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        Proud Foundation Vision & Mission   

• Make Parent Driven Education America's Educational Model

• Use Educational Quality Assurance to maximize comprehension

• Use Technology to achieve outstanding learning

• Be the World's Best in Academics

Megasmart email: jeff@proud.com

Jeff's Education Blog

The first steps in Reading!

This is a super-duper reading method, there aren't any frills, just good basic down-to-earth reading, and they keep a good schedule. More time spent on the program, the more you get out of it. Steps to Literacy, covers phonetics, vocabulary, spelling, writing, word recognition, reading comprehension and fluency in kindergarten through second grade. One of the program's strengths is that it appeals to students with different learning styles and ability levels, advocates say.

The students are learning to read in a fast-paced program that is being phased in systemwide to accelerate student literacy skills and eliminate achievement gaps.

In a study involving first-graders at more than a dozen schools that use the curriculum, the school system found that about 88 percent met targets in a statewide literacy test last year, compared with 74 percent three years earlier. A quarter of the students were from low-income families, and more than a third represented racial or ethnic minorities. That kind of progress can help eliminate achievement gaps.

Sheriff Lee Baca and other local law enforcement leaders unveiled a new report that links low graduation rates with violent crimes such as homicide and aggravated assault.

The report noted that high school dropouts are over three times more likely than graduates to be arrested and eight times as likely to go to jail or prison. Nationwide, 68 percent of state prison inmates do not have a high school diploma. The report highlights research showing that California’s dropout crisis damages California’s economy, in addition to threatening public safety. According to data released in August by the California Dropout Research Project: dropouts earn less, pay fewer taxes, and are more likely to collect welfare and turn to crime; for each year’s worth of dropouts, California suffers billions of dollars in economic losses over time, including $12 billion in crime costs alone; and every dollar invested in programs proven to increase graduation rates will return a long-term savings to taxpayers of $2 to $4.

The host server for Proud Foundation is being changed. We should be up and running smoothly in a few days. This is the printed sources of thoughtful hypotheses representing the state of education today in the USA.

This research is the foundation for my book titled: "Megasmart & Freedom to Learn." This book gives you the ability to educate your own kids to a very high bar, making them influential and compelling persons; people that you will want to meet!

That is one conclusion of a major report released Tuesday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). It measures student literacy in science, math, and reading (focusing this year on science) among 15-year-olds, and is an often-cited reference for policymakers sounding the alarm bells about the state of education in the United States and its implications for the ability of Americans to secure jobs in a global economy.

Finland emerged at the top of 57 countries in science, according to the 2006 survey results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The US ranked 29th, behind countries like Croatia, the Czech Republic, and Liechtenstein, and ahead of just nine other OECD countries.

The US is average in the number of students at the highest levels of scientific literacy, but has a much larger pool – nearly 1 in 4 – at the bottom.That worry has energized education advocates and reformers, who see the test as a useful tool to catalyze public opinion behind the need for fundamental change in how America educates.

"To most policymakers there's almost a believed connection between how well our kids do in school and how well our economy does in the global economy," says Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy.

Teachers would decide what to teach and when. Teachers and parents would hire and fire principals. No supervisors from downtown would tell anyone -- neither teachers nor students -- what to wear.

These are among the ideas a delegation of teachers and their union officers are urging L.A. schools Supt. David L. Brewer to include in the school reform plan he will present to the school board Tuesday.

Will this improve education?

Young, Gifted and Skipping High School

 

As Jackie Robson rushed off to Japanese 101, a pink sign on the main door of her college dorm reminded her to sign out. There were more rules: an 11 p.m. curfew, mandatory study hours, round-the-clock adult supervision and no boys allowed in the rooms.

Jackie is 14. She never spent a day in high school.

Like the other super-bright girls in her dorm, the Fairfax County teen bypassed a traditional education and countless teenage rites, such as the senior prom and graduation, to attend the all-female Mary Baldwin College in the Shenandoah Valley.

The school offers students as young as 12 a jump-start on college in one of the leading programs of its kind. It also gives brainy girls a chance to be with others like them. By all accounts, they are ready for the leap socially and emotionally, and they crave it academically.

Last spring, Jackie finished eighth grade at Langston Hughes Middle School in Reston. This fall, she's taking Psychology 101, Japanese 101, English 101, Folk Dance and U.S. History 1815-1877: Democracy and Crisis.

Disadvantaged students' low performance has many mutually reinforcing causes. We're the most unequal society in the industrialized world; it would be silly to expect academic performance to be equal when nothing else is. Every industrialized society has achievement gaps. Ours are bigger because our economic system is more unequal.

Educational debates are corrupted by insistence that schools alone can close achievement gaps. Certainly, better schools would lift achievement. Groups trying to improve schools, train better teachers and principals, improve curriculum and raise standards are essential.

Closing gaps requires combining better schools with greater social and economic equality.

On Monday, I gave one example of why better schools alone can't do it, describing how low-income children have more frequent asthma, resulting in more school absence. Imagine two groups of children, identical except that one has high absenteeism from untreated asthma. When children in this group do come to school, they are often drowsy from being awake at night. Without proper medical care, they can't suppress symptoms with inhalants, as more fortunate children do. The second group has adequate medical care and less absenteeism. If both groups have great teachers, curriculum and standards, they will still differ in average learning.

Of course, good teachers will get higher average achievement from children who are frequently absent than will inadequate teachers. But will good teachers get the same average achievement from the frequently absent that they get from healthier students? Certainly not.

A federal lawsuit was filed Tuesday challenging a new state law that will change the way “gender” is defined in schools. 

The new law says “no teacher shall give instruction nor shall a school district sponsor any activity that promotes a discriminatory bias” against students. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Diego, seeks an injunction barring the law from going into effect as well as a finding that the law is unconstitutional. The lawsuit says the change “recklessly abandons the traditional understanding of biological sex in favor of an elusive definition that is unconstitutionally vague.” The lawsuit argues that the new law redefines gender as sex, and says it includes “a person's gender identity and gender-related appearance.” Robert Tyler, a lawyer for Advocates for Faith and Freedom, said it is a safety issue. In a press release issued earlier in the day, he said: “What will prevent the 250-pound linebacker from deciding he wants to share the locker room with the cheerleaders?” “If implemented, this bill will have disastrous effects in our school system,” Tyler said. “This social experiment defies common sense.”

Grossmont Union High School District board member Priscilla Schreiber is one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, which also is being supported by board members Larry Urdahl, Robert Shield and Jim Kelly. At a news conference held outside Lincoln High School, supporters of the lawsuit said the new law would allow students to define themselves as either male or female, regardless of biology. It also would prohibit anyone – students, teachers and other staff members – from speaking against homosexuality or transgender issues.

“If you say anything that is opposed to that alternative lifestyle, you are discriminating against those individuals,” said Ron Prentice of the California Family Council, which oversees the California Education Committee. “It's an indoctrinating bill. It's a bill that says you must respect the rights of homosexuals to the degree that the traditional world view is silenced.”

But Geoff Kors, the executive director of Equality California, which sponsored the bill, said the lawsuit is wrong. Kors said the new law was just a “language clean-up bill” which clarified conflicting state laws regarding students' discrimination and harassment. He said that the definition of gender has been in the education code since 2000, and there have been no controversies surrounding it. “This bill did not make any change to the definition of gender,” Kors said. Equality California is one of the state's leading same-sex rights' groups

The kids grab small voting devices on their desks, then punch in their answer to a question posed on the screen above them: "¿Cual es verde? "

In an instant, teacher Nancy Conn pushes a button and up pops a chart showing the correct answer -- the green square -- among six squares of varying colors.

All of this is happening on a large interactive white board -- a cross between a blackboard, computer screen and projector -- that Conn uses in her Spanish classroom at Hickory Grove Elementary School in Bloomfield Township.

The boards -- which will be in every classroom in the Bloomfield Hills Schools district by the beginning of next year -- are among the ways schools in metro Detroit are using technology to teach and capture the minds of a generation growing up in a digital age.

At Lottie Schmidt Elementary School in New Baltimore, students in Jim Alvaro's fifth-grade class create podcasts of their lessons, broadcast for anyone on the Web to hear. Rob McClelland, a teacher at the Oakland Technical Center campus in Wixom, has created computer games that help solidify students' understanding of key lessons.

And at Fisher Elementary School in the South Redford School District, students are learning Chinese and interacting with pen pals in China via a webcam, computer, projector and software.

"You always learn something new by using technology," said Natalie Joniec, 10, a Fisher fifth-grader.

Technology boosts performance

While some schools are pushing forward with plans to fully integrate technology, others struggle to do so in ways that engage kids and help them learn, said Ledong Li, an assistant professor of education at Oakland University.

And that's a problem, he said.

"If we deliver information like we used to do in the traditional way, kids are bored in the classroom," said Li, who organized a workshop in June on using video games in the classroom. "They don't feel they are engaged."

Li said technology can be intimidating to teachers who aren't familiar with how to use it, or how it can benefit their lessons. And so much is focused today on improving test scores that it's easy to see technology as an extra. Yet, Li said research shows technology can improve student performance.

Still, some teachers "look at the requirements for raising test scores as the kind of signal that they have to do things in a traditional way," Li said.

State Superintendent Mike Flanagan has announced proposed changes to teacher preparation programs, and he's making the integration of technology into teaching practices a priority. Last year, Michigan became the first, and still the only, state in the nation that will require students to take an online class or have online experience to graduate high school.

Ric Wiltse, executive director of the Lansing-based Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning, said budget crunches have impacted how schools integrate technology.

But, Wiltse said, "teachers are getting more and more creative about how they use the technology tools students have these days."

That includes Alvaro, whose classroom has a blog called the Skinny as well as the podcasts. The students worked on a project that had them research and write about when their ancestors arrived in the United States.

Games that teach

Today's kids are steps ahead of their teachers, in many cases. They instant message, text message, play video games, blog and use social Web sites like MySpace and YouTube.

"Everything we do is about technology," said Kala Kottman of Commerce Township, a senior at Walled Lake Western High School and the Oakland Technical Center campus in Wixom. "It's a big deal."

Kala, 17, is enrolled in the culinary arts program at the technical center. She was among a group of students in a computer lab playing a game created by McClelland, who provides support to fellow teachers.

There are about 100 culinary tools students must memorize, and while they still use rote memorization tricks, McClelland's game gives them a fun way to test their knowledge. McClelland has produced a similar game for two other technical center programs.

In the game, which is timed, students must quickly match a picture of a tool with its correct name.

McClelland programmed the game using popular phrases familiar to kids. For instance, if they click on the wrong answer, they're likely to hear the "D'oh!" popularized by Homer Simpson. If they get it right, they might hear a "Woo hoo."

Instant feedback

The Bloomfield Hills district is making a significant investment in the Promethean white boards. About $2.1 million has been committed to put them in all of its classrooms.

Something went horribly wrong after Texas decided to crack down on mayhem in public schools by mandating zero tolerance for weapons, drugs and violence on campus. Given broad discretion to remove unruly pupils from class, teachers and administrators restored order. But they also created a terribly efficient fast track to prison for a shocking number of Texas schoolchildren.

According to an analysis of statewide data for 2001-2006 and thorough studies of more than a dozen Texas school districts, the number of students suspended and the number removed to alternative discipline campuses skyrocketed after the Legislature's 1995 overhaul of school discipline laws. This, the public interest law group Texas Appleseed states, has caused a "school-to-prison pipeline" that puts inordinate numbers of youngsters on a path to dropping out of school and into the juvenile justice system. The far end of the pipe pours into Texas' massive adult prison system.

State schools Supt. Jack O'Connell hosted a summit in Sacramento last week of 4,000 educators, policymakers and experts. He asked them to confront California's "racial achievement gap" -- the persistently lower test scores of California's African American and Latino public school students compared with their white and Asian peers. In 125 packed sessions, participants probed causes of the gap and offered strategies to close it. O'Connell asked them to "honestly and courageously face this pernicious problem," and for two days, the capital was abuzz with ideas, energy and even some hope.

Strikingly, the state's other "achievement gap" was barely mentioned at the summit; this is the gap between California and the rest of the nation.

