Our children deserve better!

URGENT UPDATE!!!

Unite Memphis for Education
&
Memphis City Schools Parent Assembly

For more information visit: http://www.unitememphisforeducation.org/

Please show up at 3:00p.m.

Tuesday – April 7th

125 North Main Street
Memphis City Council Meeting

Even though MCS won the court case the City Council has appealed the decision- NO FUNDING HAS BEEN SENT TO MCS. The 2009-2010 school year is in jeopardy!
We need the City Council to commit to funding MCS and remove the cloud of uncertainty over our community. Withholding these funds will only weaken MCS and make it harder to improve in the future!
A good public education for all children benefits everyone in our city!
The quality of life in Memphis and Shelby County would be greatly improved if our public schools were the best in the nation!

We need you to show up and PLEASE WEAR RED!
We want to fill the Council Chambers from

3:00p.m. - 5:00p.m

The City Council believes the vast majority of the community supports their decision to cut MCS funding. We ALL need to convince them they are wrong!

Please take the opportunity to let the City Council know that we want to have our concerns addressed. WE NEED YOU THERE!!!

As the Commercial Appeal said in their February 19th editorial –

“Our children deserve better!”

U.S. Must Learn From International Peers

To respond to the Obama administration’s call for common educational standards, federal officials need to take advantage of several resources that will show where the United States stands compared with other developed countries, a group advocating such standards says in a new report.

The United States has "tunnel vision" when it comes to comparing the performance of its students, its educational expectations of students, and policies affecting every level of education, the Alliance for Excellent Education writes in a policy brief released today.

While other countries "eagerly compare" themselves against their peers, the report says, the United States "ignores the opportunities to learn from its international peers in education."

The Alliance for Excellent Education is working with the National Governors Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and other groups to establish a method for making such comparisons, often called international benchmarking.

President Barack Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have given such efforts a boost since taking office by endorsing attempts to produce common, or national, standards that are in line with what other countries expect of their students.

Read the full article in Education Week

Broward Schools Incorporate Digital Techonology

FORT LAUDERDALE - Their work drew applause and laughs from an appreciative audience of more than 100 of their peers. More than a dozen short movies — all researched, written, acted, filmed and edited by students at New River Middle School — hit the big screen in the school's media center Friday afternoon.

Forget the simple report or project on a display board. These students seamlessly integrated technology and their regular lessons to produce work for the Global Learning Initiative through Digital Education for Students. The program is in 76 Broward County Click here for restaurant inspection reports schools.

Students say GLIDES encourages them to learn, despite themselves.

"Some of it doesn't seem like work," said Kim Morton, 13, a seventh grader who made a movie on obesity with two classmates. He and his partners took nine weeks to do research, write the script, then film and edit using iMovie software.

Combining their curriculum with technology engages students with their work, said teacher Elyse Brunt,...

Read the full article in The Sun-Sentinel

State Plans to Track Students' Progress, Not Just Test Scores

Malden, Massachusetts — Each fall when the state releases MCAS scores, principals often blame a dip in scores on the students, tactfully arguing that the class in question was perhaps not as superb a group of mathematicians or voracious readers as their predecessors.State education leaders plan to inject a reality check this fall into the "good class vs bad class" debate by tracking the performance of individual students as they advance from one grade to the next. The new measurement could shed light on who is falling short -- teacher or pupil -- and lead to fundamental changes in the way students are taught.

Mitchell D. Chester, the state commissioner of elementary and secondary education, said yesterday that the new analysis will make it harder for local school leaders to be dismissive of poor test scores.

"It takes away a lot of the excuse-making," Chester said at yesterday's meeting of the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education where the new system was unveiled.

Read full article from The Boston Globe

Reading Instruction and Assessment

Excerpted from "Reading Test Dummies" by E.D. Hirsch
New York Times, March 22, 2009

"Our current reading tests are especially unfair to disadvantaged students. The test passages may be random, but they aren’t knowledge-neutral. A child who knows about hiking in the Appalachians will have a better chance of getting the passage right; a child who doesn’t, won’t. Yet where outside of school is a disadvantaged student to pick up the implicit knowledge that is being probed on the reading tests?

