monday.
The Tennessee Department of Education found that instructors who got failing grades when measured by their students’ test scores tended to get much higher marks from principals who watched them in classrooms. State officials expected to see similar scores from both methods.
“Evaluators are telling teachers they exceed expectations in their observation feedback when in fact student outcomes paint a very different picture,” the report states. “This behavior skirts managerial responsibility.”
http://goo.gl/WHx3S

Police break up $3M drug ring linked to Mason teen Cincinnati Enquirer

LEBANON — The clean-cut 17-year-old who loved skateboarding and played roller hockey much of his life didn’t look the part.
But Warren County law enforcement officials say Tyler Pagenstecher, an upperclassman at Mason High School , headed up a $3 million drug ring that for nearly three years doled out pot to local students and was suspected of selling about $20,000 of the drug each month.
Now he faces two felony counts of drug trafficking. Just three months shy of turning 18, Pagenstecher is not being charged as an adult. If convicted, he could spend the next three years in a state juvenile detention center.
http://goo.gl/uywfz

Your Baby Can Read company going out of business Associated Press

NEW YORK — The company that persuaded hundreds of thousands of parents to buy Your Baby Can Read products is going out of business, citing the high cost of fighting complaints alleging its ads were false.
Your Baby Can LLC announced the decision on its website.
“Regretfully, the cost of fighting recent legal issues has left us with no option but to cease business operations,” the notice says. “While we vehemently deny any wrongdoing, and strongly believe in our products, the fight has drained our resources to the point where we can no longer continue operating.”
http://goo.gl/5nMfJ

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CALENDAR
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USOE Calendar
http://tinyurl.com/5x9oh9

UEN News
http://www.uen.org

August 3:
Utah State Board of Education meeting
250 E. 500 South, Salt Lake City
http://www.schools.utah.gov/board/Meetings/Agenda.aspx

August 9:
Utah State Charter School Board meeting
250 E. 500 South, Salt Lake City
http://1.usa.gov/Axtt5K

August 14:
Executive Appropriations Interim Committee meeting
1 p.m., 445 State Capitol
http://goo.gl/E0hoC

August 15:
Education Interim Committee meeting
2 p.m.
http://goo.gl/8WODJ

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