The most recent results from the National Assessment of Education Progress test (popularly known as "the nation's report card") place California's fourth- and eighth-graders below those in nearly every other state in math and reading achievement. (Although California's math scores have improved over the last decade, so have the scores in the rest of the country.)

This national achievement gap affects students across the state regardless of their race. If we don't address both the racial and national achievement gaps, it's hard to imagine solving either one

Dr. G was there as a board member for the Fort Bend Independent School District's Thurgood Marshall High School Electronic Engineering Academy. Being a surgeon and participating with a high school was of particular interest to me because of the education aspect of his exemplary work. He had just returned from Nigeria where he continues his efforts towards building a hospital for those who need health care.

Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee of the D.C. Schools is considering turning over the management of 27 failing public schools to nonprofit charter education firms, is sending a clear signal that she intends to shake up the moribund bureaucracy that has failed generations of students.

Experts and school advocates say they are uneasy about the lack of details surrounding her idea, particularly given evidence across the country that charters and schools under private management sometimes fare no better than traditional public schools.

(Please note that experts and school advocates designed the system that's there now. HooRah, Michelle is really thinking!  And her ideas are outside the "Box" - very cool!)

"Advanced economies, whether America's or Denmark's, are knowledge economies. And knowledge economies reward education. Get a degree, expand your skills, and you will do just fine."

"Today, the Economic Policy Institute issued a report that should come as a clarion call to everyone concerned about the impact of unfair trade agreements and practices on America's working families. In their report, the EPI concludes that between 25 to 30 million American jobs -- about one in five American jobs -- in states all across the nation, are at risk for being off-shored over the next decade. And it's not just manufacturing jobs - the report shows those jobs that require at least a four-year college degree are actually the most at risk. This report makes clear what the labor community has known for far too long: bad trade deals, cheap foreign labor, illegal foreign subsidies and foreign currency manipulation are having a devastating effect on American workers...Given this reality, I find it alarming that Senator Clinton and Senator Obama have chosen to support a flawed Peru Trade deal that will only further expand the NAFTA-model that has already cost us well over a million jobs."

Professor Rosemary Karr constantly challenges the perception that math is something to be feared.People think it's OK to say "I've never been good at math," says Karr, who teaches at Collin County Community College in Plano, Texas. But "if I were to tell you, 'I can't read,' or 'I can't write,' are you going to be laughing? Why is it socially acceptable to say, 'I can't do math'? "

Karr, who will be honored today in Washington, D.C., as community college professor of the year, has spent much of her career demystifying mathematics for remedial students. "At the developmental level, you see increased frustration, and that's something I'm good at, helping students to relax a little bit more and see the fun of mathematics, and not just see math as something to torture people," she says.

She uses clips from movies such as Cast Away and Little Big League to introduce math concepts in a non-threatening way and has a knack for analogies that build understanding. Untangling algebraic equations, for example, is like taking off shoes before socks and socks before pants.

Karr left a tenured position at Eastern Kentucky University in 1989 when her husband was transferred to Plano. At Collin, she started working with remedial students and found that helping students get over their fears of math at the developmental level went a long way toward setting them up for success.

American students even in low-performing states like Alabama do better on math and science tests than students in most foreign countries, including Italy and Norway, according to a new study released yesterday. That’s the good news.The bad news is that students in Singapore and several other Asian countries significantly outperform American students, even those in high-achieving states like Massachusetts, the study found.

“In this case, the bad news trumps the good because our Asian economic competitors are winning the race to prepare students in math and science,” said the study’s author, Gary W. Phillips, chief scientist at the American Institutes of Research, a nonprofit independent scientific research firm. The study equated standardized test scores of eighth-grade students in each of the 50 states with those of their peers in 45 countries. Experts said it was the first such effort to link standardized test scores, state by state, with scores from other nations.

Gage Kingsbury, the chief research and development officer at the Northwest Evaluation Association, a group in Oregon that carries out testing in 2,700 school districts, praised the study’s methodology but said “a flock of difficulties” made it hazardous to compare test results from one country to another and from one state to another. “Kids don’t start school at the same age in different countries,” he said. “Not all kids are in school in grade eight, and the percentage differs from country to country.”

Because of such differences, Dr. Kingsbury said, it would be a mistake to infer too much about the relative rigor of the educational systems across the states and nations in the study based merely on test score differences. Scores for students in the United States came from tests administered by the federal Department of Education in most states in 2005 and 2007. For foreign students, the scores came from math and science tests administered worldwide in 2003, as part of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, known as the Timss.

Concern that science and math achievement was not keeping pace with the nation’s economic competitors had been building even before the most recent Timss survey, in which the highest-performing nations were Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan. American students lagged far behind those nations, but earned scores that were comparable to peers in European nations like Slovakia and Estonia, and were well above countries like Egypt, Chile and Saudi Arabia.

The Timss survey gives each country a metric by which to compare its educational attainment with other nations’. The nationwide American test, known as the National Assessments of Educational Progress, allows policy makers in each state to compare their students’ results with those in other states.

3-year brain lag found in ADHD kids - They can catch up to their peers, says a reassuring study.

Dr. Philip Shaw of the National Institute of Mental Health said that although brain development was slower among children with ADHD, it followed a normal pattern, which should reassure parents. Shaw, lead author of the report published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said the results could help explain why many children with ADHD appear to grow out of the disorder and become less impulsive and fidgety as they mature.

About 4.4-million school-age children in the United States, or 3 percent to 5 percent, have ADHD, which can lead to poor school performance and behavior problems. Half of children diagnosed with the disorder are treated with stimulants, such as Ritalin, or other medicines.

Researchers used magnetic resonance imaging equipment to scan the brains of 223 children and adolescents with ADHD and 223 youngsters without the disorder. The scans were repeated two, three or four or more times at three-year intervals.In children with ADHD, developmental lags were most pronounced in the prefrontal cortex, which supports attention and working memory, among other things. Half of the cortical points in ADHD children reached peak thickness at an average age of 10.5, contrasted with 7.5 in children without the disorder.

Since brain development in ADHD is just slower and not a permanent disability, we can catch these kids up by just teaching them at their own rate.

Thank goodness parents are idiots. Otherwise, at least half of the current tax-funded bozos – the so-called public servants whose sole mission is to supplant parental rights and decision-making - the teachers - would be unemployed, taking their aggressive panhandling to the streets nonetheless. And, we can't have that, can we?

Of course, not all parents are idiots. One special class of the omniscient exists; those parents employed by government or associated organizations (can you say teachers unions). These folks are never idiots since they drink from the fountain of enlightenment. The fountain whose source is the never-ending stream of tax dollars, and whose drain is the never-clogged pipeline of bloated salaries.

Parents are idiots. Yes, that is a harsh statement. However, from what I read – from what the state and its minions believe, it is absolutely true. Offensive, but true.

Alright, put up or shut up! Fair enough. A recently published study on public school choice looked at the schools parents chose when they were allowed to select between the various Milwaukee public schools. The study reports that many parents chose schools based on nonacademic reasons; parents chose schools for reasons other than the state's definition of a quality program.

The Tofflers go on to highlight that those regions and nations that will be successful in the future need to grasp a simple fact: "An advanced economy needs an advanced society, for every economy is a product of the society in which it is embedded and is dependent on its key institutions."

In a world where knowledge and talent are supreme, what are we doing to create wind under the wings for our key institutions such as our K-12 schools, apprenticeship and trade school programs, community colleges and other institutions of higher education?

"Today's industrial-age bureaucracies are slowing the move toward a more advanced, knowledge-based system for creating wealth." In other words, the status quo is busy tying anchors to productive change.

The Answer Rests with Leadership

Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus in their management classic, LEADERS: Strategies For Taking Charge, capture this when they proclaim, "It almost seems trite to say it, but we must state the obvious. Present problems will not be solved without successful organizations, and organizations cannot be successful without effective leadership. Now." While management is important, leadership is crucial for successful organizations.

About 40% of Americans can best be described as functionally illiterate. That means they may be able to read [a little] but can’t understand what they’ve read – like ballot box instructions – or perform simple addition and subtraction without the aid of a calculator or computer.

“….heavy physical work [manual labor, low wage jobs], the care of home and children [lots of children, few responsible fathers], petty quarrels with neighbors, films [entertainment], football [all sports] [and] beer [or illegal drugs]….[will fill] up the horizons of their [empty] minds [and lives]….Even when they [become] discontented, as they sometimes [will], their discontent [leads] nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they [can] only focus on petty specific grievances [high prices and low wages]. Larger evils [like modified teaching strategies, state-prescribed drugs and lowered expectations which lead to lower achievement] invariably [escape] their notice” [Emphasis added.]

Problem areas
As officials struggle with the law's 100 percent goal, they say they must contend with a variety of challenges.

For example, new students arrive every year from other countries speaking little or no English, Groth said. They must, nonetheless, take the tests -- written in English and administered with directions written and spoken in English. Only students in the country for less than 12 months are exempt.

No Child Left Behind measures improvement in more than 20 demographic subgroups based on ethnic background and income level, including special education and English learner. If any subgroup fails, the entire school fails.

Schools that take federal money to help low-income students and don't make the grade for two years in a row get placed in "program improvement," a six-year series of increasing penalties for schools that don't make the grade.

Federally mandated sanctions range from the parental right to move children to a better school in the first year to firing educators and converting the school to a charter school in the sixth and final year of program improvement.

Given the scope of what I hope to accomplish with this blog, I felt it was absolutely essential to begin by addressing the issues of race and equal opportunity for at-risk minority students. The majority of my professional career over the past 16 years or so has been advocating for the needs of at-risk minority students. However, I want readers of this blog to understand that the message I deliver to all is the same, regardless of their race. I have the same message for inner-city Houston as I do for my hometown of suburban Katy. Over the course of this blog, I will communicate intensively on the pursuit of academic equality and excellence for all students of all colors. For my suburban readers, however, one should understand without question that at-risk accountability has driven public education for the past two decades. One cannot separate that issue from its ripple impact on the classrooms across the board.

The reviled and revered 1971 ruling of Federal Judge William Wayne Justice envisioned equal opportunity for all students. However, the failure of public education, political, and civil rights leaders to confront the concrete requisites of that ruling continues to haunt Texas - and America’s - minorities.

In order to “insure equal educational opportunities for all students regardless of race, color, or national origin,” Judge Justice ruled that programs should include “specific educational programs” designed to “compensate minority group children for unequal educational opportunities resulting from past or present racial and ethnic isolation.”

Up to 6,000 West Virginia teachers can retire next year, a trend that will accelerate in coming years — and state Board of Education members are looking for ways to fill the gap. “We are facing the possibility of massive teacher shortages in the state,” state board member Lowell Johnson said.

The new group — made up of state Department of Education employees, higher education and work force officials — will search for better ways to recruit, retain and pay for new teachers, Johnson said. That may include fast-tracking teacher certifications, hiring people with English as a second language to teach foreign languages, and improving teacher salaries. Johnson said the group would also make sure state law does not forbid their solutions.

In a related decision, board members introduced a plan to address cost-of-living pay increases in the fastest-growing areas of West Virginia. The plan is in response to a lawsuit filed June 8 on behalf of the Berkeley County Education Association and other school employees. Paul Taylor, the Martinsburg lawyer who filed the suit, wants the state board to comply with a 17-year-old law that required it to address the increased cost of living in some areas of West Virginia.

On Aug. 29, Kanawha Circuit Judge James Stucky denied the school board’s motion to dismiss the case.

"Within two to three years, our school district will be in the headlines for failing," said Kelli Moors, president of the board of Carlsbad Unified School District -- that, with San Dieguito Union High School District and Poway Unified School District, are among the highest performing in the county.

All three say that they have so far met the requirements of federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, but won't for long.

Under the law, every student in every classroom in every state must read and do math at grade level by 2014 as measured by a battery of state tests given each spring to students in grades two through 11.

As Congress considers reauthorizing the landmark legislation, designed to improve teaching and learning across the nation, educators and policymakers across the state say the law should stay -- but it must be revised to make it work.

"There's not a school in our district that will meet that test -- not a school in the nation," said Don Phillips, superintendent of Poway Unified School District.

To reach that 100 percent target in California, state lawmakers set annual goals for improvement. In 2006-07, one in four students was required to earn a "proficient" score, which means that a student has learned the facts and skills that state officials have set for that grade and age.