To base tests on what is actually taught in school would not only be fairer to disadvantaged students than the current Kafkaesque system of testing, it would enable such students to gradually narrow the gap in their general knowledge and vocabulary. Eventually, we’d see improvement in the reading levels of all students.

This reform would have another excellent consequence: Teachers and students might begin to demand content standards that are more specific than, say, this third grade standard from Ohio: “Compare the cultural practices and products of the local community with those of other communities in Ohio, the United States and countries of the world.” It would be far more useful to set out what exactly children should learn about the 13 colonies or Paul Revere’s ride."

Schools Must Improve to Get Stimulus Money

Education Secretary Arne Duncan says schools must make dramatic changes to get money from a special $5 billion "Race to the Top" fund included in the economic stimulus package.

"We're going to reward those states and those districts that are willing to challenge the status quo and get dramatically better," Duncan said March 16 at the White House.

Those who keep doing the same old thing, however, won't be eligible for the money, he added.

Schools will be getting tens of billions more dollars through regular channels, such as Title I and IDEA. On top of that, Duncan will have an unprecedented $5 billion to award for lasting reforms.

To get an award, schools and states must show they have been spending their money wisely. They are supposed to find innovative ways to close the achievement gap between black and Latino children who lag behind their white counterparts in more affluent schools.

Specifically, states are supposed to:

• Improve teacher quality and get good teachers into high-poverty schools;
• Set up sophisticated data systems to track student learning;
• Boost the quality of academic standards and tests; and
• Intervene to help struggling schools.

Read Full Article in eNews

Staff Development for Teachers Deemed Fragmented

By Stephen Sawchuk

(Washington D.C.) - Although American teachers spend more working hours in classrooms than do instructors in some of the top-performing European and Asian countries, U.S. students have scored in the middle of the pack on a number of prominent international exams in recent years.

That paradox appears to stem at least in part from a failing of the United States’ systems for supporting professional learning, concludes a new report released here last week. American teachers, it finds, are not given as many opportunities for on-the-job training as their international peers, and their effectiveness appears to suffer as a result.

The time U.S. teachers actually spend in professional training largely continues to take place in isolation, rather than in school-based settings that draw on teachers’ collective knowledge and skills, the report says.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan addresses the audience during a press conference to announce the release of the National Staff Development Council report on professional development in Washington on Feb. 4.

—Christopher Powers/Education Week

Despite some recent improvements in professional-training opportunities, “we’re way behind other countries that are high-achieving in terms of the time and intensive opportunity for deep learning they provide,” said Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford University professor who co-wrote the report with four colleagues at that university’s School Redesign Network. “We still see teachers engage in really short one- and two-day workshops rather than ongoing, sustained support that we now have evidence changes practices and increases student achievement.”

A new push to reorient staff development nationwide could come from the new U.S. secretary of education, Arne Duncan, who praised the report at its unveiling in Washington. In his remarks, Mr. Duncan named improving the quality of teaching “one of [the new federal education administration’s] top two priorities, along with raising standards.”

Read full article in Education Week

Rigor, Rewards, Quality

Last week President Obama gave his first major speech on public education to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. Here is the major message of his speech:

"Despite resources that are unmatched anywhere in the world, we have let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short, and other nations outpace us. The relative decline of American education is untenable for our economy, unsustainable for our democracy, and unacceptable for our children. We cannot afford to let it continue. What is at stake is nothing less than the American dream."

What are we waiting for?
What is more important than protecting our economy, our democracy, and our children?

Music Education Can Help Children with Reading Skills

ScienceDaily (Mar. 16, 2009) — Children exposed to a multi-year program of music involving training in increasingly complex rhythmic, tonal, and practical skills display superior cognitive performance in reading skills compared with their non-musically trained peers, according to a study published in the journal Psychology of Music.

According to authors Joseph M Piro and Camilo Ortiz from Long Island University data from this study will help to clarify the role of music study on cognition and shed light on the question of the potential of music to enhance school performance in language and literacy.

Studying children the two US elementary schools, one of which routinely trained children in music and one that did not, Piro and Ortiz aimed to investigate the hypothesis that children who have received keyboard instruction as part of a music curriculum increasing in difficulty over successive years would demonstrate significantly better performance on measures of vocabulary and verbal sequencing than students who did not receive keyboard instruction.

Several studies have reported positive associations between music education and increased abilities in non-musical (e.g., linguistic, mathematical, and spatial) domains in children. The authors say there are similarities in the way that individuals interpret music and language and “because neural response to music is a widely distributed system within the brain…. it would not be unreasonable to expect that some processing networks for music and language behaviors, namely reading, located in both hemispheres of the brain would overlap.”

The aim of this study was to look at two specific reading sub-skills – vocabulary and verbal sequencing – which, according to the authors, are “are cornerstone components in the continuum of literacy development and a window into the subsequent successful acquisition of proficient reading and language skills such as decoding and reading comprehension.”

Using a quasi-experimental design, the investigators selected second-grade children from two school sites located in the same geographic vicinity and with similar demographic characteristics, to ensure the two groups of children were as similar as possible apart from their music experience.

Children in the intervention school (n=46) studied piano formally for a period of three consecutive years as part of a comprehensive instructional intervention program. Children attending the control school (n=57) received no formal musical training on any musical instrument and had never taken music lessons as part of their general school curriculum or in private study. Both schools followed comprehensive balanced literacy programmes that integrate skills of reading, writing, speaking and listening.

All participants were individually tested to assess their reading skills at the start and close of a standard 10-month school year using the Structure of Intellect (SOI) measure.

Results analysed at the end of the year showed that the music-learning group had significantly better vocabulary and verbal sequencing scores than did the non-music-learning control group. This finding, conclude the authors, provides evidence to support the increasingly common practice of “educators incorporating a variety of approaches, including music, in their teaching practice in continuing efforts to improve reading achievement in children”.

However, further interpretation of the results revealed some complexity within the overall outcomes. An interesting observation was that when the study began, the music-learning group had already experienced two years of piano lessons yet their reading scores were nearly identical to the control group at the start of the experiment.

So, ask the authors, “If the children receiving piano instruction already had two years of music involvement, why did they not significantly outscore the musically naïve students on both measures at the outset?” Addressing previous findings showing that music instruction has been demonstrated to exert cortical changes in certain cognitive areas such as spatial-temporal performance fairly quickly, Piro and Ortiz propose three factors to explain the lack of evidence of early benefit for music in the present study.

First, children were tested for their baseline reading skills at the beginning of the school year, after an extended holiday period. Perhaps the absence of any music instruction during a lengthy summer recess may have reversed any earlier temporary cortical reorganization experienced by students in the music group, a finding reported in other related research. Another explanation could be that the duration of music study required to improve reading and associated skills is fairly long, so the initial two years were not sufficient.

A third explanation involves the specific developmental time period during which children were receiving the tuition. During the course of their third year of music lessons, the music-learning group was in second grade and approaching the age of seven. There is evidence that there are significant spurts of brain growth and gray matter distribution around this developmental period and, coupled with the increased complexity of the study matter in this year, brain changes that promote reading skills may have been more likely to accrue at this time than in the earlier two years.

“All of this adds a compelling layer of meaning to the experimental outcomes, perhaps signalling that decisions on ‘when’ to teach are at least as important as ‘what’ to teach when probing differential neural pathways and investigating their associative cognitive substrates,” note the authors.

“Study of how music may also assist cognitive development will help education practitioners go beyond the sometimes hazy and ill-defined ‘music makes you smarter’ claims and provide careful and credible instructional approaches that use the rich and complex conceptual structure of music and its transfer to other cognitive areas,” they conclude.

From Science News

Education Lessons from Bernie Madoff

from Education Week

by Walter M. Stroup

"Mindful of H.L. Mencken's observation that "there is always an easy solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong," let us urge the new Obama administration to avoid making the mistake of previous administrations in equating accountability in education with high-stakes test scores. There is increasing evidence that flaws in current test design should all but disqualify their continued use as metrics of accountability, especially in science and mathematics education.