But starting in 2008, the annual requirement for improvement will rise 11 percent per year.

The federal government holds all states accountable for their schools’ performance, but it lets states design their own accountability measures. That means the tests that students take in Wisconsin, for example, might be far easier than the tests students take in Massachusetts (in fact, they are).

The disparities are laughable, especially when they’re used as the basis for a massive federal educational accountability system. Some states habitually report that upwards of 80 percent of their students score at the “proficient” level on state tests. But when those same students take the national assessment, only 20 percent reach the “proficient” mark.

But even if the state tests are easier, the argument goes, they can still show whether students in each state are making academic progress. If the percentage of Illinois’s eighth graders who score “proficient” on the state test increases from one year to the next, then the state is doing a better job teaching its youngsters, right? Wrong. A new study, The Proficiency Illusion, shows among other things that some state tests are simply getting even easier from one year to the next.

Researchers used data from schools in several states whose pupils participated both in state testing and in a nationally standardized assessment by the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA). Then they estimated proficiency cut scores, i.e., the level students needed to reach to pass the tests. What did they find?

State tests vary greatly in difficulty. The extent to which the difficulty of tests varies from one state to the next is shocking. Cut scores on Colorado’s math test were at the 6th percentile on the NWEA scale; Massachusetts’ math test cut scores were at the 77th percentile.

What does this mean for educational policy and practice? What does it mean for standards-based reform in general and NCLB in particular? It means big trouble, and those who care about strengthening U.S. K-12 education should be furious. There’s all this testing - too much, surely - yet the testing enterprise is unbelievably slipshod. It’s not just that results vary but that they vary almost randomly, erratically, from place to place and grade to grade and year to year in ways that have little or nothing to do with true differences in pupil achievement.

America is awash in achievement “data,” yet the truth about our educational performance is far from transparent and trustworthy. It may be smoke and mirrors. Gains (and perhaps slippages) may be illusory. Comparisons may be misleading. Apparent problems may be nonexistent or, at least, misstated. The testing infrastructure on which so many school reform efforts rest, and in which so much confidence has been vested, is unreliable - at best.

The ideology of unemployment insures that those infected with it will be unable to enter or remain in the world of work without serious in-depth unlearning and retraining. Urban youth are not simply ill prepared for work but systematically and carefully trained to be quitters, failures, and the discouraged workers who no longer even seek employment. What this means is that it is counterproductive to help urban schools do better at what they now do since they are a basic cause of their graduates living out lives of hopelessness and desperation.

The dropout problem among urban youth - as catastrophic as it is - is less detrimental than this active training for unemployment. We need be more concerned for "successful" youth who graduate since it is they who have been most seriously infected. They have been exposed longest, practiced the anti-work behaviors for the longest period, and been rewarded most. In effect, the urban schools create a pool of youth much larger than the number of dropouts who we have labeled as "successful" but who have been more carefully schooled for failure.

Taxpayers shouldn't be asked to pick up the cost of private schooling for special education children who don't first give public schools a chance, New York City's top appeals lawyer told the Supreme Court Monday. Arguing on the first day of the court's new term, The justices were urged not to make it easier for parents to be reimbursed for private schooling in situations where school districts contend they can take care of children's special needs.

The parent in the case before the court "had no contact with the system at all."

Many high school graduates are not academically prepared for the rigors of college level work. According to the latest data from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, 35 percent of all freshmen at Texas public higher education institutions were not prepared for college-level work in at least one area. During the fall of 2006, 38 percent of students at public two-year colleges had to take remedial coursework as did 24 percent of students at public four-year colleges.

Nationwide, the trend is similar with 42 percent of community college freshmen and 20 percent of freshmen at four-year institutions having to enroll in at least one remedial course. During the 2006 fall semester, 162,597 students were enrolled in remedial classes at public higher education institutions including 139,647 students at public two-year colleges and 22,950 students at public four-year colleges.

ACT, a national college entrance testing company, found that only 19 percent of Texas high school graduates in 2007 were “college ready” for math, science, reading, and English.

In addition to the direct costs of teaching and administering remedial education courses, there are many indirect costs to students, families and the economy. The Alliance for Excellent Education estimates the nation loses $3.7 billion a year as a result of remedial education. Their estimate includes $1.4 billion to provide the remedial education on college campuses and a $2.3 billion loss to the economy from lost earnings.

If you are among those District residents who cheered Mayor Adrian Fenty's takeover of the public school system, it's time to tighten the old chin strap and gear up for battle. The Fenty administration is about to go to war.

After weeks of observing and probing, Fenty and schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee have decided to take a whack at the Gordian knot entangling the D.C. school system. They intend to cut down to size the central office, which they regard as an obstruction to school reform. They also want to rid the system of underperforming principals and teachers, who are as hard to get rid of as a bad cold. 

But even as legislation is being drafted in the executive branch, defenders of the status quo have started to circle their wagons. And nervous lawmakers, especially those facing the voters next year, are beginning to engage in the council's favorite dance: It's called "slipping and a-sliding, peeping and a-hiding" -- moves designed to avoid taking a firm position on the firings.

The Fenty administration, however, can't move decisively without expanded authority to terminate employees. For that, it needs the D.C. Council's cooperation. But, you ask, didn't the council approve the mayor's plan to take over the schools? Yes. Fenty's plan won council approval by a robust 9 to 2 vote in April. But that was then, this is now, and overnight can be a lifetime in politics. To buck up council weaklings, Fenty and Rhee are going to need the support of residents who are tired of their children suffering the consequences of a poorly performing school system.

For individuals, the economic returns to education are substantial as well.  In 2006, the median weekly earnings of college graduates were 75 percent higher than the earnings of high-school graduates.  In turn, workers with a high-school degree earned 42 percent more than those without any diploma.¹  These differentials are large and have been growing; indeed, they have roughly doubled in the past twenty-five years or so.  The source of the widening wage gap between the more-educated and less-educated is nothing more complicated than supply and demand.  The demand for more-educated workers has been increasing rapidly, partly because the much more widespread use of computers and other sophisticated information and communication technologies in the workplace has increased the reward for technical skills.  The supply of highly educated workers has also risen.  At the start of the 1980s, 22 percent of young adults aged 25 to 29 held a college degree or more; by last year, that fraction had moved up to 28.5 percent.²  Nevertheless, the supply of educated workers has not kept pace with demand, thus generating an increased salary premium for education.  Because the wages of those at the top of the educational ladder have increased the fastest, increasing our investment in education can benefit not only individuals and society but also might narrow income gaps.

This is pure propaganda. Please read this and the accompanying NEAP scores.

Most of our students are just barely proficient in the core subjects of reading and math to minimally survive.

A huge number of our high school and college graduates didn't learn enough in the US school system to read simple pamphlets or make change.

This is dangerously dismal. We are barely ahead of where we were in 1983 when the famous "A Nation at Risk" was published showing how inadequate our school system was then...and still is.

Article Titled: "Let the 'No Child' law do its work"

The simple wisdom of the NCLB law is its recognition that reading and math are fundamental to learning other subjects, and that schools need to be independently judged. Before this law, US public schools were graduating many students who could barely read a sentence or multiply numbers. Since then, test scores in these subjects have risen. More than 70 percent of schools showed progress. And, most important, large gaps between white and minority students have narrowed.

What D.C. officials have acknowledged is a dangerous and deteriorating special education system has meant big paydays for the lawyers of James E. Brown & Associates. Since 2001, D.C. has paid nearly $15.5 million to the law firm for representing parents who sue the city schools over the special education system, city records show.

Federal law says children can be placed in outside schools, at public expense, if the children can prove that their local schools can’t meet their needs. Parents are allowed to bill the schools for their legal fees. The law gives the schools 35 days to respond to a parent’s request for a special education evaluation. D.C. routinely breaks that law, leaving anxious parents facing the prospect of watching their children wallow in failing schools.

“It takes a toll financially and emotionally,” said Theresa Bollech, a part-time activist who fought to get her learning-disabled daughter, Ashley, placed in a private school. “Year after year, I’ve seen the schools fail to provide adequate programs and services.”

In the past, teachers have generally arrived at the schools after four years of a liberal arts education, with some pedagogy courses, and a major and perhaps minor or endorsement area. These teachers have typically been 22 or 23 year old largely developmentally late adolescents who were fresh out of college. This approach to procuring teachers had been in place for many years until a teacher shortage struck America, and many school systems were forced to re-think how to procure teachers and began examining the  "alternative certification" route. This paradigm shift was spearheaded by Delia Stafford who implemented a Texas state department mandate, an entirely new approach that provided a new type of teacher that was uniquely suited to work in the urban schools with at-risk students in the Houston Independent School District. She was assigned as Director of Alternative Certification by then Superintendent Dr. Billy Reagan. Coupled with Martin Haberman's Star Teacher interview, her efforts were successful and later recognized by the first President Bush. She was awarded the "Commendation for Meritorious Service Award" by Dr. Rod Paige. Her efforts have increased exponentially the number of alternatively certified teachers for thousands of schools across the nation. Her combination of careful selection and district based on-site training has made this paradigm shift of alternative certification possible. Her courage, persistence and insight have challenged the decades old approach to teacher training and certification. Currently, she heads the Haberman Educational Foundation. Inc. and in the last thirty years she has touched the lives of more children, teachers, principals and schools in her work than any other leading pedagogist in America. In this interview, she responds to questions about the domain of alternative certification, it's history and importance, and reflects on her challenge to the status quo in American education.

 In his decision, U.S. Magistrate Judge Aaron Goodstein said the district broke the law between 2000 and 2005 when it failed to evaluate students with a suspected disability on a timely basis and routinely suspended them instead of figuring out if they needed special education services.

The cost of providing special education has increasingly strained school district budgets, with MPS spending millions more on the mandated services each year. Meanwhile, the district has struggled to find enough special education teachers. The ruling could exacerbate some of these financial strains and teacher shortages. Complying with both the spirit and the letter of the law in terms of making sure children are identified and receive the services they are entitled to is mandatory - it's not optional.

Dr. Shirley Neeley, the former superintendent of schools in Galena Park who Gov. Rick Perry named the Texas Commissioner of Education in early 2004, left that job July 1, after learning in mid-June that Perry wouldn't re-appoint her.

"Over the last few years, he has been disappointed in the agency's lack of action to deal with the accusations of cheating in our public schools. He looks forward to bringing in someone who will take decisive action to deal with this issue and be willing to work hard to take education in Texas to the next level."

Neeley, the first woman to head the TEA, took her ouster philosophically. "I can compare my situation to that of a superintendent when a school board decides to take no action or not extend their contract," she wrote in a letter to TEA employees. "Anyway you look at it, the message is clear: when it is time to go, it is time to go."

Although evidence of widespread cheating on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills test may have been a big part of it, some think Neeley had tired of cheerleading for Perry. And there was tension with her deputy commissioner, Robert Scott, who served as interim commissioner before she arrived and now since she's gone.

Claypool founded Educational Services of America in Nashville in 1999 as one of the few companies even attempting to make money by running special education private schools. With programs in 16 states, ESA owns and operates more than 120 private and charter schools. It hires the teachers and sets up the curriculum for about 7,800 students with learning, developmental or behavioral problems.

Only about 2 percent of all special education students -- about 100,000-- are taught in private schools set up exclusively for special education, according to recent data from the U.S. Department of Education.

ESA schools offer instruction for students with many kinds of disabilities, from mental retardation to high-functioning autism. One of its rapidly growing programs helps high school special education graduates who want college degrees.

When Maryland's top school officer proposed that the state back away from its tough high school testing program last week, one reason might have been the troubling performance of some suburban schools. An alarming pattern of failure is surfacing: Minority students, especially African-Americans, are struggling to pass the exams in the suburban classrooms their families had hoped would provide a better education.

"It is a wake-up call to African-Americans in Maryland," said Dunbar Brooks, president of the state school board and former president of the Baltimore County school board. "For many African-Americans, the mere fact that your child attends a suburban school district does not make academic achievement automatic."

Baltimore City and its suburbs released school-by-school results last week for the Class of 2009 - the first group that must pass the statewide High School Assessments in algebra, English, biology and government to get a diploma.