To help us head off a potential collapse of trust in public education comparable in scale to the collapse of trust in our financial system, we might look to draw parallels from what we are learning with the economy. In particular, the closure of Bernard Madoff's fraudulent investment firm stands to teach us at least four basic lessons we might use in reflecting on the role high-stakes testing has in driving current education reform.

A first lesson is that the most compelling evidence for something's being wrong is often hidden in plain view. Consistent investment returns of 10 percent or more can’t be real, and in Mr. Madoff's case, they weren't. Similarly in education, there is mounting evidence in plain view that our current approach to high-stakes-test design can’t tell us what we need to know in order to drive education reform.

Separate from the question of whether any one test can give a complete picture of what a student knows or what he or she has learned in a given year—the answer to which is obviously no—there is the more precise question of whether, empirically, the tests work as good measures of what a teacher has done during a given school year. The answer to that question is also no.

Using student scores from the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, or TAKS, our university-based research group has analyzed both the effectiveness of some specific reform projects in mathematics and year-to-year scores from the entire state in science, math, social studies, and English. For the most part, we have found the TAKS tests to be what W. James Popham of the University of California, Los Angeles, calls "insensitive to instruction."

This means that even in situations where sensitivity to instruction is most implicated—those where there is a sustained, aggressive, high-quality, and content-focused intervention—most of a student’s score on the high-stakes TAKS (more than 70 percent of the variance) is predicted by the previous year's math scores (with at most only 7 percent to 8 percent of the variance related to the intervention). We have checked with colleagues involved in mathematics interventions from around the country, and their results with similar tests are comparable.

We also found in our study that the predictive power of previous math scores holds up over a number of years of math testing, not just for the year prior. Even across subject areas, test scores predict other test scores in ways that are very likely to overwhelm the effects that any teacher could be expected to have in any given year.

For reform-oriented accountability to work, test scores need to be highly sensitive to what educators do. Instead, we have tests made up of items selected for their ability to consistently sort students, year in and year out, in the same order relative to an increasingly cross-test, cross-year, and even cross-domain psychometric "profile" developed by the testing organizations. (An example would be the location of students, in terms of an ability construct, on a logistic curve.)

These profiles emerge as an artifact of how items are selected. Test developers include in their respective proprietary item pools only those items shown to sort students in the same relative order in terms of their likeliness of getting an item correct. (In other words, ideally for each item in a given area, Student Q should always be more likely to get it right than Student S.) When high-stakes tests are then assembled using only the items that fit with these internal sorting profiles, the tests themselves also end up being remarkably robust in keeping students in the same relative order in terms of their overall scores (Student Q's overall test score is very likely to be higher than S's).

Using this approach, test scores will continue to predict other tests scores in ways that will remain remarkably insensitive to the quality of content-specific instruction. And just one of the unintended consequences of this insensitivity to instruction may be that those schools feeling the most pressure to improve test scores will resort to emphasizing test-taking skills, as opposed to meaningful academic content, as a compelling alternative strategy for attaining immediate, if short-lived, results.

Needless to say, these findings are highly problematic for outcome-driven reforms.

A second important lesson the Madoff scandal teaches us is that, for misrepresentation to work at a large scale, people’s desires and, even more so, their fears need to be played to, often by appeals to highly specialized forms of expertise or insider knowledge..."

Read more of the lessons to be learned from Madoff scandal here:
What Bernie Madoff Can Teach Us About Accountability in Education

Education Philanthropy Due to Slow Dramatically

from Education Week

by Eric W. Robelen

"The recession tearing into the U.S. economy is not only straining the public coffers that support K-12 schooling, it’s also taking a toll on education philanthropy.

From family foundations to corporate philanthropies, charitable giving to K-12 education appears to be facing a downturn. Although no national figures are available, many philanthropies—including notable education contributors such as the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation—expect to decrease their giving levels this year."

Read the full article:

Education Philanthropy Catching a Chill As Economy Cools Charitable Giving

Sheryl Feinstein is an assistant professor of education at Augustina College in South Dakota, where she teaches courses in educational psychology and adolescent development. Her Annual Conference presentation, "Teaching the At-Risk Teenage Brain," explored the functions of the teenage brain and how these processes explain teens' sometimes erratic behavior.

Feinstein defines the at-risk teenager as one in danger of emotional or academic problems or both, including crime, violence, and substance abuse. Factors that put teens at risk include poverty, academic failure, and delinquent friends, among others. According to Feinstein, who has conducted boundless research and written two books on the subject, the adolescent brain differs from the adult brain in three primary ways:

• Overproduction of dendrites (greater propensity for learning new things).
• Pruning, or loss of dendrites not being used, occurring more rapidly.
• Decision-making process governed by the amygdala, making teens emotionally-driven.

Primary use of the amygdala is also the cause of misunderstandings, incendiary language, and bad decision making. Understanding the cerebral functions that cause certain behaviors is a big step toward knowing how to effectively teach teenagers and defuse any possible confrontations.

from bloggers at the ASCD Annual Conference

Fix the Dropout Rate in Pre-K

The achievement gap is a deep-seated, long-standing, hard-to-solve issue that isn't going away unless we use a strategic approach to solve it, Vanderbilt University Professor Joseph Murphy told ASCDers in his session entitled "Leadership Lessons for Closing the Achievement Gap." His recent research points to some "big-picture conclusions," including that tackling the problem in high school is often too late.

Contrary to public opinion, schools don't cause the achievement gap, and cannot close it on their own, he said. We must not let society off the hook, he said, noting that raising the average income of lower-income people by $4,000 a year would go far in closing the gap. Yet schools still have the biggest potential to help and when they fail to act, children become more disadvantaged. Among the promising school interventions that work— used best in combination—include preschool programs, smaller class size especially in the early years, use of cooperative strategies, personalized learning, extended time for learning, extracurricular activities targeted particularly for underachieving students, and, finally, providing high-quality teachers who understand the students, respect them, and believe that the students can learn.

The place to fix the 9th grade problem is in preschool, he reiterated. "The hill gets higher as we climb it . . . It is time to see the problem as the moral and ethical issue it is."

Posted on ASCD blog

USDA Defends Its Nutritional Standards

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Food stamps, school lunch and other public nutrition programs do not contribute to an obesity epidemic affecting millions of children and adults, despite blame levied by critics, U.S. and academic officials said on Thursday.

The Agriculture Department programs will cost about $73 billion in fiscal 2009. They range from school milk to food stamps and the Women, Infants and Children food program.

The large price tag has prompted some critics to point to research blaming the programs as a factor in a global obesity crisis.

"USDA is not aware of any convincing evidence that school meals or other federal nutrition programs cause obesity and overweight. The evidence that does exist is mixed," Thomas O'Connor, USDA's acting deputy undersecretary for nutrition, told a House Appropriations subcommittee.

An estimated 61 million Americans are affected by the department's nutrition programs. Recently, the recession has boosted demand for assistance. A record 31.8 million people received food stamps at the latest count and other programs are at or near record levels.

Kelly Brownell, a professor at Yale University's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, said he did not believe there was sufficient evidence to show USDA's programs were leading to more obese Americans.

"I believe it comes up in the context of critics of these programs using this as an excuse for wanting to cut back," he said.

Despite widespread support for the food programs, Brownell and others said the measures have the ability to do more to curb the obesity problem.

"I believe we have lacked the coordination and long-term vision to take full advantage of their potential," said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat and chair of the subcommittee.

An estimated 32 percent of U.S. children fit the government's definition of being overweight and 16 percent are considered obese, putting themselves at risk for serious health problems.

President Barack Obama has a goal of ending childhood hunger by 2015. He has proposed a $1-billion-a-year increase in funding for child nutrition that would be used in part to improve access to programs and improve the nutritional quality of school meals.