What they show is that in Baltimore County alone, nearly a third of the system's roughly two dozen high schools had pass rates of 60 percent or less. Also, high schools with predominantly African-American populations, such as Randallstown and Woodlawn, had passing rates mostly below 50 percent.

The results were similar, if not so pronounced, in Anne Arundel County, where some of the most urbanized schools - North County, Annapolis, Glen Burnie and Meade - performed well below the rest of the system.

Educators point to the gap in achievement between African-Americans and whites as one reason for the slump among inner suburban schools - although not the only one.

Until now, the achievement gap in Baltimore County has been masked by county averages. Some of Maryland's highest-performing schools are in the county's largely white and well-to-do northern corridor, including Towson, Dulaney, Carver and Hereford high schools. Those schools, along with the Eastern and Western technical magnets, boost the county averages.

A 24-year-old mortuary science major at San Antonio College, is about to plunk down $133 for a psychology textbook. She's not happy about it. In fact, she's not even sure why she has to take psychology.

"Unless I'm going to be talking to dead people about their problems," She mused while standing in line at the college's bookstore. "It just irritates me."

That attitude is not uncommon among students, or parents. Who likes dropping hundreds of dollars on books they'll likely never crack again?

Students are now spending an average of $700 to $1,000 each year on textbooks, and the issue has caught the attention of lawmakers and student activists, inspiring studies to find out why prices are so high and a flurry of state laws aimed at controlling costs. There's plenty of blame going around: Publishers are accused of "bundling" books with costly CD-ROMs, bookstores are slammed for marking up prices, and universities are knocked for taking a cut of the profit.

The U.S. labor force is 153 million people strong. Three traits of the American work force position our nation for tremendous gains in the increasingly competitive 21st century worldwide economy: high productivity, flexibility and mobility. Every year, about one-third of U.S. jobs change hands, largely because workers have found better opportunities.

America's economy is increasingly a knowledge-based economy. Two-thirds of all the new jobs being created require some kind of post-secondary education. Over the next decade, America will need 3 million health-care professionals and 1.7 million schoolteachers. We will need more than 900,000 engineers, and workers in other high-growth industries including nanotechnology, geospatial technology, and the life sciences, to name a few. From 2001 through 2006, high-paying occupations grew almost three times as much as lower-paying occupations.

With the new school year starting, students need to be aware that high school dropouts make about $522 per week for full-time work and their unemployment rate is about 7.1 percent. Meanwhile, workers with a high school diploma average $704 weekly, and this segment of the work force has a 4.4 percent unemployment rate. Workers with associate degrees average about $846 per week, and this group's unemployment rate is 3.5 percent. But workers with a bachelor's degree or higher average $1,393 per week and have an unemployment rate of 2.1 percent.

Some preschoolers are getting tossed from our schools precisely when they need attention and care. A young mother recently told me, "That was a crisis situation; my child was expelled from preschool and it happened right in the middle of my divorce." These kinds of cases happen too often in Florida. With the start of a new school year, a surprisingly large number of parents are worried that their young children will be turned away due to disruptive behavior.

A 2005 Yale University study revealed that the Florida preschool expulsion rate is 18 times greater than expulsion rates in grades kindergarten through 12th grade. Communities need to ask: What have we done to help children who are at risk of being expelled from preschool? According to the mother mentioned above, her child did not get the help he needed during one of the most stressful times of his life.

Comments on this article

by Paul Preston: "That was a crisis situation; my child was expelled from preschool and it happened right in the middle of my divorce." Is the fact that the child is going through divorce the schools fault and hence the school's responsibility. No it's the parents.

by Tom: As usual, a new fully-funded government program is proposed as the only possible solution to solve a problem. Don't buy into this myth. by Nancy: This is a bad parenting problem, not a "schools need to do more" problem. Accountable parents raise successful school children.

Democrats Try to Soften Bush’s Education Law

The House education committee posted the proposals on its Web site this week. Among the most important changes in the draft are those to the law’s accountability system, in which states judge whether schools have made “adequate yearly progress” and can avoid sanctions.

The draft would allow states to look beyond annual test scores and says bluntly that broader criteria “may increase the number of schools that make adequate yearly progress.”

Another change would distinguish schools where only one or two student groups fail to meet annual testing goals from those where three or more groups fall short. The latter would face more rigorous sanctions; students at the former would no longer be eligible to transfer to higher-performing schools.

That change would be popular in many suburbs, where thousands of schools with sterling local reputations have faced federal sanctions because of one or two low-performing groups, but it has already drawn opposition from the tutoring industry and the Bush administration.

A bill allowing states to opt out of testing requirements without losing federal money, introduced this year by Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan, has attracted 50 conservative Republican co-sponsors, including the minority whip, Representative Roy Blunt of Missouri.

Seven-year-olds' mastery of reading, writing and math has returned to 2000 levels despite huge state spending on early education schemes.

At least one in ten pupils fails to reach basic levels in the subjects regarded as crucial by parents and employers.

Almost half of boys - nearly 140,000 - will start the next phase of primary school next week without the writing skills needed to be sure of coping with the courses. They lag behind girls in every subject.

The results have prompted claims that the Government's campaign to raise primary school standards has run out of steam. The Tories said the trend was "hugely concerning" because a solid grasp of the Three Rs in primary school was a springboard to success at GCSE and beyond. The LibDems called boys' poor writing skills "a national disgrace" and warned that ministers' targets for raising primary achievement were now out of reach.

The figures emerged days after research from Durham University found that spending of £21billion over the past decade on nursery education and childcare has failed to improve children's ability to learn.

Voucher supporters say the voucher program will help middle- and low-income families to afford the educational option of private school. It will not take money from public schools, they say, and will improve them by offering competition.
 

Their opponents complain the program's $500 to $3,000 subsidies would be too little to make a difference to most middle- and low-income families and will just help the wealthy, while further undermining Utah's public schools.
 

Voucher plan

    * Narrowly passed in the 2007 Legislature, faces a referendum challenge Nov. 6.
    * Would award $500 to $3,000 in financial aid for every child enrolled in a private school, except those currently attending private school (low-       income private school students could still get vouchers).
    * The voucher program could cost $400 million to $500 million over 12 years.

In an effort to separate church and state, teachers have gone too far; they are becoming anti-religious

Many teachers in public schools across the country now stress feelings and mystical experiences, not facts and reason, much less critical reading and thinking. Their behavior modification techniques indoctrinate children with emotion-driven group think and anti-Western, anti-Judeo-Christian values.

In classrooms throughout the country, Judeo-Christian beliefs are cast aside or ridiculed. Multicultural studies, environmental propaganda, and arts-education classes now indoctrinate children with New Age religious beliefs. Public schools sometimes try to sneak offensive spirit or new age religions into their curriculum without parents’ knowledge.

"AMERICA is in trouble," says Vernon Ehlers, a Congressional representative from Michigan. The problem, thinks Ehlers, lies in the nation's classrooms:

Now a $33 billion remedy is to be administered over the next three years. On 9 August, President George W. Bush signed legislation to recruit thousands of new teachers, update the science and math skills of those already in classrooms and help science-orientated kids to launch research careers. It also calls for significant increases to the National Science Foundation's $4.7 billion annual research budget, although exactly how much is unclear.

An increasing number of black lawmakers in Florida find themselves strapped with a dilemma: They can continue to support public schools as the academic performance of black children annually falls below that of every other ethnic group, or they can dump public schools in favor of unproven* private schools that accept vouchers. The public school officials state that "Every dollar taken to support a voucher is a dollar taken from the education of a public school student." **

*research has shown time and again that private schools outperform public schools.

**This is not correct and a deliberate twisting of the facts. These dollars are the same ones that are spent on failing public schools. They are still spent on the children's education, only the dollars are better spent at a quality school. This type of lying is a major reason why public school officials are not trusted.

The large numbers of children affected by poverty feel overwhelming: fifteen million children live in poverty in our country.(1) That figure is probably low. We are failing these millions of children miserably: as of June 2006, seven thousand children in our nation drop out of school every day, predicting a life of poverty for 2,555,000 additional youth and families each year. (2) In response to the size and the significance of the need, our nation must resolve: No more will we ignore our children -- our nation's most precious resource -- who are needy! No more will we stand by as children lack food, clothes, a decent environment, health care, or someone to assist with homework! No more should children go to schools in this country where termites infest walls, windows leak, bathrooms don't work, and the building feels like a jail.

Accepting the status quo will bring America to its knees. Americans must make an intense examination of what needs to be done to stop the decline of our country's educational system, and act! The next decade must see a radical transformation of the ways we instruct our youth. Graduating every student with an excellent education is the solution, and effective teachers and principals are the key to achieving this goal.

Under-resourced schools lack adequate space, computer equipment, and other educational materials. Poor children tend to get the nation's weakest, lowest paid, and newest teachers. Facilities are overcrowded and in shameful disrepair. Further, poor parents do not have the capacity to advocate for their children in the school system in the same way that middle class parents can.

For children in poverty being successful in school is a matter of life and death. For those without a high school diploma, the likelihood of ever having a decent job -- one with adequate health insurance and some form of retirement account -- is extremely remote. Being a drop-out or a push-out dooms people to dead-end jobs, living in unsafe neighborhoods, and never being able to fully provide adequate health care for themselves and their families. It also means that those who are miseducated never develop the individual potentialities that would give their lives greater meaning and society the benefit of their participation and productivity.

Moving kids to better neighborhoods does not improve their school grades

Many social reformers have long said that low academic achievement among inner-city children cannot be improved significantly without moving their families to better neighborhoods, but new reports released today that draw on a unique set of data throw cold water on that theory.

Researchers examining what happened to 4,248 families that were randomly given or denied federal housing vouchers to move out of their high-poverty neighborhoods found no significant difference about seven years later between the achievement of children who moved to more middle-class neighborhoods and those who didn't.

Although some children had more stable lives and better academic results after the moves, the researchers said, on average there was no improvement. Boys and brighter students appeared to have more behavioral problems in their new schools, the studies found.

A mere three-tenths of 1 percent of Chicago public school teachers receive "unsatisfactory" evaluations. A recent study by the New Teacher Project, a national non-profit aimed at raising the caliber of public school teachers, also found that even among the district's 87 most demonstrably failing schools, 80 percent hadn't issued an "unsatisfactory" rating to a teacher.

Either that's one astounding teaching force, or the Chicago Public Schools' evaluation system is whacked.

Call us cynics, but we favor the latter interpretation

Prince George's County schools are offering new teachers stipends to pay for professional development, Montgomery County is hiring instructional coaches, Fairfax and Arlington county schools will have some smaller classes and Loudoun County teachers will have the chance to take free college courses -- all thanks to the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Nationally, about half of federal teacher-quality money is used to hire teachers to reduce class size, a move that has drawn criticism.

Since 2002, Congress has provided about $16 billion under the law to help states and school systems improve the caliber of the teaching workforce, the biggest federal investment ever in teacher quality. About $30 million of these grants flowed to the Washington area last year, a Washington Post survey found.

But some education experts argue that funding across the country has been frittered away on programs that are not specially tailored to closing achievement gaps between rich and poor students or ensuring that teachers are prepared to help students meet ever-tightening academic standards. Lesser-known provisions expanded the federal role in teacher training, principal development and related initiatives, prompted by research that shows quality of instruction is a major -- often the most important -- factor in student performance.

Testing doesn't always give us the answers we want.

Since 2002, when No Child Left Behind became law, states have spent millions of dollars giving standardized reading and math tests; one estimate puts the total cost above $5 billion through 2008.

I don't have a problem with testing children. I have a problem with thinking test results tell you most of what you need to know. They simply don't — these tests are often very narrow instruments. Where reforms have forced educators to notice children who might otherwise have been neglected, I give credit. But I wrote this book because school reforms intended to abolish a two-class system were in some ways exacerbating it. There's one world where students pass the test as a matter of course and get to write poems, and another where children write paragraphs about poems.

Meanwhile, there's supposed to be a movement in American schools to educate each child as an individual. The teachers at Tyler Heights work mightily to do that, but they have to get everybody to the same place in the same amount of time, and follow daily curriculum agendas handed down from above.

The program, which has been adapted from a similar Mexican cash incentives plan, is aimed largely at schools with students from low-income families. Some think it is unfair that some kids will see other seventh graders being rewarded for far lower scores, while they savor only the intangible plums of pride and satisfaction.