Read the rest of this article on Yahoo - Food Nutrition Programs Don't Lead to Obesity: USDA

Stimulus Bill Mandates Focus on Teacher Effectiveness

Language on Fair Distribution, Effectiveness Offers Policy Clues

By Stephen Sawchuk

The recently enacted economic-stimulus bill requires every state to take steps to improve teacher effectiveness, as well as to tackle one of the most pervasive problems in K-12 education: inequities in access to top teaching talent for poor and minority children.

In those two provisions, which governors must address to get their cuts of $53.6 billion in state fiscal-stabilization aid, some experts see glimpses into the future of federal teacher-quality policy.

“We have a lot of evidence that this administration is very interested in making effective teaching a priority,” said Sabrina W.M. Laine, the director of the National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality at Learning Point Associates, a federally financed technical-assistance center in Naperville, Ill. “The stimulus bill is wide open for interpretation, but it provides the proverbial shot in the arm for equitable distribution and for discussions to move a reauthorization bill [on education] forward.”

Whether the language in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will have an actual effect on state and local teacher policies depends on the much-anticipated guidance for the state stabilization fund and on U.S. Department of Education oversight, analysts say.

An administration official said the language is intended to strike a balance between what states can do given their current capacity and the expectations for them to be more forward-looking on teacher quality.

“The intent here is not to expect some sort of dramatic change overnight,” Marshall “Mike” S. Smith, a senior adviser to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, said about the teacher provisions. “It is, however, to expect states to see that this is a fundamental inequity and to begin to address it in a thoughtful way, and in a way that measurably advances the ball.”

Read the rest of this article in Education Week

Poverty Drains Potential

Poverty and Potential: Out of School Factors and School Success by David Berliner

This brief details six out-of-school factors (OSFs) common among the poor that significantly affect the health and learning opportunities of children, and accordingly limit what schools can accomplish on their own: (1) low birth-weight and non-genetic prenatal influences on children; (2) inadequate medical, dental, and vision care, often a result of inadequate or no medical insurance; (3) food insecurity; (4) environmental pollutants; (5) family relations and family stress; and (6) neighborhood characteristics. These OSFs are related to a host of poverty-induced physical, sociological, and psychological problems that children often bring to school, ranging from neurological damage and attention disorders to excessive absenteeism, linguistic underdevelopment, and oppositional behavior. Also discussed is a seventh OSF, extended learning opportunities, such as preschool, after school, and summer school programs that can help to mitigate some of the harm caused by the first six factors.

Bill Gates spoke at the TED conference 2009 about his two passions: global health and public education. For first ten minutes, Gates discusses using creativity, technology, and innovation to solve the huge, entrenched problems of global health. These massive, complicated world problems are the type of problem our children must be prepared to participate in solving. Are we educating them to do so?

The second ten minutes of Gates' talk focuses on education. He states that the linchpin in quality education is quality teaching. How do we make a great teacher? Watch and learn from Bill Gates:

The LIttle School That Could

When we use courage and commitment, we can accomplish so much. Read about this little school that not only could but did in Oakland, California.

Click here to watch their video.

(story from Edutopia.org, the George Lucas Foundation dedicated to public education that works.)

From the outside, you would be hard pressed to find anything special about ASCEND School. The original buildings and added-on portable classrooms look just like countless other aging inner-city school facilities across the country. But looks, as they say, can be deceiving.

Behind the 8-foot-high cyclone fence that surrounds much of the facility is a school that has captured the imagination and excitement of educators and parents alike. In a neighborhood that has seen more than its share of challenges, this small K-8 school is a daily demonstration of the powerful changes that can happen when an entire community comes together to make education work for kids.

Read the rest of their story at Edutopia.org

Link Between Physically Fit and Mentally Fit

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Physically fit students in Texas are more likely to do well on the state's standardized test and have better attendance, according to a study released Monday.

The study, which reviewed results of fitness assessments of students across Texas, also found that fit students are less likely to have disciplinary problems.

"Now, we have hard evidence that there is a link between fitness and academic success," said state Sen. Jane Nelson, R-Flower Mound, who pushed the 2007 legislation calling for a renewed emphasis on physical fitness. "We need to continue our efforts to decrease these trends as if lives depend on it, because they truly do."