Educators respond to skeptics by arguing that no one has figured out how to get more poorer children engaged in learning. Trumpeting the long-term benefits of education, the better jobs and lives well lived has not worked. Cash just might.

Still, critics warn school officials to be prepared for a backlash from families, both poor and more well off. The program will foster “ill will.” The word bribe comes to mind. You certainly don’t want kids with identical abilities, where one gets paid and the other doesn’t.

Gov. Deval Patrick envisions free education for every Massachusetts resident from age 3 through community college.

To help him make that vision a reality, Patrick yesterday appointed an 18-member panel to draw up blueprints for the 10-year plan.

“We need to change fundamentally the way we think about and most of all deliver public education in this commonwealth,” the governor said. “Everything is on the table.”

1. How big is America’s school system?

Nearly 55 million children attend schools in the United States, taught by about 3.5 million teachers. About 89 percent of students from kindergarten through the 12th grade attend public schools, the rest private or religious ones. 

2. How can we judge the quality of U.S. schools?

There are several important benchmark tests, administered to students in many countries.

In the United States, testing companies make assumptions about what students at different grade levels will learn, in part by examining textbooks that are widely used across the nation. Thanks to these tests and the similarity of textbooks, there is already something akin to a national curriculum in science, mathematics, reading, and history.

Some children will do poorly on tests simply because the curriculum in their classroom, their school, or even their country did not include the material that was tested. The tests send a signal to educators about what is usually taught, as well as what was taught poorly and therefore not learned. This is a backward process—we should be setting the tests based on the curriculum, not setting the curriculum based on the tests. 

3. So how do American students compare to peers internationally?

In assessments of math and science, U.S. performance is mediocre. There are two major tests, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). On the math portion of the TIMSS, our eighth-grade students rank 16th among 46 nations. The 15 entities whose students outperformed ours include Singapore, Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong, Estonia, Japan, and Hungary. On the PISA test, American scores in science and math literacy were below the average for the 30 nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)The American Institutes for Research examined the scores of the 12 nations, including ours, that participated in TIMSS and PISA in 2003 and found that our students consistently ranked eighth or ninth of the 12. Only mathematics and science have been consistently tested, because other subjects are culture-bound. We spend a lot on education—only Sweden spends more—so these outcomes are disappointing.

The downside of diversity - A Harvard political scientist finds that diversity hurts civic life.

It has become increasingly popular to speak of racial and ethnic diversity as a civic strength. From multicultural festivals to pronouncements from political leaders, the message is the same: our differences make us stronger.

A massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam -- famous for "Bowling Alone," his 2000 book on declining civic engagement -- has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

The study comes at a time when the future of the American melting pot is the focus of intense political debate, from immigration to race-based admissions to schools, and it poses challenges to advocates on all sides of the issues. The study is already being cited by some conservatives as proof of the harm large-scale immigration causes to the nation's social fabric. But with demographic trends already pushing the nation inexorably toward greater diversity, the real question may yet lie ahead.

A fifth of children set to start secondary school in September are unable to read, write or add up properly.

Exam results for 11-year-olds to be published next week are set to show as many as 120,000 lack basic literacy skills and almost 140,000 cannot do sums.

Ministers insist that standards have soared since Labour came to power, when more than a third of children left primary school without reaching national standards in English and math.

Just as we are all in a state of angst about Britain's depressed, underperforming, over-eating offspring, teachers are recommending that children should stay well clear of formal school until the age of seven. The Professional Association of Teachers said at its annual conference yesterday that children ought to be allowed to delay the start of formal education, allowing them more time for play. Are they mad? Or is it just possible that the organisation could be plugging this for all the right reasons, having seen at first hand the consequences of the present directive regime of pressure and performance targets on fragile, five-year-old minds?

Increasingly, when I have visited schools and met parents, teachers and child psychologists, there have been discussions about why our children have to start school so early. Raising the starting age is not a radical idea - many countries have followed the practice for decades and their children do not suffer. American research recently found that children who had "teacher-led, academic lessons" at the age of five did not display "lasting academic advantage" over those who began later. Moreover, they were more likely to suffer emotional problems as adults.

Last academic year, the school system's budget contained the equivalent of more than $13,000 per child for all of its public schools, though not all of that was directly spent on children. The city's charter schools received $5,859 per child in cash and the rest in services.

In a 7-2 decision, the Court of Appeals affirmed the right of charter schools to receive as much money per pupil as regular public schools spend on their students. When the new academic year begins next month, Baltimore will have 22 charter schools serving about 5,400 children, more than in the rest of the state combined.

"It's a great decision, and it's in keeping with what we believe is and should be the law of the land: Money should follow children," said Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform, "Children are entitled to equitable public funding regardless of the kind of school they attend."

More and more, parents at wit's end are begging doctors to help them calm their aggressive children or control their kids with ADHD. More and more, doctors are prescribing powerful antipsychotic drugs.

In the past seven years, the number of Florida children prescribed such drugs has increased some 250 percent. Last year, more than 18,000 state kids on Medicaid were given prescriptions for antipsychotic drugs.

Even children as young as 3 years old. Last year, 1,100 Medicaid children under 6 were prescribed antipsychotics, a practice so risky that state regulators say it should be used only in extreme cases.

These numbers are just for children on fee-for-service Medicaid, generally the poor and disabled. Thousands more kids on private insurance are also on antipsychotics.

Highly gifted students in San Diego public schools have typically enjoyed a class size of 20 students per teacher – which is much smaller on average than the norm. But in the future, the teacher-student ratio for so-called Seminar classes in the San Diego Unified School District could increase to 25 to 1, much to the dismay of some parents.

The Gifted and Talented Education Seminar task force, which is made up of parents, teachers and administrators, stressed the importance of keeping the 20-to-1 ratio in a report to the school board in May. It recommended hiring about 20 additional teachers at a cost of $1.57 million to meet demands from parents for more Seminar classes.

Roughly two-thirds of elementary schools surveyed by the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy reported increasing math and reading time since the law was passed in 2001.

In some cases, schools appear to be adding math and reading time to lessons in other subjects, meaning they might be teaching both reading and history at the same time. Schools are facing tougher consequences under the No Child Left Behind law, which could explain the recent spikes in time spent on math and reading in the new report.

The Wall Street Journal reported today on what appears to be widespread corruption at the New York State Education Department.  This corruption targets children with disabilities.

"Golden has confirmed many of the facts that my office has been investigating over the last year in preparation for legal action against Mr. Kelly and the others involved in what I believe to be a conspiracy," Cuddy stated. "Multiple attorneys in that office reported that they left because they felt that participating in Kelly's agenda would cause them to lose their licenses to practice law, and sources inside the office confirm that the agenda is ongoing despite expressed opposition within the office from Kelly's staff," Cuddy said.

Because of today's Wall Street Journal report, Cuddy has requested that New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo commence an immediate, full-scale investigation in order to determine whether there has been a criminal conspiracy to violate the civil rights of New York State's disabled children and their parents. My office is offering assistance to any current or former employee of the State Education Department who feels that they are being threatened or intimidated into participating in a cover-up. Cuddy also bought this matter to the attention of the Office of the Inspector General of the United States Department of Education.

California finally seemed ready to develop a computerized student-tracking system to accurately compile dropout rates, transfer student records and do basic research. The lack of a student information system keeps educators in the dark about what works and what doesn't work.

Two years ago, a Harvard University study criticized the state for not having given students identification numbers, something that has been done since then. The Harvard study concluded that the high school dropout rate in California was 29 percent, much higher than the 13 percent rate being reported by the state at the time.

The heads of two of America's titans of the high-tech economy, Google and AT&T, had a simple message when they met with the nation's governors Saturday: Get us a skilled workforce. And get out of the way.

As things stand, they say government regulations often hamper business investment. Qualified workers are in short supply.

Case in point: AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson said his company is hard-pressed to find the 50,000 new hires it's seeking each year, including 4,000 positions that are returning to the United States from India. Part of the blame, he and Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt agreed, lies with an underperforming education system.

Schools are places organized on the expectation that groups of children and youth of the same age "learn" at roughly the same rate and in the same ways. Schools organized on the basis of age-grades are an American cultural and historic phenomenon that have not only survived but thrived (1/2 trillion dollars per year, 54 million children in 15,000 districts over four hundred years) and will not be transformed simply because their assumptions reflect neither the realities of student growth and socialization nor any research or theory of human development.

The natural drive for children to move and not sit all day has never been adequately dealt with by schools. The fact that teachers spend most of their time talking and giving directions which have little or no impact on learning is well-documented. Limiting school practice to the theories and research of psychology cannot lead to effective school teaching and learning because psychology seeks to explain how individuals learn and schools are locked on the assumption that" learning" must occur in groups.

Pianta's recent study of 2,500 classrooms in 400 school districts shows that the typical child has a 1 in 14 chance of learning in a rich, supportive classroom environment. Fifth graders, for example, spend 91 percent of their time listening to the teacher or working alone on low-level worksheets.

The following subgroups exist in a class of 25 to 35 students: 4-6 students feign helplessness regardless of how much the assignments are watered down and never complete assignments; 6-8 students need for attention prevents them from staying on task and interferes with the work of others; 1-2 students see themselves as having been hurt by teachers and seek revenge regardless of the task or assignment at hand; 3-4 students challenge the teacher for control of the classroom; 6-8 students come to school everyday and function as observers rather than participants. (They devote most of their time to observing the interactions (i.e. the cold or hot war) between the teacher and each of the four student groups cited above. Ultimately, this group comprises the majority of school dropouts; these are students with very low achievement who declare they quit school because it was "boring." ); 4-6 officially labeled special needs students with IEP's.

It is the ideology and functioning of great teachers that must be replicated. The value we place on their craft knowledge is the ultimate test. Unless and until we recognize, prize it and develop ways of disseminating it we will continue to stumble about assuming we can derive best practice in schools from some theory of "learning," that doesn't exist.

 

Dodd is seeking easing certification requirements for teachers and giving schools more ways to show they are making students better at math and reading.

Senators Judd Gregg of New Hampshire and Richard Burr of North Carolina -- both Republicans -- introduced legislation last week aimed at keeping the accountability and testing concepts while giving more leeway to schools. For example, the bill would give schools more time to achieve test standards among children just learning English, and treat schools with small populations of low-achieving students less harshly than those with widespread problems.

Avoid labeling entire schools as failing because they have students who are harder to teach, such as those with learning disabilities or limited English skills.

Give schools more time to bring up test scores before they are forced to take corrective action.

Ease certification requirements for teachers.

Give schools more options for showing they are making students better at math and reading.

Treat schools less harshly if they have small populations of low-achieving students compared with those with widespread problems.

Allow different ways of calculating a school's progress in bringing up test scores in select locations.

Demand for students with a solid foundation in science continues to grow. By 2010, jobs in science and engineering nationally are expected to increase by 2.2 million.1 Equally important, science education needs to ready citizens who do not pursue careers in science to handle dilemmas they will face in their lives, such as selecting treatments for diseases, evaluating messages about climate change, or using new technologies.

However, current science education in the United States falls short of these goals. American students continue to languish in international comparisons of science achievement. The situation only grows worse in later grades. In national assessments, U.S. students’ performance becomes increasingly weaker at higher grade levels.

"More money for education" is nothing more than empty words when it comes to the Federal Department of Education and the destruction that agency has done to America's children in the area of education. When are America's parents going to catch on to that big lie pitched every election cycle? Does the problem ever get fixed from one Congress to the next? No. One president to the next? No. One governor to the next? No. Over the past 25 years I have read thousands of words written about how to improve education in America, but what do we see coming out of the government's indoctrination centers? It makes me sad to say, but so many are little more than zombies. Fifty percent of all college freshmen need remedial reading instruction. Watch the individual out there who can't make change at a mini-mart until the computerized cash register puts it up on a digital screen. All the money in the world won't fix education as long as the system is unconstitutionally controlled by the federal government and as long as the curriculum is anti-American, anti-learning and new world order-doctrine driven.

There are 72 million parents with children. What do you suppose would happen if 10 or 12 million of them pulled their children out of school all at the same time and home-schooled them until the state legislatures correct the problem? Only parents, using the power they have can stop the brainwashing of America's children into becoming "global citizens" and the push to get children to experiment with queer sex. Let your voices be heard from border to border, coast to coast. Not all parents can afford to put their children in private schools; so many have written me that they feel so poorly educated, they are afraid to home school. There is help out there for those parents who wish to get their children out of these cesspools: Welcome to the National Home Education Network and National Home school Networks. I also highly recommend you look into Exodus Mandate Program.

THE COMPLAINTS are reaching a crescendo as Congress moves closer to reauthorizing No Child Left Behind, the education reform law that President Bush passed with rare bipartisan support in 2001. Conservatives are wailing about federal intrusion. Teachers unions and some leading Democrats moan that the law relies too much on testing as the measure of student progress. And some parents echo each of those indictments.

With immigration reform derailed, educational accountability offers Washington its last chance for a big bipartisan accomplishment this year. It won't be easy — conservative Republicans want to repeal the federal testing mandate, and teachers unions are pressing Democrats to dilute it by allowing schools to be judged not only by test scores but by fuzzier measures, such as teacher assessments. Such changes would amount to dismantling the foundation built since 2001. The better course is to dig deeper into the law's initial motivation and more effectively lift up the millions of children still left behind every day.

Colleges lost their way in the 1960s, contends VICTOR DAVIS HANSON, a classics professor. Students now get a ‘therapeutic curriculum’ instead of learning hard facts and inductive inquiry. The result: we can’t answer the questions of our time.

Is the Iraq war, as we are often told, the “greatest mistake” in our nation’s history? If few Americans know of prior abject disasters during the winter of 1776, the summer of 1864, or January 1942, then why wouldn’t Iraq really be the worst mistake in our history?

Americans increasingly cannot seem to answer questions like these adequately because they are blissfully uneducated. They have not acquired a broad knowledge of language, literature, philosophy, and history.

Instead, our youth for a generation have been fed a “Studies” curriculum. Fill in the blanks: Women’s Studies, Gay Studies, Environmental Studies, Peace Studies, Chicano Studies, Film Studies, and so on. These courses aim to indoctrinate students about perceived pathologies in contemporary American culture—specifically, race, class, gender, and environmental oppression.

Such courses are by design deductive. The student is expected to arrive at the instructor’s own preconceived conclusions. The courses are also captives of the present—hostages of the contemporary media and popular culture from which they draw their information and earn their relevance.

The theme of all such therapeutic curricula is relativism. There are no eternal truths, only passing assertions that gain credence through power and authority. Once students understand how gender, race, and class distinctions are used to oppress others, they are then free to ignore absolute “truth,” since it is only a reflection of one’s own privilege.

By contrast, the aim of traditional education was to prepare a student in two very different ways. First, classes offered information drawn from the ages—the significance of Gettysburg, the characters in a Shakespeare play, or the nature of the subjunctive mood. Integral to this acquisition were key dates, facts, names, and terms by which students, in a focused manner in conversation and speech, could refer to the broad knowledge that they had gathered.

In the end, education is the ability to make sense of the chaotic present through the prism of the absolute and eternal truths of the ages. But if there are no prisms—no absolutes, no eternals, no truths, no ages past—then the present will appear only as nonsense.

The No Child Left Behind Law as it was originally passed was a big power grab by the federal government to manage and control education in the USA. Education has traditionally been locally controlled and a responsibility of the states. Now the NCLB Law is up for reauthorization.

As Congress prepares to debate No Child Left Behind's reauthorization, conservatives and liberals alike are calling for greater state and local control of schools. Whether they join together in a common legislative initiative could shape the outcome of the reauthorization debate and the future of American education.

Scrambling to hire 500 certified teachers by Sept. 4, a hurricane-ravaged school district hopes to find some of them in Pittsburgh.

Betty Jean Wolfe, the district's director of human resources, said Pittsburgh and Minneapolis are being targeted because they have teacher surpluses. She said the district is recruiting in Houston because a large number of New Orleans residents relocated there after Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005.

"If anybody in Pittsburgh has a heart for New Orleans, come down and join us," said Ms. Wolfe, who's offering new hires up to $17,300 in relocation, housing and retention incentives, plus credit for service in other school districts, so they can start higher on the district's salary scale.

Base pay for a teacher with a master's degree ranges from $37,300 to $52,900, according to the district's salary scale. By comparison, in 2005-06, the average Allegheny County teacher made about $59,000, without a master's, according to state figures.

The Arizona Department of Education (ADE) has mandated that the schools align their curricula to an ADE-determined grade-by-grade curriculum sequence. "These rules would have the perverse effect of dumbing-down some of the most successful schools in the entire United States," said Clint Bolick, the litigation center's director.

The schools filing the lawsuit—BASIS Tucson, BASIS Scottsdale, Veritas Preparatory Academy in Phoenix, Chandler Preparatory Academy and Mesa Preparatory Academy — include four of the ten highest-performing public schools in the state based on AIMS test scores.Newsweek named BASIS Tucson one of the nation's ten best high schools for two consecutive years.Mesa Preparatory Academy will open this fall. Veritas, Chandler Prep, and Mesa Prep are part of the Great Hearts Academies network.

The city has made some strides in offering families more choice. Today, New York has 58 public charter schools serving 15,000 students; another 12,000 children are on waiting lists to enroll in charter schools. After years of political bickering, state legislators in Albany have finally agreed to increase the cap on the number of charter schools that are allowed in the state from 100 to 200. Approximately 50 new charter schools will be allowed to open in New York City.

Unfortunately, this will only help a fraction of the tens of thousands of kids trapped in the city's public schools, where, on average, only one out of three 8th graders is reading at grade-level.

More money is not the answer. New York City already spends more than $12,600 on each student in public school every year, well above the national average.

Mayor Bloomberg's "customer feedback" survey is a small step in the right direction toward empowering parents. Yet he should recognize that parents have been giving feedback for years in their efforts to escape public schools whenever they have been given the chance. The question is whether politicians will ever give them the opportunity.

More Florida schools earned Ds and Fs and fewer earned As and Bs on this year's school report card, state figures show.

Officials had predicted schools would fare worse this year because the state stiffened the grading standards, making it harder for schools to get top marks. Among the changes was the inclusion for the first time of FCAT science scores in this year's grade calculations.

Across Florida, 1,941 public schools earned As or Bs, down from a high of 2,077 last year. And 302 earned Ds or Fs, more than double the 143 that got lousy grades last year. The number of F-grade schools hit 82, an all-time high since Florida started grading schools in 1999.

Would you prefer to have your child in a class of 30 with a school district's best teacher or in a class of 20 with one of its least effective teachers?

Assume a 30-minute instructional period for a subject in grades 1-3. And assume every minute is instructional time which, of course, it is not. The teacher attempting individual attention in a class of 30 has an average of one minute per child. California's mandate of a maximum 20 students means the teacher has 90 seconds per student, 30 seconds more. Per half hour. The other 28.5 minutes must be devoted to the other 19 students.

Hardly the formula for outstanding results.

The guaranteed winners? Teacher unions. 60,000 more teachers, 90% of whom typically join the unions, and $600 dues, has raised union income $32,400,000 annually, or nearly $200 million by this fall.

No wonder they support smaller classes.

Jefferson believed in selection by merit from an early age: "By that part of our plan which prescribes the selection of youths of genius from the classes of the poor, we hope to avail the state of those talents which nature has sown as liberally among the poor as the rich, but which perish without use, if not sought and cultivated."

To fix reading we must answer three basic questions:(1) how does someone learn to read – that is, what are the skills, environments, family variables, instructional factors, that provide the foundation for proficient reading; (2) why do some children (and adults) have difficulty learning to read; and most importantly, (3) what can be done to prevent and/or remediate reading difficulties.

...yet experts cannot be all-knowing. Would you trust the production of food, clothing or shelter – even more important to our well-being than education – to the same people who are producing education in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and even wealthy Capistrano Unified? I didn't think so.

Planning an economy from the top down is "as hopeless as if a human being tried consciously to control all the muscles directing his breathing, blood circulation, and digestion, deciding just when to contract his right ventricle and how much insulin should be released by his pancreas," wrote Scott Shane in a 1994 book analyzing the failure of the Soviet "utopia."

That's the same problem with the school systems in America, which are not particularly different than the Soviet economy. An elite group plans and directs a one-size-fits-all system. There are few choices. There are no consumers. This is a top-down, government-controlled monopoly system, with more than a little bit of coercive force at its disposal. How could a system such as this take root in a society that is supposed to pride itself on freedom and the market economy?

That's why socialist education systems cannot provide decent education for kids no matter how much money is thrown at the bureaucracies.

The market (and private charities) will provide an astounding array of excellent choices in the poorest, bleakest neighborhoods.

We don't know exactly how the new system would work, any more than I can tell you how a pencil came into being. But I do know that, as in all free markets, the results will be astounding. And an enormous amount of resources (almost half the state's general-fund budget) would be unleashed, generating unheard-of prosperity.

Parents, educators and the nation's mathematicians clash over reform math programs -- what critics call "fuzzy math." The debate has become particularly heated as test after test shows U.S. students lag children in Singapore and China.

Reform math allows students to solve problems however they wish and uses everyday language -- think "combine" instead of "add." It encourages independent reasoning and computation using familiar objects, so students may solve word problems by drawing a series of circles and counting up the answer.

No matter the curriculum, improving math education in the United States is a front-and-center goal. Citing global competitiveness, the Bush administration last year assembled a new panel to study the teaching of math.

Many mathematicians and engineers have explicitly declared certain reform programs as fundamentally flawed and overly simplistic. A leading critic, research mathematician and Stanford University professor R. James Milgram, says programs such as Everyday Math, and Investigations in Number, Data, and Space (known as TERC), both of which are used in Ridgewood, are too reliant on calculators and don't thoroughly teach students basic number facts or functions.

"Students are coming to the university worse prepared than any time we can remember. ... They simply cannot do math at the university level."

This attitude of blaming the victim is a common occurrence in the public schools. Other than constant cries for more money, perhaps nothing is heard so often as arguments by educators that students who do not learn are to blame. It is alleged they simply don't try, their home conditions are the cause of failure or they can't learn regardless of what teachers or schools might do.

Anyone remotely resembling a normal person is able to learn French, or math, or whatever. On the other hand, there is a too long list of teachers who are unable to teach.

That teachers are generally the problem, not students, is indicated by the thousands of schools - public, private, secular, religious - where disadvantaged students consistently learn.

In their never-ending effort to "help" homeschoolers, public school bureaucrats periodically try to increase homeschooling regulations. This makes K-12 education perhaps a unique endeavor: it's a field in which the failures regularly, and astonishingly, insist that they should be able to regulate the successful.

Never mind that homeschoolers consistently outperform children institutionalized in government schools or that the longer a child is institutionalized in a government school the worse he does in relation to homeschooled children. Never mind, also, that international surveys of academic performance show that in the course of 12 years government schools manage to turn perfectly capable children into world-class dullards. No, the same education bureaucrats who consume an annual cash flow of roughly $600 billion to achieve previously unknown levels of semi-literacy and illiteracy among otherwise normal American children feel compelled from time to time to abandon their diligent pursuit of intellectual mediocrity to offer proposals for regulating homeschool parents.

Private school vouchers are often touted as a way to level the educational playing field for less-affluent families, particularly minorities living in poverty.

The fear about voucher programs leading to segregated schools exists because it's happened before. The first state-sponsored voucher programs arose in Southern states as a way to help white families avoid sending their children to integrated schools. The schools were dubbed "segregation academies" and popped up throughout the South.

Eventually, courts ruled those scholarship programs illegal, although many white students continued to avoid enrolling in public schools and those who did often moved to predominantly white districts. Those familiar with the history of segregated schools say current voucher debates bring up painful memories for many, said Marcia Synnott, a University of South Carolina history professor who is an expert on the history of education in the South.

Tens of thousands of students cheat on the TAKS test every year, including thousands on the high-stakes graduation test, according to an in-depth data analysis by The Dallas Morning News.

The analysis – among the first of its kind on this scale – found cases where 30, 50 or even 90 percent of students had suspicious answer patterns that researchers say indicate collusion, either between students or with school staff. Perpetrators go almost entirely undetected and unpunished by state officials.