The two-year old law requires annual fitness assessments for public school students beginning in third grade. The results were reported to the Texas Education Agency and the Cooper Institute of Dallas analyzed them.

The Cooper Institute found that cardiovascular health, measured by a walking/running test, had a higher correlation to school success than the students' body mass index.

"Increased exercise improves cardiovascular health and that helps the brain function more efficiently and enhances its ability to learn," said aerobics pioneer Dr. Kenneth Cooper, founder of the Cooper Institute.

The results of the first fitness assessment, which measured students in the 2007-08 school year, found that Texas students were startlingly unhealthy and their fitness levels declined sharply through 12th grade, where less than 10 percent of students passed the fitness test.

Students will be assessed again this spring.

The Fitnessgram test includes a skin fold test, curl-ups and push-ups. Another exercise tests flexibility, with students sitting with one bent leg and one straight leg and then reaching forward as far as they can.

In the trunk lift, which tests trunk extensor strength, students lie on their stomachs and raise their upper body while the teacher measures the distance between the students' chins and the floor. The last test is called the pacer, a paced 20-meter run that increases in intensity as time progresses.

The results are recorded on a report card that allows parents and teachers to identify the physical strengths and weaknesses of each student. Results, unattached to students' names, also are submitted to the TEA.

"Our state and nation are struggling with obesity, thanks to the combination of increasingly sedentary lifestyles and the declining quality of diets," said Gov. Rick Perry. "We owe it to our children to take the appropriate steps to encourage fitness, steps that are made clearer by the information contained in this first round of testing. I am confident we are on our way to making a difference that will improve and even save lives."

Texas Youth Fitness Study

ALBANY, N.Y.—The national high school graduation rate remained flat at about 75 percent between 2002 and 2006, while a dozen states made substantial gains, according to a new report by researchers at Johns Hopkins University.

The report, released Thursday by the Baltimore university's Everyone Graduates Center, found the largest gain was in Tennessee, where the rate rose from 61 percent to 72 percent. New York's rate increased from 64 percent to 67 percent.

Those two states produced the greatest number of additional graduates, with roughly 8,000 more students in each earning high school diplomas in 2006, said the center, which tries to develop strategies to help students graduate.

The Tennessee Department of Education said Democratic Gov. Phil Bredesen had put a lot more funding toward students considered at risk and students for whom English is a second language.

"I have to give a lot of credit to the teachers and principals in the local districts because without them you would not see these results," department spokeswoman Rachel Woods said.

Read the rest of the article from The Boston Globe 3/12/09:

Report: 12 States Made Gains in HS Graduation Rates

No Picnic for Any of Us!

In his column in today's New York Times, David Brooks expresses the single most important factor in rectifying the ills of our education system: persistent courage.

Building on the familiar story that we have heard about President Obama's mother waking him up to study at 4:30 a.m. when he was a child. Enduring his complaints, President Obama remembers his mother replying, "This is no picnic for me either, Buster!"

Our school systems have become dangerously ineffective for the majority of the children that they serve. Data proves this hands down. Building a relevant, competitive, effective public education system that educates children for their futures in our knowledge-based economy will require tough choices grounded in reality, focused on the needs of children, motivated by heroic efforts to preserve and defend our commitment to high quality public education. We must have the persistent courage to expect no less of ourselves and our systems. We must have the persistent courage to do the hard things because they are the right things to do for our children's futures.

Read David Brooks article: "No Picnic for Me Either!"

About His Deposit ... by Jan Hoffman NY Times

How many private-school students will make the switch to public school will not be known for months. In past recessions, enrollments in independent schools remained stable, according to the National Association of Independent Schools, which represents 1,400 institutions with a median first-grade tuition last year of $14,640. But it may be different this year. Smart Tuition, a New York-based firm that handles payments for some 2,000 private schools across the country, said that by mid school year, 7 percent of families had already dropped out, double from last year. And administrators, financial aid counselors and parents themselves say many families have been questioning for the first time their ability to pay for private school, and what to do if they cannot