More American children suffer long-term life-harm from issues related to reading than from parental abuse, accidents, and all other childhood diseases and disorders combined.  In purely economic terms, reading related difficulties cost our nation more than the war on terrorism, crime, and drugs combined. 

Driven mainly by an extraordinary influx of Hispanics, the nation’s population of minority students has surged to 42 percent of public school enrollment, up from 22 percent three decades ago, according to an annual report issued yesterday by the government.

The report also found that many high school students were spending more time on homework than did students two decades earlier. In 1980, 7 percent of 10th graders reported spending 10 hours a week or more on homework, but by 2002 that number had risen to 37 percent, more than a fivefold increase. The number of boys who reported spending 10 hours or more increased to 33 percent from 6 percent. For girls, the number jumped to 41 percent from 8 percent.

In 2002, 19 percent of girls, and 26 percent of boys, reported spending three hours or less a week on homework.

As much as I've heard and read about "No Child Left Behind" the education bill President Bush signed into law five years ago, I had no idea that every state uses a different test and standard to determine whether its schools are making the required progress under the law.

It is an issue, we learned, that is debated sharply in education circles — with some states accusing others of lowering the bar by using easier tests and lower standards to make their schools look more successful.

Why would they do this? Well, the stakes couldn't be higher. A school that is identified as not meeting NCLB targets — the requirement is 100 percent proficiency in reading and math by 2014 — could face sanctions or ultimately be shut down.

PARIS: School students in the United States think they are just great at mathematics: but by the age of 14 they are two years behind the level in other industrialized countries and overall come 24th in a class of 29.

The causes are perplexing. But a central factor that has to be corrected is a climate of low school standards, low expectations and not enough exams.

So says the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in a survey on Tuesday of underlying policies and trends in the US economy, against a background of recent warnings that emerging countries such as China and India, are producing more engineers than the United States.

The OECD stressed that the higher education system is still a world leader and that overall spending on education is high. But it is damning in its analysis of school standards.

“A country’s ability to compete in an ever more integrated economy depends crucially on a highly educated workforce. However ... the United States has lost its leading position. Test scores at the compulsory level are at or below the OECD average and lag those in many other major economies.”

The mother of Rashunda Smith, a senior at Aiken College & Career High School in College Hill, said her daughter doesn't deserve the bad news she received on May 15.

That's when Rashunda learned she won't be allowed to graduate because she failed two sections of the graduation test again, even though she passed all of Aiken's required courses with average-to-good grades. Aiken College & Career High School is rated in Academic Emergency on the state report card, the lowest of five categories.

"She came a long way from being a D student," Tina Smith said. "... She came to be a B student, getting on the honor roll. But she didn't pass the OGT."

Rashunda's circumstance is disturbingly common, some school officials and politicians said as graduations begin in Greater Cincinnati.

The class of 2007 is the first group to be required to pass the sophomore-level Ohio Graduation Test instead of the older Ninth Grade Proficiency Test, and the beefed-up exam is taking its toll.

Statewide, about 7 percent of Ohio's seniors failed at least one part of the five-part exam.

The skills needed for a 21st century marketplace are different and often more complex than we imagine.

Our education system was designed and organized around the priorities of 19th century industrialists and investment bankers to prepare our populace for factory work. It's design and general aims have not changed since then. It is still a vehicle for developing prescribed behaviors and a narrow set of skills. It does not, for the most part, focus on building cognitive skills, or what we commonly refer to as intelligence.

The end products of human capital-driven education are workplace skills, and the willingness to participate in our economy—to be good workers and enthusiastic consumers. This would be acceptable to most of us if it didn't preclude developing the full powers of our brains.

Are we trading in our brainpower for purchasing power? Taking the 'human capital' view, some may argue that over-education of the underclass produces a set of problems that create dissatisfaction, underemployment, and unrealistic expectations.

But, what about intelligence? How important is it? Do we need it to participate in our own governance, to realize a true democracy? Do we need it to improve our lives, to create high-functioning relationships and communities? Is it not intelligence that enables us to evolve from mere survival: defensive, aggressive, and coping behavior--to transcendence: compassion, tolerance, individual and social evolution? Our current system of schooling, by the nature of its outmoded design, ignores these urgent human needs.
 

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday strengthened the rights of the millions of parents who have children with disabilities, ruling they may go to court on their own to fight a school district's choice of a special education program.

The unanimous decision opens a door that had been closed to these parents in many parts of the nation, where judges had ruled that they could not go to court unless they hired a lawyer to represent them.

But as the parents of an Ohio child with autism said in their appeal to the high court, private lawyers were "often too expensive for the average 'unrich' American." The justices said a private lawyer was not required because the federal law that gave children with disabilities a right to a "free appropriate public education" also gave their parents a right to fight for them in court.

"We conclude the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act grants parents independent, enforceable rights," said Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.

He noted the law empowered parents at each step of the process in deciding on the proper education program for their child.

      While lawsuits loom over the state Board of Education regarding the implementation of vouchers, or lack thereof, officials are concerned about who will defend the board if the issue heads to the courts, since the board's actions are in conflict with the opinion of Utah's attorney general.
      It could mean getting outside counsel.
      Voucher proponents are up in arms about the state board's delay and refusal to implement a voucher program that they expected to be up and running as of Tuesday.
      The program would provide Utah families with a tuition voucher ranging from $500 to $3,000 per student attending a private school, based on the parents' income.
      But those interested in such help are going to have to wait indefinitely, since the board has yet to draft rules for the bill that voucher supporters believe should be implemented now.

1. Senator Alexander, you are the only U.S. Senator who has also been U.S. Secretary of Education. Has being in the Senate changed your beliefs about the federal role in education from when you were Secretary?

No! I've always been a skeptic about the federal role in education. I've been around so long that I've taken about every possible position, which means I've learned as I've gone. Generally speaking, I still believe that most of what can be done to improve schools has to be done first at home and second in the local school. There is a natural limit about what can be done from Washington to improve the quality of education locally, which is why I have always preferred the higher education model to the K-12 model for federal involvement in education. In higher education, we basically recognize the autonomy of individual institutions and give the money to the students and let it follow them to the institution of their choice. We give billions of research dollars not to individual professors to dish out but to competitive processes that are peer reviewed.

Having said that, the one thing I have learned in the last four years is that No Child Left Behind despite its problems had a real value, and that is putting a harsh spotlight on the inadequate education that some children, mostly minority children, were getting. That forced schools and citizens across the country to pay more attention to that. Requiring states to set their standards and to publish them has helped these children. The question for us now is where to go in the next five years.

4. It seems as if every decade or so there is a new federal push to improve our K-12 public schools. First, we responded to the Soviet Sputnik in 1958 by passing the National Defense Education Act. Then there was the famous Nation at Risk study in 1983.In 1991, you worked with President George H.W. Bush and the Nation's governors to formulate America 2000 with its five ambitious national education goals. During the Clinton Administration we had the School to Work Opportunities Act. In 2001 No Child Left Behind came into being. In the aggregate, what have we learned about the impact of these federal reform efforts on the quality of our schools?

What I've learned is that sometimes they make a big difference. I was just in a hearing with five Nobel Prize winners from the United States. Almost all of them were beneficiaries of the Sputnik era when we increased scholarships and grants for researchers. They're home-grown talent. They didn't come from India or China or some other country. On the other hand, most of our efforts in K-12 have had at best mixed results. So what I've learned is that the higher education model we use which involves autonomy, competition, choice, innovation and marketplace is better than the command and control model we use for K-12 where we fund dozens of different programs and set standards. I know the two systems are different, but they are not that much different. I think we can learn a lot from the extensive federal involvement to help create the best system of colleges and universities in the world; and how different that model is from federal involvement in K-12.

5. When you were Secretary of Education, you used to say that complacency is the Nation's chief educational problem. You stated further that even in well-to-do suburbs, our high school graduates could not compete with their peers in Western Europe, Japan, and the emerging economic "tigers" of Asia. Relative to when you were Secretary in 1992, how competitive are today's schools?

I think some of our schools are among the best in the world. For example, Maryville, the town where I grew up in Tennessee, had good public schools when I went there and has it today. They have high standards in every subject, high achievement scores, and students who have high aspirations and go to good colleges and universities. And Maryville is a middle income town. It's not a town of rich people. I think our danger in America is one of complacency, laziness and an attitude of taking for granted the fact that our brainpower advantage since World War II has created a situation where we create 30 percent of the world's wealth every year for 5 percent of the people, which is the percentage that live in the United States. We're overlooking the fact that the Chinese, Indians, Europeans, and peoples throughout the world have the same brains and have figured out how to make this a much more competitive world. It may not be Sputnik that mobilizes us but a decrease in our standard of living that mobilizes us.

6. How does the America COMPETES (Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science) Act that you are co-sponsoring fit with your long-term view of the direction of American education?

I'm delighted with the America COMPETES Act which just passed the Senate 88 to 8 after two and a half years of bi-partisan work. What was interesting about that was when we asked the National Academy of Sciences to tell us exactly what we need to do to keep our brainpower advantage and to put that in priority order, they put K-12 first. They put it ahead of funding early career researchers. They put it ahead of increasing funding for the Department of Energy's Office of Science and the National Science Foundation.What I like about it is that in math and science and the critical foreign languages it will inspire tens of thousands of people to come into teaching and help us retrain teachers who are there now. And it will hopefully inspire their students by using our national laboratories and universities in summer institutes and training programs to introduce them to the excitement of math and science. I can't think of anything more exciting for a student than to spend some time at Oak Ridge National Laboratory with a Nobel Laureate like the kind of people I met today at the hearing. So I like very much the recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences, and I am delighted that the Senate has enacted virtually all of their recommendations.

7. Study after study confirms the American business community is fed up with our public schools and they have been for a long time:

ü1 million kids drop out of school each year or roughly 5500 kids every day

ü1/3 who begin 9^th grade will never receive a high school diploma or GED

üHalf of our African-American and Hispanic kids never make it to the 10^th grade.

üReading scores among our 12^th graders have deteriorated since 1992 despite getting higher grades and taking tougher courses.

ü Only 1/4 of today's 12^th graders are proficient in math.

üHalf of community college entrants and a quarter of 4-year college entrants need remedial math or English.

üBusinesses contend they cannot find enough entry-level workers with decent basic skills and work habits.

Five years after the federal accountability law No Child Left Behind changed the way schools operate nationwide, several Iowa educators said good things eventually happened at schools that were labeled because students fell short of goals laid out in the law.

In some ways, teaching college hasn't changed much since the Middle Ages. The professor lectures, the students listen and take notes. Inevitably, a few heads nod while others drift into daydream.

Jettisoning the massive lecture hall is the focus of a trend called course redesign that's gaining ground in universities across the nation, including at most of the Alamo Community Colleges campuses.

In redesigned courses, students sit at computers and work through online textbooks, exercises or readings at their own pace. Class time is saved for small-group discussion and activities, or traded in altogether for time in laboratories, where tutors roam around helping students.

   It's doubtful but not impossible that Utah will have a functioning school voucher program by fall after the Utah Board of Education on Thursday opted to seek legal counsel before adopting rules to set up the program.
    Upset by the delay, voucher supporters expect a lawsuit.
    ''Anything's on the table considering that they're not abiding by the law,'' said Leah Barker, a spokeswoman for Parents for Choice in Education. "I hope this isn't another tactic to delay the thousands of moms and dads who [want vouchers]."
    The state's Parent Choice in Education Act, the broadest school voucher program in the nation, is on hold pending a public vote after voucher foes collected enough signatures to force a referendum on the matter. Yet a second law, which amended the first, remains on the books and could be applied to start the program, according to an opinion from Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff.
    That opinion, while not legally binding, could give the state school board legal cover to move forward, Kristina Kindl, an education specialist in the A.G.'s office, told the board's law and policy committee.
    Yet most board members were more comfortable missing a May 15 deadline than possibly overstepping their authority to fill gaps in the second law, which lacks several key provisions from the first. The board also decided to ask Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. to request a repeal of the second law - commonly referred to by its bill name, HB174 - until the public votes vouchers up or down.
    "I'm not willing to fill those holes without [answers to the] legal and ethical questions," said Debra Roberts, a board member from Beaver. "All we're saying right now is, why are we going through all this process if we can ask the Legislature to do the honorable thing and pull back until the public votes."
    The voucher law would provide $500 to $3,000 from Utah's general fund to help parents of public school students pay for private school tuition. To enact the law, the state school board must adopt a policy rule outlining how staffers will implement and oversee the voucher program.
    A draft rule based on the original law was poised for final passage Thursday. But with the original law on hold and facing a public repeal, the rule has no foundation, said Jean Welch Hill, a lawyer at the Utah Office of Education.
 

Some of Connecticut's most troubled public schools suspended misbehaving students so often last year that more than one-third of their students were thrown out at least once, state figures show.

One elementary school in Bridgeport issued out-of-school suspensions to 60 percent of its students - some of them several times.

Ordering children out of school is a longstanding and widely used form of punishment across the U.S., but that could change soon in Connecticut. Lawmakers are considering a bill that would permit out-of-school suspensions only for students deemed too dangerous or disruptive to be in school.

The bill, which passed unanimously in the House of Representatives a week ago, would require schools to provide alternative in-school suspension programs in most cases. The proposal is pending in the Senate.

Children 'damaged by exam factories'

Schools under the Labour Government  have been turned into "factories" that churn out exam results but fail to educate children properly, according to a leading Government adviser.

In a damning indictment of Tony Blair's school reforms, Alan Smithers, the professor of education at Buckingham University, says the Government has "done quite a lot of harm" to children by subjecting them to repeated tests.

Addressing a conference today, he will say that the Prime Minister has produced a generation of children regarded as the most unhappy in the western world.

Under Mr. Blair, there has been a significant increase in funding for schools, coupled with a year-on-year rise in test scores for children aged 11, 14 and 16.

But Prof Smithers, an expert on school standards, says there is mounting evidence that children's self-esteem and long-term development is being undermined by the target-driven culture in state schools. This move is driving rising numbers to educate children in the private sector.

The comments come days after teachers said five-year-olds were being prevented from playing in water and sand trays at primary school because they were being drilled to pass national tests.

It sounds like a simple formula to fix broken public schools: Require students to spend more time in class. Ask parents to sign contracts committing to be involved. Hire teachers who believe every child is college material.

Popular charter schools such as the Knowledge Is Power Program and YES Prep Public Schools follow such rules, and both have waiting lists of students who want to attend.

With enrollment declining in the Houston Independent School District, the impending expansion of successful charter schools here raises questions about whether traditional districts could — or should — play copycat.

But it would be difficult for traditional districts, which have more students and more red tape, to make big changes. It also would require schools to spend their money differently, on teacher salaries instead of football, perhaps.

The theory claims that adult students often seek individual flexibility and freedom. At the same time, many need or prefer group collaboration and social unity. These aims are difficult to combine. There is a tension between the urge for individual independence and the necessity to contribute in a collective learning community. Thus, cooperative learning seeks to develop virtual learning environments that allow students to have optimal individual freedom within online learning communities. Some of the pedagogical and administrative challenges with regard to accommodating both individual freedom and cooperation are explained in my 2003 article Theory of Cooperative Freedom

In 1992, Rosalie Wells described gating as a pacing technique that denies students access to information before they have completed all prerequisite assignments. The acronym COG – Cooperative Gating – has evolved as a result of writing this paper. It signals that students must complete a task to get access to a cooperative resource. This could for example be used as a stimulus for motivating students to answer in-text questions. They are allowed to see what others have answered only if they provide an answer others may read.

New-age math doesn't add up

It's called reform math, discovery math, constructivist math, fuzzy math. I think of it as new-age math, and believe it is one reason why last year nearly half the 10th-graders in Washington public schools failed the mathematics portion of the high-school graduation test. It is also one reason American kids do so poorly when measured against kids from Europe and East Asia.

New-age math, which is used in most schools today (including many private schools), came packaged with a garden basket of fragrant thoughts. "It was hands-on," recalls Seattle math teacher Martha McLaren. "Make math fun. Small groups. Kids learning to work together, to 'appreciate the differences.'

One of the leading new-age series, TERC's "Investigations," leads the sixth-grade student to scissor out parts of a disk and paste them over other parts. The book tells the student, he has discovered the number pi. The lesson does not require the student to solve any problems with pi. It does not list the formula c=2 pi r. Instead, it prances on to a lesson about how to estimate the area of a baby's hand by counting squares on graph paper.

The new-age math has several attributes. It tends to introduce topics in a roundabout way that aims for a eureka moment. That is the "discovery" part. It introduces many subjects early, focusing on concepts rather than calculation. That is the "constructivist" part. It sometimes wants the student to estimate an answer rather than find the right one. That is the "fuzzy" part. It demands written explanations of how an answer was arrived at, often in "math journals." That is the part parents find most baffling.

New-age math uses games, colored blocks, dice, poker chips and other manipulatives. It requires working in groups. If you let kids struggle and come up with their own solutions, they'll learn it better.

None of these things is necessarily bad. A good teacher may use a game or lead the students to a eureka moment. But there are drawbacks. With group work, McLaren says, there is a tendency for "the majority to struggle and other students to show them the answers."

The new-age math takes time. "They'll give you one problem and ask you to find five ways to solve it," says Seattle math teacher Linh-co Nguyen. "And that takes up a whole hour of class time." The idea is that the student who works through five ways will have it down solid. Maybe, but it might be better to learn one good way.

Always, the new crowds out the old. What's getting crowded out with new-age math is solving problems with paper and pencil. Kids are taught to use calculators. The result, says McLaren, who substitutes across the Seattle district: "In the seventh grade, you can ask students what's 38 take away 3, and a lot of them have to use a calculator for that — probably 30 percent in the average class. Kids don't know basic addition and subtraction. They haven't been taught long division."

Nguyen, who substitutes, has been in eighth-grade math classes in Seattle where not one student would volunteer the equation for the area of a rectangle. [Area=length X width]

Ted Nutting, who teaches calculus at Ballard High, says, "Supposedly, reform math is heavier in concepts but weaker in skills. But in my experience, kids are weaker in both." He says the weakness is most noticeable in "B" and "C" students.

The official measure of math skills is the Washington Assessment of Student Learning. The WASL is a new-age test, with many questions being as much about explanations as answers. Some are more of logic than math — making the WASL a better test for the college-bound than the high-school grad expected to know basic algebra and fractions. At the same time, Washington, D.C., consultant Michael Cohen, who has reviewed the WASL, says the actual math in it is seventh-grade level.

Consider that. To graduate from high school, our state was going to require kids to demonstrate knowledge of seventh-grade math — and because of the way we teach them, and the way we test them, half of them can't do it.

And after high school? At community colleges, half the students take remedial math. At the University of Washington, atmospheric-sciences professor Cliff Mass says, "I saw a profound drop in math skills starting in the mid-'90s." New-age math, he says, has created "a whole generation of students who can't do fractions."

"I have students who want to do meteorology," he says. "They can't do the math — and they have to give up their careers."

Some of the teachers quoted here — Mass, Nutting, Nguyen, McLaren — are involved in Where's the Math? (www.wheresthemath.com), a group that promotes international-standard math or, as math teacher Marta Gray calls it, "Real math. We want real math."

"I don't have an excuse for him not attending school. I really don't."

It's a story frequently repeated in Marion County schools. A Star Editorial Board analysis found that about 13 percent of students in the county's public schools -- roughly 16,000 children -- recorded 10 or more days of unexcused absences in the 2005-06 school year.

The high absentee rate is occurring amid an environment of intense accountability for teachers and administrators. Teachers can lose their jobs and even entire schools can be shut down if standards aren't met. But the frequency with which students miss school begs a couple of questions: Can children learn if they aren't in the classroom? And should educators be held responsible for ensuring that students are in school, a job that primarily is parents' responsibility?

"Truancy is a symptom of a problem, not the problem itself," says Gaylon Nettles, the state Department of Education's chief attendance officer. "There is some reason why this kid didn't go to school."

Los Angeles Unified is disorganized, lacks financial controls and suffers from a "pervasive" lack of accountability, says a highly anticipated management audit of the nation's second-largest school district.

The $350,000 report, commissioned by Superintendent David Brewer III shortly after he was hired last fall, lays out a scathing litany of organizational, financial and administrative shortcomings in the 707,000-student district.

"The lack of accountability is pervasive throughout the organization at all levels," says the report compiled by Evergreen Solutions of Tallahassee, Fla. "The current culture in LAUSD is one typified by not responding to priorities and deadlines, and there is no sense of urgency among managers."

It just MUST be that the recent report by the Commission on NCLB was written by Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings and her people. It is not possible that the 15 Commissioners, a group of reasonable people with reasonable amounts of intelligence and who have not been living under a rock for the past 5 years, could not detect some of the really serious problems with NCLB. Even the staunchest supporters such as Checker Finn and his Manhattan Institute have given up on it, realizing that it is a total failure.

At first they didn't succeed, so they tried, tried again.

Of about 40,000 students who failed the mandatory California High School Exit Examination last year, about 45% have enrolled for a fifth year of high school or an adult education program, according to new figures from the California Department of Education. About 4,800 passed after taking the test once more.

The data also show that this year's class of graduating seniors has a pass rate of 91.2%, more than 2 percentage points higher than the class of 2006 at this point last year. Black students improved by 4.5 percentage points, more than any other subgroup. Overall improvements were similar within the Los Angeles Unified School District.

There's been a deliberate effort to discredit and eliminate technology in schools. Don Knezek, who heads the International Society for Technology in Education, teaches technology is our last best hope for keeping up as schools in China, India and the Philippines crank out brilliant prodigies.

USC's programmers are developing questions to assess students' learning styles and eagerness to improve their grasp of material. They are tweaking the software to predict where the student's acquisition of information will lead, tossing up new challenges at a pace that the student will find motivating. They're watching students use their work at several campuses in the district and adapting accordingly.

Computers are already helping students learn and will become increasingly important year by year. When a good teacher and good technology get together, watch out.

U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has launched reviews of the department's ethics and financial disclosure policies in response to questions raised through far-ranging investigations of the student loan industry, the agency said in a statement last night.

The actions by Spellings are part of the fallout from an expanding probe of the $85 billion-a-year student loan industry.

Family involvement matters for young children's cognitive and social development. But what do effective involvement processes look like, and how do they occur? This research brief summarizes the latest evidence based on effective involvement—that is, the research studies that link family involvement in early childhood to outcomes and programs that have been evaluated to show what works.

The conceptual framework guiding this research review is complementary learning. Harvard Family Research Project (HFRP) believes that for children and youth to be successful from birth through adolescence, there must be an array of learning supports around them. These learning supports include families, early childhood programs, schools, out-of-school time programs and activities, higher education, health and social service agencies, businesses, libraries, museums, and other community-based institutions. HFRP calls this network of supports complementary learning. Complementary learning is characterized by discrete linkages that work together to encourage consistent learning and developmental outcomes for children. These linkages are continuously in place from birth through adolescence, but the composition and functions of this network changes over time as children mature.2

"Family Involvement Makes a Difference" is a set of research briefs that examines one set of complementary learning linkages: family involvement in the home and school. As the first in the series, this brief focuses on the linkages among the family, early childhood education settings, and schools. Future papers will examine family involvement in elementary school, middle school, and high school settings. Taken together, these briefs make the case that family involvement predicts children's academic achievement and social development as they progress from early childhood programs through K–12 schools and into higher education.

BECAUSE EVERY CHILD DESERVES A QUALITY BASIC EDUCATION.

Over 90 million children worldwide are denied the opportunity to a quality, basic education. This year, Americans will join up to remind our leaders that Education is a Human Right.

Click on the above link to learn about the Global Campaign for Education.

Official apologizes over class-size furor - An administrator for Santa Ana schools tells teachers that rosters will be corrected to reflect the true number of students in class.

Santa Ana Unified School District administrator has apologized to grade school teachers for a district policy that called for falsifying class rosters in order to retain state funding for small classes, and pledged that rosters would be corrected to accurately reflect the number of students in each classroom, according to teachers and a union official.

The probe was prompted by a Times report that the district falsified documents and misused substitute teachers in an effort to retain the $16 million in state funding it receives for keeping kindergarten through third-grade classes at an average ratio of 20 students per teacher.

Teachers at the grade schools said their classes were actually much larger than the district was contending — accusations that, if proved, could cost the district some of the state funds.